What are we to make of the glaring contradiction between the Koran’s claim that “there is no compulsion in religion” (2:256) and the many other verses that call for war, slavery, and death to those who refuse to submit to Islam (9:5, et al)—to say nothing of the militant behavior of the prophet of Allah, Muhammad? This is the question Stephen M. Kirby examines in his new book, Islam’s Militant Prophet: Muhammad and Forced Conversion to Islam.

Rather than offer speculations or cite nearly 1,400 years of Islamic history that is heavy laden with forced conversions, Kirby answers the question in an objective and meticulous fashion—in a fashion that any Muslim will be hard pressed to counter: he focuses exclusively on the career of Muhammad, from its beginnings in 610 till his death in 632, as recorded in Islam’s primary sources, the Koran and Hadith, and as understood or interpreted by Islam’s most authoritative scholars, such as Ibn al-Kathir. Along the way, readers are provided useful explanations—again, directly from Islam’s learned scholars themselves—of arcane or misunderstood doctrines, such as abrogation, which is essential for any exegesis.

The long and short of it all?

The command of “no compulsion in Islam” was a unique command that had doctrinal authority for only a little over two years. It was abrogated both by the Sunnah and the Koran. Its short lifetime was preceded and followed by commands that non-Muslims were to be given the option of converting to Islam, fighting to the death, or, at times, paying the Jizyah. Muhammad was indeed the militant prophet of a militant religion that supported forced conversions to Islam.

Before reaching this conclusion, Kirby offers example after example of Muhammad giving non-Muslims—pagan Quraysh, Jews, and Christians, almost always people who had no quarrel with him aside from rejecting his prophetic authority—two choices: convert or suffer the consequences, the latter of which often manifested as wholesale massacres.

It’s also noteworthy that, according to Islam’s earliest histories, sincere belief in Muhammad’s prophet claims is lacking. The overwhelming majority of those who converted to Islam did so either under duress—literally to save their heads—or else to be part of Muhammad’s “winning team.” Conversion was the price for one man, Malik bin Auf, to get his kidnapped family back from Muhammad.

Insincere, coerced conversion is especially evident in Muhammad’s conquest of Mecca. When Islam’s prophet, at the head of a vast army—which had already put several tribes to the sword for refusing to convert—was approaching the polytheists of Mecca, the latter were warned: “Embrace Islam and you shall be safe. You have been surrounded on all sides. You are confronted by a hard case that is beyond your power.” When the leader of Mecca, Abu Sufyan—who had long mocked Muhammad as a false prophet—approached the Muslim camp to parley, he too was warned: “‘Embrace Islam before you lose your head.’ Abu Sufyan then recited the confession of faith and thus he entered Islam.” The Meccans soon followed suit.

Rather tellingly, the Muslim historians who recorded these non-Muslim conversions to Islam saw no contradiction between the coerced and insincere nature of the conversions and the Koran’s claim that “there is no compulsion in religion.” For instance, in Muslim historian Taqi al-Din al-Maqrizi’s (d. 1442) multivolume history of Egypt, anecdote after anecdote is recorded of Muslims burning churches, slaughtering Christians, and enslaving their women and children. After each incident, the pious Muslim historian concludes with, “Under these circumstances a great many Christians became Muslims.” (One can almost detect in inaudible “Allahu Akbar.”)

Aside from sporadic bouts of persecution, the entrenched dhimmi system (see Koran 9:29)—itself a form of coercion—saw the increasingly impoverished Christians slowly convert to Islam over the centuries, so that today they remain a steadily dwindling minority. In The Arab Conquest of Egypt, Alfred Butler, a 19th century historian writing before the age of political correctness, highlights this “vicious system of bribing the Christians into conversion”:

[A]lthough religious freedom was in theory secured for the Copts under the capitulation, it soon proved in fact to be shadowy and illusory. For a religious freedom which became identified with social bondage and with financial bondage could have neither substance nor vitality. As Islam spread, the social pressure upon the Copts became enormous, while the financial pressure at least seemed harder to resist, as the number of Christians or Jews who were liable for the poll-tax [jizya] diminished year by year, and their isolation became more conspicuous. . . . [T]he burdens of the Christians grew heavier in proportion as their numbers lessened [that is, the more Christians converted to Islam, the more the burdens on the remaining few grew]. The wonder, therefore, is not that so many Copts yielded to the current which bore them with sweeping force over to Islam, but that so great a multitude of Christians stood firmly against the stream, nor have all the storms of thirteen centuries moved their faith from the rock of its foundation.

In short, the Koran’s claim that “there is no compulsion in religion” seems more of an assertion, a statement of fact, than a command for Muslims to uphold. After all, it is true: no Muslim can make a non-Muslim say the words “There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.” But that doesn’t mean they can’t enslave, extort, plunder, torture, and slaughter those who refuse.

During a recent interview on CBN, President Trump was asked if he thinks America should prioritize persecuted Christians as refugees. He responded:

Yes. Yes, they’ve been horribly treated. If you were a Christian in Syria it was impossible, or at least very, very tough, to get into the United States. If you were a Muslim you could come in, but if you were a Christian, it was almost impossible and the reason that was so unfair — everybody was persecuted, in all fairness — but they were chopping off the heads of everybody but more so the Christians. And I thought it was very, very unfair. So we are going to help them.

