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Iraqi priest shares harrowing experience at the hands of Islamic captors

November 24, 2015
Ted Tuttle

Editor

During his radio program Tuesday, Glenn spoke with Father Douglas Al-Bazi, a priest from Iraq who watched his own church blow up in front of him before being kidnapped and tortured by terrorists. He now hosts hundreds of displaced Christians in a refugee camp he founded in Iraqi Kurdistan, called "The Church of Martyrs."

Father Douglas called for listeners to "please pray for my community" after describing how he is preparing to help many of them leave their homeland and seek refuge outside of the Middle East. These rescue efforts could only be accomplished thanks to the thousands of generous donors to the Nazarene Fund.

"I told the people, I know we're going to start this --- this journey is like Moses," Father Douglas said. "But actually Moses in himself, he believed that 'I'm going to the Promising Land. Even me, I will not see the Promising Land. But I'm going to prepare it for our kids.'"

Tonight on his TV program, Glenn will give a sneak peek at an American Dream Labs (ADL) documentary film about the plight of Christian refugees in the Middle East. Watch a clip of Father Douglas describe how he responded to the torture he endured at the hands of ISIS.

Listen to more of Glenn's conversation with Father Douglas or read the transcript below.

Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors.

How many ISIS members are Christian? The answer is zero. So how do you know who the good guys or the bad guys are?

Well, you start with the parish priest. You go find one guy. The one guy we found is Father Douglas. This is an amazing man that I want you to meet. He's over in the area right now. He is the pastor of -- you ask him what his church is, it's the Church of Martyrs. The Church of Blood. And he has set up his own refugee camp, and these are the people that we are bringing back in. The Nazarene Fund has raised now $12 million. That money is going to take and rescue many of his people. And he's on the phone with us now. Father, how are you?

FATHER DOUGLAS: Good. How are you? Thank you very much for this introduction of me. I'm just pleased. Okay? Not amazing. Not a hero. Nothing. Okay?

GLENN: Yes, sir.

You are -- A, you're a hard guy to get a hold of because you won't really sit down for an interview or go out to lunch or anything because you've told our team several times, I'm on God's time, I'm on God's work.

Are you in a car right now? Are you in the middle of a surgery for somebody or anything? Because you usually don't set aside a time to --

(laughter)

FATHER DOUGLAS: No. Actually now I'm in my office. I locked my door. I'm locked inside because I want to hear you very well.

GLENN: Okay.

FATHER DOUGLAS: So maybe many people -- kids, they will knock on the door, just to look at where I am. Okay? Yes.

GLENN: Father, would you do us a favor and tell us, you were taken hostage, and it is a pretty harrowing story. Can you tell us that story a bit?

FATHER DOUGLAS: You know, when we talk about a story, we talk always with the beginning and the end. But, you know, when we talk about persecution and pain because there is something we have here actually (inaudible). So we are not talking about the story, we are talking about lives. And we used to -- I'm sorry to say that, but some of the same situation -- and this is actually taken back many centuries.

And me, as the personal, I grew out a lot of events in my life, and they were really horrible events. But when I mention them, I always tell my people when I talk about what happened to me, I don't want you to feel sorry about me. But I want you to just open your eyes to what happened to my people.

Because I often say that, even when I went also to the United States this summer, and before in Europe, I told them, "I know that -- I believe that your kids, they're not going to be a member of ISIS. But there will be -- sooner or later, they're going to be victims by ISIS. So open your eyes and wake up."

What happened to me actually, I survived twice by bombed cars. They attacked my church one time. They blew up my church in front of me. One time, they were a group -- they wanted to kill me, and they shoot me. But they -- I just got shot in my (cut out) by an AK-47, and after that, I was taken up for nine days. Those nine days, of course, I cannot forget them because they were -- changed a lot me, as personal, my ambition, and my ways.

And those nine days there, I went out with completely -- they assault my nose -- by hammer, they broke my -- my cheeks. And also, they picked me -- my back. So that's why I went to -- to have a big surgery in my back because I changed one of the discs in my back. I spent almost one year in bed. And now I'm using actually fake teeth. When I smile, just -- those fake teeth, they're good for, you know, just taking photo. A selfie, you know, on phone or Facebook.

(laughter)

But just to keep my smile, you know.

