Here's an interesting flyer making the rounds of Midland promoting an guy named Kamal Saleem. What raised some red flags to me was that the outfit promoting the evening at our Center for the Arts was a "Citizens Concerned for our Nation" rather than one of our local churches or parachurch groups.
When I Googled for that outfit, the only hits for the group were a non-profit corporation filing in June. There are a lot of good organizations out there without much of a Web presence, but when you have a Yahoo e-mail address and no web site, it stands out in this day and age.
That looked a bit fishy. A quick Google on Saleem seems a bit fishy as well, as his back-story of being a PLO terrorist before coming to Jesus is questioned by quite a few folks. How much of that flak is from being an evangelical and how much of it is overplaying a fear of Islam for fun, evangelism and profit is a good question.
The anti-Saleem lit on the Web tends to flow from Muslim and Arab Christian quarters, so it needs some grains of salt applied, but he wouldn't be the first evangelist to fudge his resume. Mike Warnke comes quickly to mind as an evangelist/comedian who developed a bit following in the 80s from a fabricated Satanist-drug-dealer past.
Saleem seems to have been making the rounds of various right-leaning groups, which isn't disqualifying, but he does play to a quadrant who likes to think the worst of Islam as a whole. I know some secular Tea Party types who wouldn't go to a garden-variety revival meeting but might go to hear an avowed ex-terrorist speak on the problems with radical Islam; it plays nicely into a lot of fears people have, especially as we have the 9/11 +10 going down today and a vague alert of bombers on the loose in play.
Can you use that fear to bring people to Christ? Yes, but such conversions have a tendency not to be all that strong. We have over two million people dying each year, of which even in 2001, the 9/11 attacks made up less than a percent of those. Spread out over a decade of even fewer casualties to radical Islam, it makes it a bit of a low-probability event to get worried about.
[Update 9/23- The Citizens Concerned for our Nation group has placed a couple of editorials in the Midland Daily News in the last week. It seems that they flowed from a prayer group of parents at Midland Christian School. I almost feel called out by this passage
For those who choose to get their "facts" about Kamal Saleem by "Googling" his name, I point out that anyone can put anything on the Internet, and merely because something is on the Internet does not necessarily make it the truth.
That much is true; you have to judge spin and motive for people posting bad things about a public person. Discerning the spirit of a blog post or web site is important.]
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