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Britain’s former Chief Rabbi says bigotry is rising

January 29, 2015
Wilson

Writer

Glenn interviewed Britain’s former Chief Rabbi on TV this week and the Rabbi has noticed some disturbing trends. Not only are attacks on Christians escalating in the Middle East, anti-Semitism is on the rise. Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks shared his unique insight on TheBlaze.

Glenn: You were the chief Rabbi of England. We have heard from so many people, English, Jewish, no longer feel comfortable there. What’s happening in England?

Rabbi Sacks: I don’t think it’s England. I think it’s Europe, and I think it’s the world. You know, sometimes it happens with an illness that you find a cure, you eradicate it from a certain population, but before you’ve done so, you infect another population. I kind of think that’s what happened with anti-Semitism, that after the Holocaust, Europe woke up and said what is this that’s happened in our midst? And from them on, there was a sustained campaign, probably the most complete in history, to strengthen the immune system of European culture so that there would never again be an outbreak of anti-Semitism. Sadly, the virus did infect certain populations in the Middle East.

Glenn: It was intentionally transferred. I mean, Iran is called Iran as a salute to the Aryan nation.

Rabbi Sacks: It goes back a way, yes. A very European thing called the blood libel which accused Jews of killing Christian children was taken by Christians to the Middle East, to Egypt and Syria and Lebanon, in the 19th century, and then very sadly from Germany in the 1930s, a forgery, famous forgery called the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was also taken into the Arab world, and so this huge effort of Holocaust education, antiracist legislation, interfaith dialogue, that had such an impact and actually transformed relations between Jews and Christians which had been estranged for almost 2,000 years, and there really was a transformation.

I mean, let me salute a great human being here, Pope John XXIII, who in the early 1960s began to realize what had happened and set in motion something called Vatican II which produced a document called Nostra Aetate in 1965, which transformed the church’s relationship with other faiths, but especially with Jews, and that has been one of the most positive changes in religious history, but unfortunately it began to infect parts of the Middle East, and today that has fed back into Europe, and it’s very problematic.

Glenn: Okay, so you can’t get anybody…if we would have said in the 1930s you can’t say that we’re at war against Nazi-ism, you can’t say you’re at war against Germans, even though we have a record of destroying the Nazis and then immediately handing candy to the Germans—we didn’t hate the German people; we hated the ideology that was driving them. You can’t get anyone in today’s politically correct world to say we’re at war with a psychotic version of Islam. That doesn’t mean that all Muslims are bad. I have friends who are Muslim. They’re not bad. But there is a clear ideology that wants you dead, me dead, and quite honestly some Muslims dead as well, and we won’t name that.

Rabbi Sacks: Well, I think we have to be very candid here and say that the most serious victims of radical Islamism are Muslims who are being killed in Iraq, in Syria, in Afghanistan. You know, it’s a war within Islam. There’s no question about it, just as, you know, the 1930s was a war within Europe, and just as in the 16th and 17th centuries we had a war within Christianity. So, where Islam is today, Europe was and Christianity was before then. So, this is not a completely unknown phenomenon.

Glenn: So what are we at war with, Rabbi?

Rabbi Sacks: We are at war with a way of thinking which says when bad things happen, who did this to us? I mean, Germany was not the most anti-Semitic nation in Europe at the end of the 19th century. If you would have asked in the late 1890s what are the epicenters of anti-Semitism, you would have answered Paris and Vienna, Paris of the Dreyfus trial and Vienna, whose mayor was a man called Karl Lueger, very public anti-Semite from whom Hitler learned to be an anti-Semite.

So, it wasn’t Germany, so what happened in Germany? And the answer is Germany lost the First World War, felt humiliated by the Treaty of Versailles, and instead of asking what did we do wrong, it asked who did this to us? Now, whenever a culture moves from what did we do wrong, which is a self-reckoning, which is essential to Judaism and Christianity. You know, when something goes wrong, we say, you know, forgive us, you know, help us atone, help us change.

When a culture doesn’t ask that question, when it says somebody must have done this to us, the West has had a narrative for 2,000 years which says if you want somebody to blame, here are the Jews. Unfortunately, today that is gripping hold of another kind of population. There’s no question that nothing good ever came out of this, and anti-Semitism doesn’t just destroy Jews, it destroys anti-Semites, so it’s a very self-destructive route.

Glenn: I want to come back to the war with radicalized Islam here in a second, but let me jump off of what you’re saying here, because it is one of my greatest concerns. In the 1930s, you’re right, Weimar looked for anybody, and they had good reason. We as the West punished Germans in an unreasonable way. That’s why they inflated their money, and that just led to more misery and somebody rising up and saying, “They did it!”

In the 1930s, we saw this rapid rise of anti-Semitism. We saw the world go mad, but the world went mad because people were starving. We don’t even begin to understand the kind of depression that they were going through in the 1930s. We have people now who say I’m going to go kill in the name of Allah for ISIS, and they leave, and they go. They’re signing up to behead people, but they don’t have cell service, and they write mom and dad and say you’ve got to help me get back into France because I can’t live without my cell phone. We have no clue as to how bad things economically can get.

I believe we are on the road for economic, real economic disaster that we will get through. The world has always gotten through these things but usually with bad bloodshed, because somebody, Fascists, whether they are in the line of Le Pen in France or in Russia or in Germany, Spain, somebody rises up and says, “They did this to you.”

So, we don’t have just the Islamists, we also have the Fascists and the Communists that are also rising up who also like to have Jews as a scapegoat, but I don’t think it’s just the Jews this time. I think it’s everybody who disagrees with them. So, how do we prepare a society that our leadership all across the world is saying the economic crisis is over? It’s not. Even if you don’t believe in the banking crisis or a hyperinflation or a deflation crisis, just look at technology. The people in Silicon Valley are telling us 50% of all jobs will be lost by 2025. There is a great change of some sort coming, so how do we root people into decency in a growingly secular way of life?