GLENN: Hang on just a second. Hold on. Hold on just a second. Because I just want to translate in case anybody hasn't been able to keep up with this. He's talking about how, you know, he's humble and he doesn't want anybody to pay attention to what's happening. And he's butchering this story, and we're going to have this tonight on television where we sat down with him. And we have the story. And we reenacted the story. And it is -- I'm telling you, it is hair-raising and terrifying. They took him. They kidnapped him and put him in the trunk of a car. Kidnapped him. Took him out. Beat him with a hammer in the face for nine solid days. Broke his back. Really, really broke him up. But did not break his spirit. In fact, all the way along, he was actually counseling them on how to live their life.

Tell me the story about how they would come to you during the day. At night, they would beat you and torture you. During the day, they would come to you for spiritual advice.

FATHER DOUGLAS: Yeah. During the day, actually even with my eyes, they were covered because it was forbidden for me to see anything for nine days. And also, my hands, they were tied by chains.

But during the day, they used to come and ask me a private question or a general question. A private question, when one of them, he asked -- actually many of them asked me. "I have a question for you. My friends to go away. And I want to ask you a personal question."

Such as, one of them, I remember very well, he asked about, you know, about his wife. And he told me, she's always, you know, picky, demanding, and how can I deal with her? So just imagine I'm this way and tell her -- tell him, you know, "You have to tell her that you really love her. And every day, this is the law. Every day, you have to show the love to her."

And then he asked me another and another. And this happened during the day. But most people, the same people actually, during the night, during the night, they just change from sheep to wolves.

GLENN: How did you --

FATHER DOUGLAS: Yeah.

GLENN: How did you during the day -- must you ever want to say to them, "What is wrong with you, man?"

FATHER DOUGLAS: Speak it again, sir.

GLENN: Didn't you during the day want to point out, "Remember the conversation we were having earlier today when I was a human being, how are you beating me now?"

FATHER DOUGLAS: You mean, how was my day?

GLENN: No. I'm trying to figure out how to explain this.

How did you -- how did you figure out in your own head how there seemed to be two people, sheep and wolves, but they were the same individual. How did you rectify that in your head?

FATHER DOUGLAS: You know, it happened from the first day actually. The first day they asked me -- they told me, this is who we are. We're (foreign language) or (foreign language).

And, you know, a question like that when it's heard, immediately you will lose your life if you just, you know, answer in wrong ways.

So I remember the first day I told them, "Actually, I feel sorry about you because if any one of you has this chance in his life, in all life, to continue the school and to have certificate or degree, so any one of you will be like professor and doctor or, I know, engineer. But because you went to school, for I don't know what the reason, that's why many people will use you and now you are like gangs, but used by religious ways."

And, you know, they were really shocked. And they were, you know, silent. Almost two minutes, three minutes. And they start to talk to me each one what happened to him when he was a child. And so I know that actually, when there is no education, you can control the people. But people when they have really education, knowledge, so they can look nice. But without education, people, they will completely be lost.

And even the people that are not believing God, even if they -- many met them, a lot of Christians, even here in my parish, no one actually has chance to study like philosophy or theology. But, you know, the human thing -- the spiritual thing is love. But most people, really I feel sorry about them. They are completely blind. That's what I'm saying.

GLENN: Father Douglas Al-Bazi.

FATHER DOUGLAS: But when -- during the night, they became wolves because they were happy to obey to another guy. Okay? If they are not going to obey, they will be also killed.

GLENN: Father, how have you prepared your people to be rescued and leave their homeland and leave the church that they've grown up? How have you prepared them for this?

FATHER DOUGLAS: You know, I wish -- actually, I can't believe (inaudible) -- even we are proud because we are Iraqian. But Europe is not proud because we are part of this.

In any case, our land is actually with Jesus. Our land, it is him. So when we have that love and justice, we can create any land to be prepared for our community. And it is easy to us to prepare and build communities again, but to build is the man. To build human people, such as like the people here and around, it's really hard.

But I told the people, I know we're going to start this -- this is the journey, is like Moses. But actually Moses in himself, he believed that I'm going to the Promising Land. Even me, I will not see the Promising Land. But I'm going to prepare it for our kids. So --

GLENN: Will you see --

FATHER DOUGLAS: So to myself, to Father Douglas, I am telling every day to myself, "What are you going to do if it's not a benefit for you, if it's for the next generation?" So we it's tougher on ourselves to make the next generation to be safe. This will be our Promising Land.

