The term “red-green” or “Islamo-leftism” refers to the forms of cooperation between the radical Western left and the organizations of the Islamic movement in the West, organizations which in turn control the mosques and the Islamic mainstream in Western countries. In practice, then, it is an alliance between the Western left and fundamentalist Islam, which presents itself as the representative of Islam without any objection from the Muslim majority.

The term seems to have appeared in numerous writings at the beginning of the twenty-first century, first in France, perhaps, then in Britain, but it has recently stirred controversy in America after the victory of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York, followed by the victory of Abdul El-Sayed as the Democratic Party’s nominee for the United States Senate from Michigan.

But the mutual admiration and leftist support for the Islamic movement is older than that. Some date it to the beginning of Khomeini’s Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979, when the Western left, especially the French left, hailed the Islamic revolution as a triumph over imperialism and modernity. Leading figures of the French left such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault praised Khomeini’s revolution; Foucault described it as “a new political spirituality, an alternative to Western modernity.” Khomeini, for his part, used leftist terminology about justice and historical grievances in his Islamic sermons.¹

In 1994 the British writer Chris Harman published a study titled “The Prophet and the Proletariat: Islamic Fundamentalism, Class and Revolution,”² later published as a book in 1999, in which he laid the foundations for cooperation between the Islamic movement and the left in the West against a common enemy, imperialism and the state, without either side adopting the other’s ideology: “Where the Islamists are in opposition, our rule should be ‘with the Islamists sometimes, with the state never.’”

In 2002 the French sociologist Pierre-André Taguieff coined the term Islamo-gauchisme in his book The New Judeophobia to describe a current within the far left that opposes Israeli policy toward the Palestinians and enters into alliances with Islamic currents. The term was used widely in 2003 by supporters of the law banning religious symbols in French schools; the right-wing leader Marine Le Pen then employed it in 2012 to describe what she considered a suspect alliance between the Islamic movement and the French left; and it acquired broader official governmental use between 2020 and 2021 amid the controversy over “Islamic separatism.”

In an interview with the British Times, former Prime Minister Tony Blair said that “antisemitism is not new, but it has undergone a recent and malignant development after the Gaza war within progressive left circles, because of the alliance with the Islamic movement,” and he called for this evil alliance to be brought to an end.³

The Islamic movement in the West understands that its relationship with the left is a utilitarian one, tied to achieving shared objectives against a shared enemy. It is an alliance against everything Western, Christian, Jewish, white, or capitalist. It is an alliance of demolition, not construction: the two sides have no shared conception of the society they want to build together, but they agree on the enemy that must be united against, defeated, and broken.

One might put it this way. Just as Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser under Carter, saw in Islam and the Islamic movements a force of violence, hatred, resentment, and rebellion, an organized and funded force, and used them against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan to defeat it there and hasten its collapse, so the Western left likewise saw in Islam and its movements a force of violence, resentment, hatred, and funded organization that could bring down the West from within. And the Islamic movement, in turn, found in the Western left a lever that would carry it into Western societies from the inside more quickly, and a partner in demolishing the West and replacing it with Islam.

Indeed, the scholar Daniel Pipes argues in his essay “The Western Mind of Radical Islam”⁴ that the Islamic movement is characterized by a duality: outward hostility to the West combined with deep influence by Western concepts in practice, and the adoption of revolutionary organizational methods resembling those of modern totalitarian movements such as the left and fascism, rather than the mechanisms of historical Islamic rule. This is true, though the practice of fascism and religious totalitarianism is itself a feature of Islamic rule throughout history. The Islamic movement’s imitation of the left and of the fascists certainly exists, but its imitation of Western Jewish organizations in organization, fundraising, and lobbying has become strikingly evident among Islamic organizations in the West. Even the term “Islamophobia” itself was coined in imitation of “antisemitism,” despite the vast difference between the two. And let us not forget that Islam itself stole a great deal of Jewish teaching and narrative without ever acknowledging it.

In France they did not stop at describing an alliance between the left and Islam. They found that many in the Islamic movement had adopted a shared Islamic-leftist agenda, and that many leftists had adopted Islamic discourse, meaning not merely a red-green alliance but a green-red interpenetration. This is why the French sociologist Pierre-André Taguieff in 2002 called them “the Islamic left in the West.” The Islamic left in the West is a merging of leftist Muslims and Islamized leftists, as if they had become a single new evil bloc challenging the West.

