This week we’ve been discussing Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian’s breathtakingly shameless attempt to rehabilitate Georgetown University sharia apologist Jonathan A.C. Brown and to smear his critics. This episode led us to ask: who is this Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian? We found a couple of items that may help answer that question.

Exhibit A: on December 23, 2015, the Washington Post published a piece by Allen-Ebrahimian that was plainly meant to be a heartwarming holiday story. She began by explaining that the 2015 holiday season was “unlike any other” she had ever experienced because this time Donald Trump had left “a lump of coal in my stocking, reminding me just how unwelcome my multi-faith family would be in his version of America.”

She explained that her husband is an Iranian Muslim who “tends to be particularly self-conscious when he’s invited to a meal where there are no halal, or at least vegetarian, options.” You see, even though he’d lived in the U.S. for 12 years, meals were “still an unwanted reminder that even something as universal as breaking bread can set him apart from everyone else.” A curious way to put it: the only thing setting her husband apart at dinners with non-Muslims are his own religion’s dietary rules.

Allen-Ebrahimian gave a brief account of her own background: born in Abilene to liberal Christian parents, she was taken by her parents on trips around the world, raised largely in Vienna, Austria, and after college moved to China, having learned from her travels “that neither Christians nor Americans had a monopoly on kindness, happiness or morality.” In China, she kept mum about her Christian and Texan roots, apparently ashamed of her background in that officially atheist totalitarian country.

Then she married a Muslim. At their first family Christmas dinner together, in 2014, her mother “included halal and vegetarian options for my new husband, and we were both thankful.” But, she added, “[t]hat was before Paris, before San Bernardino, before notions of religious tests and registries burst upon our national dialogue like a plague.” One would think she might refer to the terrorist atrocities as being “like a plague,” but no – it’s the idea of heavy vetting (misrepresented by her, as by many others, as “religious tests and registries”) that is “like a plague.”

So it was that as Christmas 2015 approached, Allen-Ebrahimian felt “a bit like we’re under siege.” Her anxiety caused her to break into tears. But then, at Thanksgiving, her mother “went to even greater lengths to see that almost everything was halal: Three whole zabihah chickens, with broth she carefully siphoned off into plastic containers for use in gravy and casseroles. Halal ground beef for taco night. Halal hamburger patties cooked in a clean pan on a stove rather than on the grill outside, which was covered in non-halal meat drippings. Even turkey bacon sprinkled liberally over salads and wrapped in spirals around asparagus clusters.” The effect on Allen-Ebrahimian’s husband “was immediate. Normally reserved, he talked more, cracked jokes and spent more time with everyone in the family room.”

Beautiful story, right? Or is it? Think about it and we’ll get back together tomorrow.