OPINION:
In Hamtramck, Michigan, the first Muslim-majority city in America, an all-Muslim city council legalized backyard animal sacrifice over the non-Muslim minority, who objected on animal rights and sanitary issues.
The religious slaughtering of goats and sheep is practiced among Muslims during the holiday of Eid.
Minneapolis became the first large American city to change its noise ordinance to permit all five daily Islamic calls to prayer to be broadcast on loudspeakers year-round, starting at 3:30 a.m. Activists credited the City Council’s decision as a triumph of inclusion, while other residents raised concerns about how loud early-morning and late-night broadcasts may disrupt their sleep.
Portland, Maine, Public Schools announced last year that they’re the nation’s first to offer daily halal-certified meals for all ages and grade levels on the taxpayers’ dime, framing it as “food equity.” At an estimated cost of $300,000, Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport plans to install dedicated “Wudu” foot-washing stations in its bathrooms, complementing its existing prayer and ablution facilities. Similar foot-washing stations can be found at airports in Chicago, Houston, San Francisco, Seattle, and Orlando.
Western tolerance is being exploited to advance religious rule, warns Ayaan Hirsi-Ali, a Somali-born activist who converted to Christianity in 2023. In a piece titled “From Subversion to Sharia,” she outlines the three-stage framework of radical Islam’s cultural capture.
“The first stage relies on strategic alignment with progressive social movements,” she pens. “In this initial phase, activist networks frame their cause through the language of intersectionality and diversity. They build alliances with left-wing coalitions advocating for LGBT rights and transgender causes. The partnership is purely tactical. To establish its first institutional footholds, the movement must secure the backing of the political Left, gaining both legitimacy and protection from criticism.”
Evolutionary psychologist Gad Saad coined the term “suicidal empathy,” where progressive Western societies suffer from an “inverse morality” that prioritizes the feelings and demands of outsiders, non-citizens, or criminal groups over the safety and security of tax-paying citizens and victims. This uncritical tolerance is viewed as a virtue, and many who rightly point out how it may conflict with our founding principles are labeled as “racist,” “Islamophobic,” and bigoted, quickly shutting down any debate.
As our pages have outlined, America’s youth have been indoctrinated in this “suicidal empathy,” and have been trained to view the world – especially on our college campuses – in black and white. You’re either the oppressor (bad) or the oppressed (good). Incredible accommodations have been made to the Muslim community, which is viewed by these liberals as the oppressed, leading to campuswide backlash against conservative speakers and pro-Palestinian-LGBT rallies.
America has reached Ms. Hirsi-Ali’s critical first step of Islamic cultural capture, as the far-left and Islam are in alliance, where the surrender of basic governance and Judeo-Christian norms is celebrated as progress.
The second stage emerges once a movement moves beyond seeking tolerance and begins securing structural power, she writes. America is currently at this crossroad.
More than 230 Muslim Americans now hold elected office, the highest number recorded, according to the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), and it’s expected to climb with a slew of Muslim candidates winning their Democratic primaries this year. Abdul El-Sayed won the Democratic primary in Michigan and, if he wins the general, will become the first Muslim U.S. senator.
Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota won her primary in a landslide, and House seats in New Jersey, California, and New York have all been claimed by Muslims. Last year, Amir Omar was elected the first Muslim mayor of a prominent, high-tech Dallas suburb, and this year, Zohran Mamdani was sworn in as New York City’s first-ever Muslim mayor, overseeing the U.S.’s largest financial capital.
In Massachusetts, there is a legislative proposal to establish a permanent state Muslim Commission to advise state leaders on policy matters impacting Muslim Americans, combat Islamophobia, and help elect Muslims to public office.
In the second phase, “activists and aligned politicians leverage political blocs to police public discourse, relying heavily on accusations of ‘Islamophobia’ to ruin careers and inflict lasting reputational damage on critics,” Ms. Hirsi-Ali writes.
This week, the Free Press detailed how, for two years, a group of mostly Muslim male students, led by a Muslim boy, bullied and threatened mostly female Jewish students at a prominent Arlington, Virginia, public high school while school officials repeatedly looked the other way.
The third phase begins “once the movement achieves both demographic critical mass and direct administrative dominance. At that point, the useful fiction of pluralism and progressive alliances that enabled its rise are discarded,” Ms. Hirsi-Ali warns.
America has not yet reached this point – although we’re dangerously close, as the Democratic Party seems willing to accept and forgive its most radical Muslim candidates’ past statements and beliefs, in order to gain political power. Historically, however, this dance with the devil always leaves the Democratic partner both defeated and subjugated. Look no further than Afghanistan and Iran.
Radical Islamists are using our democratic system to gain power and then destroy it from within. To restore the West, we must be clear-eyed about this threat, not tolerant of it.
• Kelly Sadler is the commentary editor at The Washington Times.
Follow the author
Please read our comment policy before commenting.