President Emmanuel Macron described the Islamic left as one that “minimizes Islamic violence and focuses on Islamophobia.” The former French interior minister Gérald Darmanin said that “the Islamic left is complicit in terrorist acts in France.” The former minister of higher education Frédérique Vidal said that “the Islamic left is gnawing at the whole of French society.” And the former education minister Jean-Michel Blanquer described the Islamic left as leading to catastrophes.

Shared Features

• Both the left and the Islamic movement are totalitarian, exclusionary, supremacist ideologies.

• Both believe in violence to achieve their goals, and both have practiced it.

• Both possess the capacity for organization, mobilization, and mass assembly.

• Both work to demonize their opponents.

• Both fail at governing and at the agenda of progress, and succeed far better in the role of opposition and in cultivating popular resentment under the pretext of resisting injustice and calling for justice.

• Both live inside a victim mentality, complaining of grievances and the absence of justice.

This is why so many radical leftist Muslims converted to the Islamic movement when it rose. The most prominent in Egypt was perhaps Sayyid Qutb, the theorist of Islamic terrorism in his famous book Milestones, who before that was a radical leftist and wrote two books of Islamic leftism, The Battle Between Islam and Capitalism and Social Justice in Islam, before turning fully to Islamic discourse. Ali Shariati in Iran likewise moved from leftist to Islamic theorist. In Egypt, too, Muhammad Imara and Mustafa Mahmoud were both Marxists who became Islamic thinkers; and Abdel Wahab El-Messiri moved from the left to Islam, specialized in anti-Zionism, and wrote a complete eight-volume encyclopedia on Zionism. The list of leftists who converted to the Islamic movement inside the Islamic countries themselves goes on.

Shared Goals and Interests

First: the shared anti-state agenda. Reducing the power of the police and the army, to the point of demanding the abolition of the police; defending illegal immigration; cutting prison funding; opposing imperialism and what they call Western settler-colonialism; working to demolish the capitalist system; demonizing the wealthy, “eat the rich”, which leads in the end to a policy of impoverishing everyone; noise and mass assembly; attempting to destroy the founding principles of the United States; demonizing the Founding Fathers; and ultimately working to demolish Western civilization from within.

Second: achieving the Islamic movement’s goals through this alliance, such as: criminalizing “Islamophobia” and treating any criticism of Islam as a crime; supporting Palestine; delegitimizing Israel; justifying violence as a response to grievances; working to turn Islam into a race; conflating Islam and Muslims and treating them as one thing; helping secure recognition of Muslims’ cultural and legal particularity, including sharia courts, sharia police, Islamic education, and sharia towns, despite their contradiction with Western constitutions and civilizational values; normalizing acceptance of the intifada and the slogan “Palestine from the river to the sea,” despite its representing an existential threat to Israel; participating in demonstrations for Islam and for Palestine; boycotting and isolating Israel internationally; spreading Judeophobia and conspiracy theories about Jews; and opposing Zionism.

It is important to understand that this alliance has a specific plan regarding Israel on which it works step by step: changing the political discourse about Israel in America and the West, then changing actual behavior toward Israel, including cutting aid, halting arms supplies, and economic boycott, then raising the level of hatred toward Israel and toward Jews, culminating in transforming Israel into an enemy rather than a strategic ally.

This cooperation appeared clearly during the Gaza war. According to the Crowd Counting Consortium at Harvard’s Kennedy School, 12,400 pro-Gaza protests were recorded across the United States from October 2023 to June 2024, and the same institute documented 3,700 protest-days at more than 500 American academic institutions.⁵

In Europe, Middle East Monitor reported more than 42,000 pro-Gaza demonstrations across the continent during the war.⁶

The Islamic movement’s closeness in the West to the left and to the woke movement protects it from criticism as inciters of terrorism. Indeed, it lends legitimacy to Islamic jihad inside Western countries, to the point of normalization, the acceptance of jihad as something ordinary.

The French newspaper Le Figaro published an extended report on the unholy alliance between wokeism and the Islamic movement, noting that working with the progressive left and the woke is the Islamic movement’s most promising tactic, while it retains its old plan of using every tool available to Islamize the West.⁷

How Does the Islamic Movement Justify This Alliance?

How does a Muslim support homosexual rights, when in his sharia it is a crime punishable by death and by being thrown from mountaintops and high buildings? How does he ally with communists, atheists, and the irreligious, who are infidels in his creed? How does he approve of gender transition for children and minors, despite Islam’s criminalization of it?