GLENN: Father Douglas Al-Bazi, thank you so much. We will talk to you again. And hopefully we will some day get to shake hands and hug and meet one-on-one. Thank you so much. God bless you.

FATHER DOUGLAS: Pray -- please pray for my community.

GLENN: Yes, sir. God bless you.

FATHER DOUGLAS: Thank you. Thank -- thank you, sir. Thank you.

GLENN: More on him in just a minute. And you're going to see an amazing show done. Tonight's broadcast at 5 o'clock was produced by American Dream Labs. And it's a very different episode. And we sent our cameras over to sit with him and he's much easier to understand when you can watch him.

It is one of the most amazing stories you will ever see. And we're going to clip the part of him out of -- it's about four minutes from our visit over with him. And make that available so you can spread that. I mean, it's truly amazing. He prayed the rosary in chains. And he made his chains the rosary. He is a remarkable, remarkable man. I want to watch tonight's really inspiring episode at 5 o'clock on TheBlaze TV.church on martyrs. Church of Martyrs.

When 'Abolish America' stops being symbolic

Al Drago / Stringer | Getty Images

Prosecutors stopped a New Year’s Eve bombing plot rooted in ideology that treats the US as an enemy to be destroyed.

Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles announced that four members of an anti-capitalist extremist group were arrested on Friday for plotting coordinated bombings in California on New Year’s Eve.

According to the Department of Justice, the suspects planned to detonate explosives concealed in backpacks at various businesses while also targeting ICE agents and vehicles. The attacks were supposed to coincide with midnight celebrations.

Marxists, anarchists, and Islamist movements share a conviction that the United States, like Israel, is a colonial project that must be destroyed.

The plot was disrupted before any lives were lost. The group behind the plot calls itself the Turtle Island Liberation Front. That name matters more than you might think.

When ideology turns operational

For years, the media has told us that radical, violent rhetoric on the left is mostly symbolic. They explained away the angry slogans, destructive language, and calls for “liberation” as performance or hyperbole.

Bombs are not metaphors, however.

Once explosives enter the picture, framing the issue as harmless expression becomes much more difficult. What makes this case different is the ideological ecosystem behind it.

The Turtle Island Liberation Front was not a single-issue group. It was anti-American, anti-capitalist, and explicitly revolutionary. Its members viewed the United States as an illegitimate occupying force rather than a sovereign nation. America, in their view, is not a nation, not a country; it is a structure that must be dismantled at any cost.

What ‘Turtle Island’ really means

“Turtle Island” is not an innocent cultural reference. In modern activist usage, it is shorthand for the claim that the United States has no moral or legal right to exist. It reframes the country as stolen land, permanently occupied by an illegitimate society.

Once people accept that premise, the use of violence against their perceived enemies becomes not only permissible, but virtuous. That framing is not unique to one movement. It appears again and again across radical networks that otherwise disagree on nearly everything.

Marxists, anarchists, and Islamist movements do not share the same vision for the future. They do not even trust one another. But they share a conviction that the United States, like Israel, is a colonial project that must be destroyed. The alignment of radical, hostile ideologies is anything but a coincidence.

The red-green alliance

For decades, analysts have warned about what is often called the red-green alliance: the convergence of far-left revolutionary politics with Islamist movements. The alliance is not based on shared values, but on shared enemies. Capitalism, national sovereignty, Western culture, and constitutional government all fall into that category.

History has shown us how this process works. Revolutionary coalitions form to tear down an existing order, promising liberation and justice. Once power is seized, the alliance fractures, and the most ruthless faction takes control.

Iran’s 1979 revolution followed this exact pattern. Leftist revolutionaries helped topple the shah. Within a few years, tens of thousands of them were imprisoned, executed, or “disappeared” by the Islamist regime they helped install. Those who do not understand history, the saying goes, are doomed to repeat it.

ALEX WROBLEWSKI / Contributor | Getty Images

This moment is different

What happened in California was not a foreign conflict bleeding into the United States or a solitary extremist acting on impulse. It was an organized domestic group, steeped in ideological narratives long validated by universities, activist networks, and the media.

The language that once circulated on campuses and social media is now appearing in criminal indictments. “Liberation” has become a justification for explosives. “Resistance” has become a plan with a date and a time. When groups openly call for the destruction of the United States and then prepare bombs to make it happen, the country has entered a new phase. Pretending things have not gotten worse, that we have not crossed a line as a country, is reckless denial.

