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Glenn's Show Prep

Paris mayor plans to sue FOX News, and the man at the center of the controversy is speaking out

January 21, 2015
Wilson

Writer

A few days ago, Steve Emerson was on FOX News to talk about the attacks on 'Charlie Hebdo'. During an interview, he said, "in Britain, it's not just no-go zones, there are actual cities like Birmingham that are totally Muslim where non-Muslims just simply don't go in." The comments went viral, and now FOX News is apologizing and the Paris mayor is threatening to sue the network for inaccurate reporting. Steve joined Glenn on radio this morning to discuss the outcry and the real Islamic extremism issue in Europe.

"[Emerson] immediately came out and he apologized profusely. Fox News gave the biggest apology I've ever seen, and now the mayor of France is saying they're going to sue Fox and Steve Emerson for saying there was no-go zones. Something is not right here," Glenn said.

Steve explained, "n Birmingham I made a total error by referring to the city as totally Muslim. And being sort of a no-go zone. And I was totally wrong. Within hours of making that statement, I issued a declarative, unmitigated, unreserved, unambiguous apology," he said.

"The reason it went viral is because...it was a hatred of Fox. The Islamists together with their alliance with those on the ultra left had been waiting 20 years to pounce on me to make a mistake. And this combined to sort of spiral out of control to the point where it seems like I was guilty of murder of some sort," he continued.

Below is a rough transcript of the segment:

GLENN: Steve Emerson is one of the nation's best national security correspondents. His investigative work on radical Islamic fundamentalism is absolutely critical to that nation's national security. There is no one who has exhibited the same expertise, courage, and determination to tackle this vital issue, written by the "New York Times" executive editor, A.M. Rosenthal. That is who Steve Emerson is. Steve Emerson is one of the bravest people investigators I believe on the planet. One of the -- one of the few that actually called September 11th before September 11 th happened. One of the few that has been there every step of the way, calling it exactly the way it is. Now, he made a mistake but honestly, it's a mistake that I think many of us could have made, because we have heard for years about no-go zones. And for some reason, France, England, and the left are coming after now Fox News and I believe targeting Steve Emerson. Because he was on the air and he was talking about no-go zones. Well, there are no, no, no go zone. But if you want to talk about political nitpicking, listen to this. No-go zones -- what are you implying with a no-go zone? You're implying that the police just don't go into that area. Well, okay. Is that true? Are there places here in America that either visitors or cops just avoid? There's no place here in America that I know of that the police say, I am not going in there. However, there are sensitive areas and areas so dangerous that you just don't go in unless you have to. The French call it a sensitive urban zone. Not a no go zone. This is -- documentation from the French government, sensitive urban zones. ZUS. I have here -- this is 35 pages of fine print, towns that are -- sensitive -- what are they call them? Sensitive urban zones. We would know them as no-go zones. So Steve Emerson was on Fox News and he made a statement about these no-go zones. And he said, I think the way most people speak without accuracy, and he said, you know, it's almost like completely Muslim or he talked about one place. Almost --

PAT: Birmingham totally Muslim.

GLENN: Totally Muslim. Well, no, it's thought totally Muslim. It's 25 or 30% Muslim. However, what is the culture, I don't know. He immediately came out and he apologized profusely. Fox News gave the biggest apology I've ever seen, and now the mayor of France is saying they're going to sue Fox and Steve Emerson for saying there was no-go zones. Something is not right here. I heard this on Friday and -- or on Monday. And I immediately reached out to Steve Emerson. We haven't had a chance to talk until right now. And he happens to be on the phone now to explain what's going on. Hi, Steve, how are you?

EMERSON: Hi, Glenn. I'm okay. Thank you. Thanks for having me on.

GLENN: First of all, thank you for all of the hard work that you have done over the years. You are really truly an American who has risked it all and -- and really, spent a lot of your life, and I would have to imagine you feel it sometimes, there have got to be days you feel you've waste add lot of your life because nobody will listen and they're just trying to torch you. But I want you to know I as an American am grateful for the things that you have done.