Islamic jurisprudence, the Islamic heritage, and the teachings of Islam are full of solutions that proceed from lying and evasion.

There is the jurisprudence of priorities, which proceeds from the tactic of postponing disputes in order to achieve the more important goals. In application, they see ideological and religious disagreements as to be deferred until tamkin,empowerment, is achieved, followed by domination and complete Islamization.

There is pragmatism, which they believe the Prophet of Islam practiced when he was weak: he made peace with his enemies and then pounced on them. He wrote tolerant portions of the Quran while in Mecca, then abrogated them, annulled their validity, once he possessed military power in Medina, where he wrote the Quranic verses that call for hatred, excommunication, violence, and jihad.

There is taqiyya, lawful deception: concealing what you believe and displaying its opposite in order to deceive others. Taqiyya is a Quranic injunction.

There is lawful lying in support of Islam, according to the hadiths of Muhammad.

There is the juristic maxim that necessity permits the forbidden, far more dangerous than Machiavelli’s dictum that the end justifies the means.

And there is the saying of Ali ibn Abi Talib, Muhammad’s cousin and the founder of the Shia school, that the Quran “bears many faces”, meaning that one may choose from it according to the situation. The late Egyptian academic Hassan Hanafi explained this by saying that the Quran is like a supermarket in which you find everything: you find milk and you find rat poison. When you are weak, offer people the milk; when you are strong, offer them the poison, that is, hatred, violence, killing, and jihad.

The Islamic movement in the West knows all this well and uses every one of these tricks. But in the end they hate the West and Western civilization; they hate Judaism and Christianity; and they believe in Muhammad’s promise to them of the conquest of Rome, that is, the fall of Western civilization and its replacement by Islam.

The Rise and Election of Zohran Mamdani

Perhaps the most prominent example of this alliance’s sabotage of the West is the rise of Zohran Mamdani, a dangerous turning point in the history of New York. A communist governing the capital of world capitalism; a Muslim who relied financially and organizationally in his campaign on Islamic organizations, governing the city that Islamic terrorism struck roughly a quarter century ago. Mamdani combines the agenda of the radical left with the Islamic view of the West. He is the first mayor in New York’s history to announce his religion after his victory, that he is a Muslim, declaring, “I am proud of my faith, and I will serve by what Islam taught me!!!” On the day of his victory he went to celebrate with his followers at a mosque in Astoria, New York, telling them: “I am from you and for you.” This is why many considered the day of his victory a black day in the city’s history. The Big Apple has fallen into the hands of a green-red alliance.

The Islamic activist Linda Sarsour said at a CAIR conference on September 20, 2025, that Islamic money and Islamic Super PACs played a pivotal role in funding Mamdani and his political rise. The press recently reported her appointment as an adviser to Mamdani, and Al Jazeera interviewed her days ago, presenting her as his adviser. It should be noted that Sarsour has demanded that Mamdani dismantle the NYPD unit responsible for monitoring terrorist threats.

CAIR was named in the 2008 Holy Land Foundation terrorism-financing investigations as an unindicted co-conspirator. The CAIR organizations, registered as 501(c)(3)s, established CAIR Action as a 501(c)(4) in order to have the right to electoral funding through affiliated Super PACs such as the Unity and Justice Fund, founder of a Political Action Committee. This fund supported Mamdani with $120,000, and by their own account, more than 80% of its funding came from Muslims. There is another CAIR-linked fund, Unity Lab PAC, which also funded Mamdani’s campaign.

The Rise of Abdul El-Sayed

The victory of Abdul El-Sayed (Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed) as the Democratic nominee for the Senate from Michigan was another shock, greater than Mamdani’s in New York, because El-Sayed comes from the very heart of the Islamic movement in America. He and his wife, while students at the University of Michigan, were prominent leading members of the Muslim Students Association (MSA), an organization founded by the Muslim Brotherhood in America as one of several major Islamic organizations, and they met each other through their involvement in it. El-Sayed’s father-in-law, Jukaku Tayeb, is one of the founders of ISNA, another of the large organizations founded by the Muslim Brotherhood, and was also president of the Michigan chapter of CAIR.