Every movement like this depends on confusion. Its supporters insist that calls for America’s destruction are symbolic, even as they stockpile weapons. They denounce violence while preparing for it. They cloak criminal intent in the language of justice and morality. That ambiguity is not accidental. It is deliberate.

The California plot should end the debate over whether these red-green alliances exist. They do. The only question left is whether the country will recognize the pattern before more plots advance farther — and succeed.

This is not about one group, one ideology, or one arrest. It is about a growing coalition that has moved past rhetoric and into action. History leaves no doubt where that path leads. The only uncertainty is whether Americans will step in and stop it.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

Trump v. Slaughter: The Deep State on trial

JIM WATSON / Contributor | Getty Images

The administrative state has long operated as an unelected super-government. Trump v. Slaughter may be the moment voters reclaim authority over their own institutions.

Washington is watching and worrying about a U.S. Supreme Court case that could very well define the future of American self-government. And I don’t say that lightly. At the center of Trump v. Slaughter is a deceptively simple question: Can the president — the one official chosen by the entire nation — remove the administrators and “experts” who wield enormous, unaccountable power inside the executive branch?

This isn’t a technical fight. It’s not a paperwork dispute. It’s a turning point. Because if the answer is no, then the American people no longer control their own government. Elections become ceremonial. The bureaucracy becomes permanent. And the Constitution becomes a suggestion rather than the law of the land.

A government run by experts instead of elected leaders is not a republic. It’s a bureaucracy with a voting booth bolted onto the front to make us feel better.

That simply cannot be. Justice Neil Gorsuch summed it up perfectly during oral arguments on Monday: “There is no such thing in our constitutional order as a fourth branch of government that’s quasi-judicial and quasi-legislative.”

Yet for more than a century, the administrative state has grown like kudzu — quietly, relentlessly, and always in one direction. Today we have a fourth branch of government: unelected, unaccountable, insulated from consequence. Congress hands off lawmaking to agencies. Presidents arrive with agendas, but the bureaucrats remain, and they decide what actually gets done.

If the Supreme Court decides that presidents cannot fire the very people who execute federal power, they are not just rearranging an org chart. The justices are rewriting the structure of the republic. They are confirming what we’ve long feared: Here, the experts rule, not the voters.

A government run by experts instead of elected leaders is not a republic. It’s a bureaucracy with a voting booth bolted onto the front to make us feel better.

The founders warned us

The men who wrote the Constitution saw this temptation coming. Alexander Hamilton and James Madison in the Federalist Papers hammered home the same principle again and again: Power must remain traceable to the people. They understood human nature far too well. They knew that once administrators are protected from accountability, they will accumulate power endlessly. It is what humans do.

That’s why the Constitution vests the executive power in a single president — someone the entire nation elects and can unelect. They did not want a managerial council. They did not want a permanent priesthood of experts. They wanted responsibility and authority to live in one place so the people could reward or replace it.

So this case will answer a simple question: Do the people still govern this country, or does a protected class of bureaucrats now run the show?

Not-so-expert advice

Look around. The experts insisted they could manage the economy — and produced historic debt and inflation.

The experts insisted they could run public health — and left millions of Americans sick, injured, and dead while avoiding accountability.

The experts insisted they could steer foreign policy — and delivered endless conflict with no measurable benefit to our citizens.

And through it all, they stayed. Untouched, unelected, and utterly unapologetic.

If a president cannot fire these people, then you — the voter — have no ability to change the direction of your own government. You can vote for reform, but you will get the same insiders making the same decisions in the same agencies.

That is not self-government. That is inertia disguised as expertise.

A republic no more?

A monarchy can survive a permanent bureaucracy. A dictatorship can survive a permanent bureaucracy. A constitutional republic cannot. Not for long anyway.

We are supposed to live in a system where the people set the course, Congress writes the laws, and the president carries them out. When agencies write their own rules, judges shield them from oversight, and presidents are forbidden from removing them, we no longer live in that system. We live in something else — something the founders warned us about.

And the people become spectators of their own government.

JIM WATSON / Contributor | Getty Images

The path forward

Restoring the separation of powers does not mean rejecting expertise. It means returning expertise to its proper role: advisory, not sovereign.

No expert should hold power that voters cannot revoke. No agency should drift beyond the reach of the executive. No bureaucracy should be allowed to grow branches the Constitution never gave it.