Trumps response is far different from that given by Barrack Hussein Obama back in November 2015. Then, as president, he described the idea of giving preference to Christian refugees as “shameful”: “That’s not American. That’s not who we are. We don’t have religious tests to our compassion,” he had added.

While Obama was making such lofty admonishments, his administration was quietly discriminating against Mideast Christians in a myriad of ways—including, as Trump pointed out above, by very obviously favoring Muslim refugees over Christian ones. Indeed, despite the U.S. government’s own acknowledgement that ISIS was committing genocide against Syrian Christians—and not against fellow Sunni Muslims—the Obama administration took in 5,435 Muslims, almost all of whom were Sunni, but only 28 Christians. Considering that Christians are 10 percent of Syria’s population, to be merely on an equal ratio with Muslims entering America, at least 500 Christians should’ve been granted asylum, not 28.

But questions of equal numbers aside, the idea of prioritizing Christian refugees over Muslims (which I argued for back in 2015) is not only more humane; it brings benefits to America as well.

Consider:

Unlike Muslims, Christian minorities are being singled out and persecuted simply because of their despised religious identity. From a humanitarian point of view—and humanitarianism is the reason being cited for accepting millions of refugees—Christians should receive top priority simply because they are the most persecuted group in the Middle East. Even before the Islamic State was formed, Christians were, and continue to be, targeted by Muslims in general—Muslim individuals, Muslim mobs, and Muslim regimes, from Muslim countries of all races (Arab, African, Asian)—and for the same reason: Christians are infidel number one. (See Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians for hundreds of anecdotes before the rise of ISIS as well as the Muslim doctrines that create such hate for Christians.)

Conversely, Muslim refugees—as opposed to the many ISIS and other jihadi sympathizers posing as “refugees”—are not fleeing religious persecution (as mentioned, 99% of Muslim refugees accepted into the U.S. are, like ISIS, Sunnis), but chaos created by the violent and supremacist teachings of their own religion. Hence why when large numbers of Muslims enter Western nations—in Germany, Sweden, France, the UK—tension, crimes, rapes, and terrorism soar.

Indeed, what more proof is needed than the fact that so-called Muslim “refugees” are throwing Christians overboard during their boat voyages across the Mediterranean to Europe? Or that Muslim majority refugee centers in Europe are essentially microcosms of Muslim majority nations: there, Christian minorities continue to be persecuted. One report found that 88% of the 231 Christian refugees interviewed in Germany have suffered religiously motivated persecution in the form of insults, death threats, and sexual assaults. Some were pressured to convert to Islam. “I really didn’t know that after coming to Germany I would be harassed because of my faith in the very same way as back in Iran,” one Christian refugee said.

Is persecuting religious minorities the behavior of people who are in need of refugee status in America? Or is this behavior yet another reminder that it is non-Muslims from the Middle East who are truly in need of sanctuary?

The U.S. should further prioritize Christian refugees because U.S. foreign policies are directly responsible for exacerbating their persecution. Christians did not flee from Bashar Assad’s Syria, or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, or Muamar Gaddafi’s Libya. Their systematic persecution—to the point of genocide—began only after the U.S. interfered in those nations under the pretext of “democracy.” All that these policies did is unleash the jihadi forces that the dictators had long kept suppressed. Now the Islamic State is deeply embedded in precisely all three nations, enslaving, raping, and slaughtering Christians and other minorities.

Surely if U.S. policies were responsible for unleashing the full-blown jihad on Christians, the least humanitarian America can do is prioritize Christians as refugees? In fact, and as Trump pointed out during his CBN interview, it’s the opposite: According to one report, from May 1 to May 23 alone, 499 Syrian refugees were received into the U.S, 99% of them Sunnis. Zero Christians were admitted.

Questions of fairness and humanitarianism aside, there are also benefits in absorbing Mideast Christians refugees instead of Muslims. Christians are easily assimilated in Western societies, due to the shared Christian heritage and outlook, and regularly become productive members of society. Muslims follow a completely different blueprint, Islamic law, or Sharia—which calls for constant hostility (jihad) against all non-Muslims, and advocates any number of distinctly anti-Western practices (misogyny, sex slavery, death for “blasphemers” and “apostates,” etc.). Hence it’s no surprise that many Muslim asylum seekers are anti-Western at heart—or, as a German police union chief once said, Muslim migrants “despise our country and laugh at our justice.”

Mideast Christians also bring trustworthy language and cultural skills. They understand the Middle Eastern—including Islamic—mindset and can help the U.S. understand it. And unlike Muslims, Christians have no “conflicting loyalty” issues: Islamic law forbids Muslims from befriending or aiding “infidels” against fellow Muslims (click here to see some of the treachery this leads to in the U.S. and here to see the treachery Christians have suffered from their longtime Muslim neighbors and “friends”). No such threat exists among Mideast Christians. They too render unto God what is God’s and unto Caesar what is Caesar’s—not to mention they have no loyalty to the Islamic ideologies that made their lives a living hell in the Middle East, the Islamic ideologies that are also responsible for jihadi terror in America. Thus a win-win: the U.S. and Mideast Christians complement each other, if only in that they share the same foe.

All the above reasons—from those that offer humanitarian relief to the true victims of persecution and genocide, to those that offer stability and benefits to the United States—are unassailable in their logic.

President Trump understands this—even if most liberals and lying media don’t.