It is not only El-Sayed, his father-in-law, and his wife who are classified as activists in Islamic organizations linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, but his sister and mother as well. His biological mother, Faten Fathi al-Koumi, worked for the Islamic American Relief Agency (IARA), an organization accused of financial cooperation with Osama bin Laden, Hamas, and the Taliban, and designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. Treasury Department in 2004.

His sister, Eman Abdelhadi, posted on X: “I hope the whole world rises up against the American empire.” She described Independence Day as a celebration of stolen land and Thanksgiving as a celebration of genocide and propaganda for American settler-colonialism, and she endorsed the October 7 attack on Israel. His close friend, who runs media promotion for his campaign, the Islamic extremist Hasan Piker, said that America deserved what happened to it on September 11.

I can say that the anti-American, anti-Western, and anti-Israel statements that have come out of El-Sayed and the members of his family are only a small fraction of what they believe. What they conceal is far more dangerous.

Strangely, El-Sayed criticizes political money in elections yet relies on Islamic political money: his father-in-law donated more than $200,000 to his campaign, and members of the Islamic organization CAIR donated $115,000.

Zohran Mamdani, Abdul El-Sayed, and other Muslim candidates rely in their campaigns on Islamic funding, Muslim volunteers, and decisive Muslim votes. They want to implement a leftist-Islamic agenda, and they accuse anyone who criticizes this of “Islamophobia”, El-Sayed even called President Trump’s criticism of him Islamophobia. More dangerously, he called criticism of sharia the product of white-supremacist racism, and his mendacity reached the point of comparing brutal Islamic sharia to Catholic canon law.

Arabic-language platforms have been filled with defenses of Mamdani and El-Sayed, one Arabic podcast in America even asked, “What’s wrong with El-Sayed if he really is a Brotherhood member?”, despite the Muslim Brotherhood’s designation as a terrorist group by the White House. And a Muslim American university professor of Egyptian origin argued that “we do not want to apply our Islam in America to Americans, but to ourselves, we Muslims”, meaning he wants an Islamic ghetto applying sharia and Islamic values that contradict the American Constitution and laws and the values of Western societies, and that stand against the very concept of citizenship in the modern state!!!

El-Sayed’s position on Israel does not differ from Mamdani’s: he describes Israel as an evil state that has committed genocide and practices apartheid; he rejects Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state; he wants to cut American aid to it and end all American military support; he wants Netanyahu tried as a war criminal; and he was a prominent member of the anti-Israel “Uncommitted” movement.

In short, anyone who analyzes the whole of his discourse concludes clearly that he is an antisemite and a hater of Jews, a fundamental feature of the Islamic movement’s discourse, beliefs, and behavior.

Add to this, of course, his radical leftist agenda: a return to the chaos of illegal immigration through abolishing ICE; nationalizing the ownership of artificial-intelligence companies; government rent control; free universal health insurance extended even to illegal immigrants; canceling medical debt; paying reparations for what he calls historical injustices; imposing a new 7% wealth tax; and, of course, portraying Muslims as victims of Islamophobia.

It is worth mentioning that El-Sayed said he stayed silent on condemning Khamenei’s killing of thousands of peaceful Iranians so as not to lose the Muslims of Michigan!!

But the question remains: does Abdul El-Sayed belong to the Muslim Brotherhood?

From my study of the history of the Brotherhood and of Islamic movements throughout Islamic history, and from my experience over decades of televised debates with senior leaders of the Brotherhood and the various Islamic groups, including Mohamed Morsi, whom I debated on Al Jazeera in November 2001 about the September attacks on America, and who later became president of Egypt, I can say with confidence that Abdul El-Sayed is a fundamentalist who belongs to the Brotherhood’s school of thought, carries its agenda and its goals of Islamization, and practices its methods of deception and misdirection. Beyond that, El-Sayed was an organizational member of a body the Muslim Brotherhood helped found, the Muslim Students Association (MSA); he cooperated with CAIR and spoke at its conferences; he received $115,000 for his campaign from 41 individuals, most of whom held or hold positions at CAIR; and, of course, his father-in-law’s relationship with CAIR and ISNA is documented, organizations founded by the Muslim Brotherhood or by elements supportive of Hamas.

Anyone who has studied the history of Islamic movements knows well that most Islamic organizations around the world, if not all of them, were founded by Muslim Brothers, Saudi Wahhabis, or Muslim fundamentalists; put more plainly, all of these organizations were founded by the organized Islamic movement. Most Islamic organizations in America and the West, and most mosques as well, particularly in the period 1960–2000, were founded through cooperation between the Brotherhood’s organization and Saudi Wahhabi money.¹⁰

As the proverb goes: if it walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck. Everything that has come from Abdul El-Sayed and his family confirms that they belong to the extremist organizations of the Islamic movement and have close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood through the organizations the Brotherhood helped found in America.