Rabbi Sacks: There is no question that this calls for real spiritual leadership. There’s no question. People can get used to a great number of things. They can get used to poverty. They can get used to disease. They can even get used to war, but they can’t get used to change, real, profound systemic change that gets faster and faster. You’re on a roller coaster of ever-accelerating change. This is very disorienting to people, and it does seem to me that at times like this a spiritual message is very important, because if there’s one thing that religion tells you, it is what is eternal in the midst of change.

I think Jews knew this very well indeed, you know? For pretty much 1,000 years, Jews didn’t know whether they would still be in the country where they were born next year. The political environment could change so fast, and yet Jews learned this extraordinary persistence during change because they were rooted in things which are not to do with where you’re living, they’re not to do with what job you do, they are to do with who am I, you know?

So I think in a sense religion may be part of the problem when it becomes radicalized, but at the same time, religion is part of the solution. One thing that drives fundamentalists in all faiths is fear, and I think to myself, you know, what is my answer to fear? Just read Psalm 27—the Lord is my light and my salvation, whom then shall I fear? God is the refuge of my life, of whom then shall I be afraid? If there’s one thing in human civilization that is stronger than fear, it’s called faith, so real, true faith, in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, in all the world’s faiths is actually the solution to the problem that we’re facing.

Glenn: There are many Christians, pastors, leaders, that are awake and standing up. I find it amazing the thing happening in the Christian world that has changed in the last five to ten years. There’s something different happening, a lot of people standing up and waking up, but there’s also, and this is in every faith, there’s also a lot that in the Christian world, they don’t want to take on anything too controversial because they’ll, you know, lose whatever.

In the Jewish world, God forbid you stand up and say never again means look for the roots of the problem, and if you see those, maybe we should weed those roots out or at least point and say maybe a bad part of the garden that’s happening over here. So, we have people in both of our faiths that are not part of the solution here. They’re not standing up.

Rabbi Sacks: We had a very great Rabbi 2,000 years ago, terrific man called Rabbi Johanan ben Zakkai. He was a real hero. I mean, the fact that Judaism survived has to do with the fact that he managed to build an Academy at Yavne after the Roman destruction of Jerusalem. So, he was one of the visionaries of his time, and as he lay dying, his disciples gathered around his bed and said, “Rabbi, tell us something.” And he said, “You want me to teach you something? Would that you were as afraid of God as you are of human beings.” They said, “Rabbi, we needed you to tell us that?” And he said, “Yes, you do, because when a thief breaks into somebody’s house, he prays that no human being should see him. He doesn’t worry that God sees him.”

So, it’s one of those mistakes we all make, being scared of other people instead of really fearing God, and that’s why, you know, if you really do reverence God, you are not afraid of saying what has to be said. Fear no man is one of the principles of religion, so I think this is terribly important, and I think we have to have the courage to say in the end, what is evil about anti-Semitism? What actually is anti-Semitism?

We have a famous anti-Semite in our history called Haman, who is a major figure in the Book of Esther, and he tells King Ahasuerus, translated in English as Xerxes, he says wipe out the Jews because there is this one people dispersed among the nations whose laws and customs are different from all other nations. Jews were hated because they were different. Anti-Semitism is the paradigm case of dislike of the unlike, but if you think about it, it is what makes us different that makes each of us, you and I, unique, and it is the fact that each of us is unique—even genetically identical twins have only 50% of characteristics in common, because each of us is unique. None of us is replaceable, and that is what the sanctity of life is all about.

So, anti-Semitism looks as if it’s about Jews, but it’s actually about what it is to be human. There was a very great survivor of Auschwitz called Primo Levi, who wrote a famous book on his experiences in Auschwitz, and he called it If This is a Man. He didn’t call it If This is a Jew. Ultimately, anti-Semitism is an assault on our humanity, so it really and truly affects all of us, Jew, Christian, Muslim, you name it, and that is why we have to stand together to fight it right now.

If you were to ask me who are the biggest victims on the line right now, I would say it is the Christian populations of much of the world. They are being persecuted throughout the Middle East and in many other parts of the world. There are no Christians left in Afghanistan. The last remaining church burned to the ground in 2010. There was a Kristallnacht, an assault on 50 churches in Egypt in 2013.

There are 5 million Coptic Christians living in fear. In Iraq, 12 years ago, there were 1-1/2 million Christians, today less than 400,000, so in the end, you have Jews fearing the return of anti-Semitism, Christians almost being wiped out of the Middle East which is where Christianity was born, and you have 90% of the casualties of Islamist violence being Muslims. So, we’re all at risk, and we all have to stand together.

Glenn: So you are talking to an audience now who has been through this. This is well-tilled soil here, and we have talked about these things for a long time. My audience is, I really, truly believe, one of the more dedicated groups of people to let’s be the righteous among the nations; however, I know I feel this way, and I am sure the audience does. I bet there are people all over the world that feel this way—what do I do? What do I do?

Yes, I know. I know what’s happening in Egypt. I know what’s happening in Iraq. I know what’s happening Afghanistan, in France, in England, in Germany, in Russia, what’s happening here. I know. We keep saying it. We keep talking. Rabbi, it’s such a huge problem. As I was thinking about this interview today, I thought I think this is going to be one of those interviews that people look back ten years, 15 years from now, and say they knew, people knew…what happened? And what happened was we don’t know what to do.

Don't miss part 2 Thursday night on TheBlaze

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.