The Supreme Court now faces a choice that will shape American life for a generation. It can reinforce the Constitution, or it can allow the administrative state to wander even farther from democratic control.

This case isn’t about President Trump. It isn’t about Rebecca Slaughter, the former Federal Trade Commission official suing to get her job back. It’s about whether elections still mean anything — whether the American people still hold the reins of their own government.

That is what is at stake: not procedure, not technicalities, but the survival of a system built on the revolutionary idea that the citizens — not the experts — are the ones who rule.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

1 in 20 Canadians die by MAID—Is this 'compassion'?

Vaughn Ridley / Stringer | Getty Images

Medical assistance in dying isn’t health care. It’s the moment a Western democracy decided some lives aren’t worth saving, and it’s a warning sign we can’t ignore.

Canada loves to lecture America about compassion. Every time a shooting makes the headlines, Canadian commentators cannot wait to discuss how the United States has a “culture of death” because we refuse to regulate guns the way enlightened nations supposedly do.

But north of our border, a very different crisis is unfolding — one that is harder to moralize because it exposes a deeper cultural failure.

A society that no longer recognizes the value of life will not long defend freedom, dignity, or moral order.

The Canadian government is not only permitting death, but it’s also administering, expanding, and redefining it as “medical care.” Medical assistance in dying is no longer a rare, tragic exception. It has become one of the country’s leading causes of death, offered to people whose problems are treatable, whose conditions are survivable, and whose value should never have been in question.

In Canada, MAID is now responsible for nearly 5% of all deaths — 1 out of every 20 citizens. And this is happening in a country that claims the moral high ground over American gun violence. Canada now records more deaths per capita from doctors administering lethal drugs than America records from firearms. Their number is 37.9 deaths per 100,000 people. Ours is 13.7. Yet we are the country supposedly drowning in a “culture of death.”

No lecture from abroad can paper over this fact: Canada has built a system where eliminating suffering increasingly means eliminating the sufferer.

Choosing death over care

One example of what Canada now calls “compassion” is the case of Jolene Bond, a woman suffering from a painful but treatable thyroid condition that causes dangerously high calcium levels, bone deterioration, soft-tissue damage, nausea, and unrelenting pain. Her condition is severe, but it is not terminal. Surgery could help her. And in a functioning medical system, she would have it.

But Jolene lives under socialized medicine. The specialists she needs are either unavailable, overrun with patients, or blocked behind bureaucratic requirements she cannot meet. She cannot get a referral. She cannot get an appointment. She cannot reach the doctor in another province who is qualified to perform the operation. Every pathway to treatment is jammed by paperwork, shortages, and waitlists that stretch into the horizon and beyond.

Yet the Canadian government had something else ready for her — something immediate.

They offered her MAID.

Not help, not relief, not a doctor willing to drive across a provincial line and simply examine her. Instead, Canada offered Jolene a state-approved death. A lethal injection is easier to obtain than a medical referral. Killing her would be easier than treating her. And the system calls that compassion.

Bureaucracy replaces medicine

Jolene’s story is not an outlier. It is the logical outcome of a system that cannot keep its promises. When the machinery of socialized medicine breaks down, the state simply replaces care with a final, irreversible “solution.” A bureaucratic checkbox becomes the last decision of a person’s life.

Canada insists its process is rigorous, humane, and safeguarded. Yet the bureaucracy now reviewing Jolene’s case is not asking how she can receive treatment; it is asking whether she has enough signatures to qualify for a lethal injection. And the debate among Canadian officials is not how to preserve life, but whether she has met the paperwork threshold to end it.

This is the dark inversion that always emerges when the state claims the power to decide when life is no longer worth living. Bureaucracy replaces conscience. Eligibility criteria replace compassion. A panel of physicians replaces the family gathered at a bedside. And eventually, the “right” to die becomes an expectation — especially for those who are poor, elderly, or alone.

Joe Raedle / Staff | Getty Images

The logical end of a broken system

We ignore this lesson at our own peril. Canada’s health care system is collapsing under demographic pressure, uncontrolled migration, and the unavoidable math of government-run medicine.

When the system breaks, someone must bear the cost. MAID has become the release valve.

The ideology behind this system is already drifting south. In American medical journals and bioethics conferences, you will hear this same rhetoric. The argument is always dressed in compassion. But underneath, it reduces the value of human life to a calculation: Are you useful? Are you affordable? Are you too much of a burden?