It Began with Obama

We can date the rise of the red-green alliance in America to the beginning of Barack Obama’s presidency, which combined leftism with support for Islamic presence and Islamic ascent. Frank Gaffney, founder of the Center for Security Policy, wrote an article and a book on the Muslim Brotherhood in the Obama administration,¹¹ naming many of the Islamic figures promoted during Obama’s tenure, such as Mohamed Magid, who had been president of ISNA and to whom Obama gave an important post in the Department of Homeland Security, along with others: Dalia Mogahed, Rashad Hussain, Huma Abedin, Farah Pandith, Kareem Shora, Mohamed Elibiary, Louay Safi, Kifah Mustapha, Azizah al-Hibri, Salam al-Marayati, Mazen Asbahi, Nawar Shora, Arif Alikhan, Eboo Patel...

Abdul El-Sayed plans to follow in Obama’s footsteps: from senator from Michigan to president of the United States.¹² The rise of Mamdani and Abdul, a quarter century after September 11, is far more dangerous to America than September 11 itself.¹³

Convergence of Goals with Certain Wings of the Right

A new term has recently emerged: “red-green-brown.” It means that certain Islamic organizations’ goals have converged with those of certain wings of the American right (convergence, not alliance). Tucker Carlson, for example, leads a fraudulent discourse in defense of Islam, Muslims, and the Islamic movements; he repeats the falsified Islamic historical narrative about Palestine and is hostile to Israel. The substance of Carlson’s discourse is an attempt to create a Christian right-wing current in the United States hostile to Israel in service of the Islamic narrative, and to produce a rupture between Christianity and Judaism in service of Islamic goals. This is why one of the Islamic movement’s leaders in New Jersey, Osama Abuirshaid, executive director of American Muslims for Palestine, admitted at a public event on January 16, 2026, that they had succeeded in splitting the MAGA movement from within; I believe he was referring to what Tucker Carlson and his current are doing. There are persistent reports about Carlson’s relationship with Qatar, matters that require security investigation more than they constitute research material.

It should be noted that the red-green alliance in America selects specific cities in which to extend its influence through candidacies for political office: Diverse cities with a mixed immigrant population, cities with a low proportion of whites and of Christian conservatives, cities with a high proportion of Muslims, cities controlled by the Democratic Party, cities with economic and social problems, cities that have become repellent to the middle class and to business people, cities with a notable presence of the radical left.

The Hijacking of the Democratic Party

For decades, the radical left or radical liberal current has controlled the schools, the universities, most of the American media, Hollywood, and then Silicon Valley, to the point that social media platforms, during the Biden years, practiced strict censorship of the American right and Christian conservatives’ access to their platforms, while opening the field to the woke agenda and the red-green alliance.

The problem is the acceleration of the so-called progressive current within the Democratic Party, which seeks to hijack the party entirely. This current calls itself the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), but in reality it differs from the social democrats or social democracy that existed in Europe and America. This current within the Democratic Party is in fact democratic communism: they want to use the mechanisms of elections and democracy to spread a communist agenda, and let us not forget that Hitler saw himself as a socialist.

What has helped this current rise in America, as Fareed Zakaria says, is the Democratic Party’s accelerating shift leftward over the past three decades: Obama was further left than Clinton, and Biden implemented a bigger leftist agenda than Obama. Zakaria observes that those who support the leftist agenda within the Democratic Party are not the poor and the workers but university graduates, which is exactly what happened with El-Sayed in Michigan. More dangerous, as Zakaria says, is the Democratic Party’s adoption of the woke agenda and its predicament regarding crime, immigration, and the border.¹⁴

The Islamic movement in America sees in the rise of this radical left within the Democratic Party its own opportunity for political ascent, which is why it has allied with it. The Islamic activist Linda Sarsour was a principal volunteer in Senator Bernie Sanders’s campaign, and the victories of Mamdani and El-Sayed are the fruit of this alliance.

Essential Observations on the Green-Red Alliance

This alliance holds that achieving justice requires bringing down the system, then bringing down the entire colonial West. From its perspective, the collapse of Israel is the prelude to the collapse of Israel’s makers and backers in America and the West, which is why the current is so intensely hostile to Israel.