EMERSON: I appreciate the kind words, you know. I'm only doing my job and I started doing it 20 years ago because I felt nobody was looking at the real aspects then of the first World Trade Center bombing in February of '92. And then -- I'm sorry, February '93. And then of course, the 9/11 attacks occurred. So I established a nonprofit looking at what the government wasn't looking at, which was the political slam, radical Islamic activities of the mosques, of the Islamic groups that pretended to be moderate or civil rights groups but were in fact conduits for radical Islamic activities. Even terrorist activities. So that's what I've dedicated my life to. And yet I did -- as you pointed out, I made a serious error when I referred to Birmingham -- I was talking about no-go zones, which by the way is not a formal reference. I mean, governments don't recognize that term. But it's an informal reference where -- in which policemen or firemen or government agencies won't go in to areas where there are dense Muslim concentrations for fear of their lives. And it's been reported on since 2002 of all places, the "New York Times" -- which referenced it. Now, having said that, in discussing it, I discussed it in England where I talked about the sharia police in parts of London that had -- basically attacked non-Muslims for not wearing the right attire. And this was reported in the BBC. It's reported in London newspapers. And yet I was attacked by the BBC for saying it. And in Birmingham I made a total error by referring to the city as totally Muslim. And being sort of a no-go zone. And I was totally wrong. Within hours of making that statement, I issued a declarative, unmid gated -- unmitigated, you know, unreserved, inambiguous apology. I put out my website.

GLENN: Steve, Steve, Steve. Tell me what's really --

EMERSON: Made any mince about it, okay?

GLENN: Tell me what's really going on.

EMERSON: The reason it went viral is because the reason -- it was a hatred of Fox. People -- the Islamicists together with their alliance with those on the ultra left had been waiting 20 years to pounce on me to make a mistake. And this combined to sort of spiral out of control to the point where it seems like I was guilty of murder of some sort. The irony, of course, that the mayor of Paris, where -- Paris being symbolically now the top city in the world where you would think it reigns has this symbolic city of free speech, having seen the massacre of people protecting -- trying to exercise free speech, is now going to sue Fox for emphasizing free speech? Which is actually true. I mean, I'd like to see the portionan mayor suing Fox or suing me. On discovery they wouldn't get away with it.

GLENN: No, I'm sitting here with 30 fif page of something called sensitive urban zones, which is what -- we, you know -- in colloquial terms call no-go zones. That's what they call them. Sensitive urban zones. It's the same thing, is it not? Or am I wrong on that?

EMERSON: It can be. It's an amorphous determine and I think it fluctuates from area to area, so I think that, again, no so against is an informal determine that the governments don't recognize. They don't recognize as a formal term, which is why Fox actually issued a second apology on Saturday night saying you know, there's no such thing as a formal, you know, recognition of no-go zones. And we -- you know, we apologize for using that term. But again, there is no formal designation of no-go zone. Those are -- the French map listed areas where there are -- what they called sensitive urban zones, where there are areas that the police or firemen or areas where government agents won't go in. And it -- the difference -- there are differences in each different zone, but certainly those zones are designated as such because of the refusal by various government agencies or services to go in for fear of their lives.

GLENN: Steve, are we --

EMERSON: BriMerrill Muslim, they're all Muslim. And in some areas they have sharia courts, not ought necessarily. But this goes beyond necessarily those areas. Some areas, it's very, very -- you know, no go, which means nobody goes in. And in some areas they do go in when they have to go in. So I think that the definition varies. On the other hand, you have mayors. You have chiefs of police. You have chiefs of firemen. You have journalists, French journalists, all -- documenting and talking about no-go zones for years.

GLENN: Right, I know.

EMERSON: As well as an article in the "New York Times" or "Newsweek" going back to 2002 and 2005. So the notion somehow this was just an invention of Fox is ludicrous.

GLENN: So Steve, let --

EMERSON: -- only because, as you pointed out, a desire to get at Fox. Or desire to get at me.