The West was built on a conviction that every human life has inherent value. That truth gave us hospitals before it gave us universities. It gave us charity before it gave us science. It is written into the Declaration of Independence.

Canada’s MAID program reveals what happens when a country lets that foundation erode. Life becomes negotiable, and suffering becomes a justification for elimination.

A society that no longer recognizes the value of life will not long defend freedom, dignity, or moral order. If compassion becomes indistinguishable from convenience, and if medicine becomes indistinguishable from euthanasia, the West will have abandoned the very principles that built it. That is the lesson from our northern neighbor — a warning, not a blueprint.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

A Sharia enclave is quietly taking root in America. It's time to wake up.

NOVA SAFO / Staff | Getty Images

Sharia-based projects like the Meadow in Texas show how political Islam grows quietly, counting on Americans to stay silent while an incompatible legal system takes root.

Apolitical system completely incompatible with the Constitution is gaining ground in the United States, and we are pretending it is not happening.

Sharia — the legal and political framework of Islam — is being woven into developments, institutions, and neighborhoods, including a massive project in Texas. And the consequences will be enormous if we continue to look the other way.

This is the contradiction at the heart of political Islam: It claims universal authority while insisting its harshest rules will never be enforced here. That promise does not stand up to scrutiny. It never has.

Before we can have an honest debate, we’d better understand what Sharia represents. Sharia is not simply a set of religious rules about prayer or diet. It is a comprehensive legal and political structure that governs marriage, finance, criminal penalties, and civic life. It is a parallel system that claims supremacy wherever it takes hold.

This is where the distinction matters. Many Muslims in America want nothing to do with Sharia governance. They came here precisely because they lived under it. But political Islam — the movement that seeks to implement Sharia as law — is not the same as personal religious belief.

It is a political ideology with global ambitions, much like communism. Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently warned that Islamist movements do not seek peaceful coexistence with the West. They seek dominance. History backs him up.

How Sharia arrives

Political Islam does not begin with dramatic declarations. It starts quietly, through enclaves that operate by their own rules. That is why the development once called EPIC City — now rebranded as the Meadow — is so concerning. Early plans framed it as a Muslim-only community built around a mega-mosque and governed by Sharia-compliant financing. After state investigations were conducted, the branding changed, but the underlying intent remained the same.

Developers have openly described practices designed to keep non-Muslims out, using fees and ownership structures to create de facto religious exclusivity. This is not assimilation. It is the construction of a parallel society within a constitutional republic.

The warning from those who have lived under it

Years ago, local imams in Texas told me, without hesitation, that certain Sharia punishments “just work.” They spoke about cutting off hands for theft, stoning adulterers, and maintaining separate standards of testimony for men and women. They insisted it was logical and effective while insisting they would never attempt to implement it in Texas.

But when pressed, they could not explain why a system they consider divinely mandated would suddenly stop applying once someone crossed a border.

This is the contradiction at the heart of political Islam: It claims universal authority while insisting its harshest rules will never be enforced here. That promise does not stand up to scrutiny. It never has.

AASHISH KIPHAYET / Contributor | Getty Images

America is vulnerable

Europe is already showing us where this road leads. No-go zones, parallel courts, political intimidation, and clerics preaching supremacy have taken root across major cities.

America’s strength has always come from its melting pot, but assimilation requires boundaries. It requires insisting that the Constitution, not religious law, is the supreme authority on this soil.

Yet we are becoming complacent, even fearful, about saying so. We mistake silence for tolerance. We mistake avoidance for fairness. Meanwhile, political Islam views this hesitation as weakness.

Religious freedom is one of America’s greatest gifts. Muslims may worship freely here, as they should. But political Islam must not be permitted to plant a flag on American soil. The Constitution cannot coexist with a system that denies equal rights, restricts speech, subordinates women, and places clerical authority above civil law.

Wake up before it is too late

Projects like the Meadow are not isolated. They are test runs, footholds, proofs of concept. Political Islam operates with patience. It advances through demographic growth, legal ambiguity, and cultural hesitation — and it counts on Americans being too polite, too distracted, or too afraid to confront it.

We cannot afford that luxury. If we fail to defend the principles that make this country free, we will one day find ourselves asking how a parallel system gained power right in front of us. The answer will be simple: We looked away.

The time to draw boundaries and to speak honestly is now. The time to defend the Constitution as the supreme law of the land is now. Act while there is still time.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.