This alliance takes no interest in criticizing tyranny, the degraded status of women, the absence of human rights, or the persecution of homosexuals in Islamic countries; it focuses exclusively on the West.

The persecution of Christians in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia receives no attention whatsoever from this alliance. Although the left is fierce in its criticism of Christianity in the West, it never comes near criticizing Islam, even though Christianity is the most persecuted religion in the world today, and Islam is the foremost persecutor of Christians worldwide.

The Islamic side has imposed on this alliance the conflation of Islam and Muslims. However hard Western thought and Western courts try to separate the two, the Muslim party insists on conflating them; the Islamic organizations insist that any criticism of Islam is an assault on Muslims, and insist that they represent Islam and Muslims together, despite being unelected.

The left tries to adapt any philosophical position to find a justification for allying with the Islamic movement, from the Iranian revolution to Islamophobia to anti-Zionism. The left has also used intersectionality theory to place all forms of grievance in a single category, and used this intersectionality to classify Muslims not merely as a religion but as a racial and ethnic minority.

Red-green discourse is pale and evasive toward Iran, while it is hostile to the moderate Islamic states allied with America.

This alliance works, in cooperation with Islamic states that sponsor terrorism, to control the institutions of the United Nations and harness them to condemn Israel exclusively.

The Islamic movement also learned from September 11 that undermining America and the West will not succeed through violence so much as through infiltrating institutions and sabotaging them from within, via a policy of alliances, immigration, and procreation.

The radical Western left treats the Islamic movement as a persecuted minority and overlooks its violent ideology, hostile to every value of the West’s liberal democracies.

Islamic funding of many American universities has entrenched the alliance between the left and the Islamic movement on campus, with Islamic control of Middle East departments and the imposition of their academic vision upon them.

The green-red alliance also blends hostility to America and the West with hatred of Judaism and Christianity and with the theory of anti-white-man animus. It is, in short, a poisonous hatred of everything Western, Christian, Jewish, white, or capitalist.

The Western left has also helped the Islamic movement to organize, to reach the masses, and to change its hardline political language into an evasive, deceptive one, accelerating its entry into the political mainstream of the West.

Some have warned of the danger that this current has hijacked the causes of Black Americans and folded them into its agenda under its theory of intersectionality.

The red-green current converges with Iran in portraying America as the leader of imperialism and therefore, for both, “the Great Satan,” as Khomeini called it.

Most Muslims who emigrated from Islamic countries to the West carried the creed of antisemitism with them, and through their alliance with the Western left they raised the level of antisemitism on the left and thence throughout the West, but this time under the heading of the Palestinian cause. The word “Palestine” has become the key to antisemitism in the West today, and a source for inflaming that hatred.

The crime of the Western left is what it leaves unsaid about Islam and Muslims regarding violence, Islamization, sharia, the condition of women, apostasy laws, and Islamic terrorism, to the point that a German leftist activist said, after a vehicle-ramming attack on citizens in Germany, “I wish the perpetrator had been white and not a Muslim!!”

The left also overlooks the cities that have become semi-closed to all but Muslims. In Europe there are the so-called no-go zones; in France, 751 areas have been counted as “sensitive urban zones,” the product of an alliance between the Islamic movement, the left, and criminal gangs. In America, Dearborn, Michigan is more an extension of southern Lebanon than an American city, and when you walk through Paterson, New Jersey you feel you are in Ramallah rather than America.

The Future of the Alliance and the Future of the West

There are different theories about the future of this alliance.

The pessimistic view holds that this alliance will lead to the sabotage of the West from within, followed by its fall. Hans-Georg Maaßen, former president of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency (the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution), said in a television interview on November 24, 2023: “In the end the Europeans will surrender to Islam, because Europeans are not prepared to confront the Islamization that is gradually destroying their culture.”

In his last interview, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said: “Europe made a grave mistake in that it created within itself peoples who reject its standards, its values, and the foundations of its constitutions, through mass immigration.” Kissinger deplored that in Berlin, eighty years after the Holocaust, people chant “death to the Jews” in the streets without being held accountable.

The optimistic view holds that the West will wake up; that the right will govern and bring under control all these negative phenomena hostile to the Western spirit and its values; that they will work to limit Islamic immigration and weaken this leftist-Islamic alliance.