GLENN: Okay. Let me ask you this. If this is where France is after, you know, after this attack, and they are so hyper focused on political correctness, and they care this much about destroying somebody like you and Fox, is your -- do you think Europe has a chance of recovering from the radicalism that is infected, and I mean radicalism from both the Islamic side and the fascistic side? There is a fight for who's going to control the populace. Which fascism, Islamofascism or the new neo-Nazi fascism? Does it have a chance of surviving?

EMERSON: The correct dynamics. Which is -- you see a rise of this -- you know, of a right wing -- sometimes very fascistic reaction to the emergence of these radical Islamic zones. And self-declared sovereignty. The sharia courts that have been enabled by European governments. The fact that -- in many countries, in Sweden as well, you will find higher rates of rape and theft and crime associated with dense Muslim migration. And I want to be very clear that I'm not saying that Muslims are responsible for all crimes or anything like that or they're responsible for all terrorism.

GLENN: I'm going to let do you that, but you don't have to on this show. We're all adults.

EMERSON: I want to be very clear in stating that.

GLENN: No, I know.

EMERSON: And I'm not associating Islam with terrorism itself, but there is a -- and it is radical in Europe. And I say statements with Mr. Cameron, who called me an idiot. But Mr. Cameron himself said ISIS and ISIL all these groups have nothing to do with Islam and they're just monsters. I could I is a that statement is more idiotic than any statement I've ever made.

PAT: Yep.

EMERSON: It doesn't necessarily mean they're equal to Islam, but it these do with the interpretation.

GLENN: They're quoting.

(overlapping speakers).

EMERSON: We have to recognize to the extent we don't recognize it is going to fester and grow.

GLENN: They're quoting the Quran. They're doing it in the name of Allah and the holy Prophet Muhammad. How much more Islamic do you need to be?

STU: That's what's amazing to this.

EMERSON: When you have a group called the Islamic Jihad and then you have the president or John Brennan, the CIA director, saying Jihad means peace and moral struggle, are we supposed to rename the Islamic Jihad the movement for peace and struggle? It's a group that carries out murders, stabbings, and decapitations. So it's absurd for us to deny the connection between Islam and these Islamic terrorist groups. Again, it doesn't mean that every Muslim is a terrorist, far from it. It's a minority, very small minority, but they have a dis-- especially the extremists, have a disproportionate control over the majority because they occupy the leadership position, the Islamists, the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood, as you know, Glenn, is the parent group of almost every single Suni terrorist group in the world from ISIS to Al Qaeda to Hamas, the Islamic Jihad. Every single group like that pays its homage to the Muslim Brotherhood. And you know what? The only country in the world that had the courage, the bravery to name the Muslim Brotherhood and its front groups in the United States, such as the Council on American Islamic Relations, which was named a front group by the F.B.I. as a front group for Hamas, the only country in the world that named and designated the Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR as terrorist groups was a Muslim country, the United Arab Emirates. And who came to the defense of CAIR? The United States.

GLENN: Steve, I just want --

EMERSON: I'm ashamed of what the U.S. State Department did.

GLENN: I think the State Department -- the State Department is one of our biggest problems and the incoming president, whoever it might be, the best thing he could do is fire every single person at the State Department. Steve, I just wanted to get you on. I wanted to hear what your point of view was on this and I appreciate. I want you also to know, there are millions of Americans who -- who know you and who have learned a lot from you. And who support you. And I know that you're -- your organization takes donations and when you're up against all the powers of the world, I know how difficult it is. And I wanted to make sure that people understood that you could donate and you could help Steve at InvestigativeProject.Org. You can also go there and learn an awful lot of information that quite honestly is very politically incorrect and they have been trying to get this guy for 20 years. And he is really truly one of the American heroes that should be remembered in history as one of the guys -- as one of the Bohnhoffers that stood when no one else would stand. InvestigativeProject.org. Steve Emerson, thanks so much for being on the program.

EMERSON: Glenn, thanks for your very kind words.

GLENN: God bless you.

PAT: And instead of all that, they've turned it around in him in the midst of 12 people being murdered at the hands of extremist radicals. Now he's the problem, not they. Unbelievable.

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.