The dangerous view holds that the alliance of the left, the Islamic movement, and the anarchists will seize power in America and most European countries, especially through the ballot box, as happened with Hitler; that the reaction will be a hardline right seeking to save the West; and that this will lead to political conflicts, then mutual violence, then civil wars, and perhaps divisions and collapses.

I hope a reformist awakening occurs in America within the Democratic Party before this dangerous scenario unfolds.

Notes and References

1. The Iranian left’s enthusiasm for the alliance with the Islamic movement in 1979, which led to the fall of the Shah, ended with Khomeini’s persecution of the leftists: he killed many of them and imprisoned most. Likewise the Egyptian left’s alliance with the Islamic movement in the so-called Arab Spring — but after Mubarak’s fall, the Brotherhood monopolized power and excluded the left. In the end, the Islamic movement regards these alliances as temporary and self-interested, solely for achieving its larger goals.

2. https://www.marxists.org/archive/harman/1994/xx/islam.htm

3. https://www.aljazeera.net/politics/2026/3/29/ (Tony Blair: “We must end the sinful alliance”)

4. https://firstthings.com/the-western-mind-of-radical-islam/

5. https://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/protests-united-states-palestine-and-israel-2023-2024

6. https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20250818-report-42000-pro-palestine-protests-events-held-in-europe-since-gaza-war/

7. https://www.lefigaro.fr/politique/la-france-insoumise-et-les-islamistes-l-histoire-secrete-d-une-alliance-politique-20241122

8. I believe CAIR should have been shut down after the Holy Land Foundation case in 2008, and I have no doubt that CAIR is a terrorist organization. I was not surprised by the announcement of CAIR’s executive director, Nihad Awad, of his elation at what happened on October 7 — that is only natural. I personally debated him on the Saudi channel Al Arabiya in 2007, during the imprisonment of Sami Al-Arian, accused of terrorism in America and later deported; in that encounter Nihad Awad defended Sami Al-Arian vigorously. Anyone who listens to Sami Al-Arian since he left America does not doubt for a moment that he advocates terrorism; he called October 7 a great deed.

9. The Islamic movement everywhere shares Hasan Piker’s view that America deserved what happened to it on September 11 — indeed, they wish for America’s ruin. I debated an American Islamic figure named Mohammad al-Asi in the first Arabic-language debate on the subject, two hours long, titled “Does America Deserve What Happened to It?” on Al Jazeera on September 18, 2001. For two hours Mohammad al-Asi insisted that America deserved what befell it, despite being an American living in it. After the debate, I believe the Islamic organizations advised him to keep silent, for I have heard nothing of him since.

10. On May 18, 1962, the Saudi King Faisal founded the Muslim World League, gathering on its board Said Ramadan, the son-in-law of Hassan al-Banna; Abul A’la Maududi, founder of Jamaat-e-Islami in Pakistan; and Amin al-Husseini, principal founder of the Islamic movement in Palestine and friend of Hassan al-Banna. Al-Banna and al-Husseini had agreed that there was no solution to the Palestinian question except through Islam, and Hamas was later the natural outgrowth of their cooperation. The Muslim World League was the beginning of the Islamic movement’s global founding, uniting Saudi Wahhabism with Egyptian Brotherhood thought, Deobandism from the Indian subcontinent, and the Palestinian Islamic movement. Most organizations in America and the West between 1962 and 2000 were the product of this alliance: the Brotherhood took on the organizational and activist work, and Saudi Wahhabism took on the funding. The most important American organizations founded by the Brotherhood after this alliance are MSA, ICNA, ISNA, and later CAIR. On Saudi Arabia’s role in supporting global terrorism, see Dore Gold’s 2003 study Hatred’s Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia Supports the New Global Terrorism.

11. https://www.amazon.com/Muslim-Brotherhood-Obama-Administration-ebook/dp/B009HIP79K

12. CAIR announced decades ago that its goal is a Muslim in the White House as president of America. CAIR does not merely aim for an American president to come from a minority of no more than 1.5% of the population; it plans for a member of the Islamic movement to reach that office — and support for Abdul El-Sayed may well serve that dream.

13. New York City did not face the savagery of Islamic terrorism only on September 11; the Islamic strikes on the city continued. Immediately after September 11, Muslims attempted to build a mosque near the site of the fallen towers, dubbed the Ground Zero Mosque — an Islamic message saying: we brought down the symbols of New York’s and America’s economic power and raised a mosque in their place. Were it not for the efforts of the activist Pamela Geller, that mosque would have been built. Then, after the Islamic movement failed to bomb Times Square, its plan became to gather for prayer in that famous square, as part of a plan to Islamize the great squares of the West by praying in them, so that in their belief they become Islamic land and Islamic waqf. Then the Islamic efforts were crowned by Mamdani’s victory as mayor of the city. And most recently, an American convert to Islam named Jessica Bowie attempted to bomb the New York State Capitol and was arrested on August 20, 2026.

14. https://www.facebook.com/reel/1571754584354482

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Hollywood has been a deliberate target of Islamic advocacy for decades. The Muslim Public Affairs Council operates an entire Hollywood Bureau. MPAC says the bureau works directly with executives, writers, producers, studios, and streaming companies to change portrayals of Muslims and Islam. By shaping culture, MPAC says, it can shape public perception and ultimately public policy. Its Hollywood Bureau has consulted with Disney, Paramount, Amazon, Hulu, CBS, NBC, Fox, FX, National Geographic, Starz, the BBC, and others.

Tom Clancy’s 1991 novel The Sum of All Fears involved Muslim terrorists, but when Paramount adapted the book, they were gone. The film’s villains became European neo-Nazis. Director Phil Alden Robinson and screenwriter Dan Pyne argued that Muslim terrorists had become a cliché and that neo-fascists fit the film they wanted to make. That part of the history should not be erased.

Well, what about the other part, not only of history, but of the present and the future as well?

CAIR conducted a lobbying campaign over the portrayal of Muslim villains before the film was released. CAIR’s ownlater materials acknowledge its involvement with The Sum of All Fears, among numerous Hollywood productions.

Fear of accusations of Islamophobia, combined with sustained pressure from Muslim Brotherhood-linked organizations, helped create a culture in Hollywood in which filmmakers became increasingly nervous about depicting Islamic terrorism, even as groups such as Hamas, al-Qaeda, ISIS, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Al-shabab, Boko Haram, and Iran-backed militias remain active around the world. At the same time, Hollywood has remained perfectly comfortable casting Nazis, Christian fundamentalists, intelligence agencies, corporations, the military, and American conservatives as villains.

In the Holy Land Foundation prosecution, federal investigators introduced internal documents from the Muslim Brotherhood’s American network. One of them was the now-famous 1991 Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America. Its author described the Muslim Brotherhood work in America as a long-term “civilization-jihadist” project aimed at changing the country from within. The document was not an American intelligence assessment. It was an internal Muslim Brotherhood document entered into evidence in federal court.

In 2008, a federal jury convicted the foundation and five of its leaders of providing material support to Hamas. The Justice Department said the evidence showed that Hamas’s parent organization, the Muslim Brotherhood, had built a network of organizations in the United States that raised money and spread support for Hamas. The defendants were ultimately convicted of channeling millions of dollars through Hamas-controlled organizations.

While CAIR itself was never prosecuted in the Holy Land Foundation case, the underlying historical connections cannot be waved away. Documents and testimony introduced in the case placed CAIR founders Nihad Awad and Omar Ahmad inside the Palestine Committee milieu from which the Hamas-support network operated in the United States. Recent congressional testimony drawing directly from the trial exhibits again identified both men on internal Palestine Committee records.

MPAC describes itself as a bridge between the Muslim community and the entertainment industry. It cultivates relationships with executives, develops writers, advises productions, organizes fellowships, works with industry institutions, and trains Muslim storytellers to enter the business. In 2018 it partnered with Disney/ABC Television on a Muslim screenwriters lab. It has worked with entertainment-industry figures and institutions including the Writers Guild Foundation and The Black List.

Hollywood does not ordinarily invite the National Rifle Association to determine whether a film about gun violence is fair to gun owners. It does not ask oil companies to approve environmental thrillers. It does not hand evangelical political organizations informal authority over scripts about Christian nationalism.

Yet organizations devoted explicitly to changing what America is have successfully presented themselves as neutral experts on what should appear on screen. MPAC says plainly that its work in entertainment shapes perception and, through perception, policy.

A country becomes vulnerable when it loses the ability to name an ideology that is openly trying to shape it. Hollywood helps teach people which threats are considered legitimate and which are considered taboo. If Americans are frequently exposed to the narratives of the Muslim Brotherhood, then the Muslim Brotherhood will gain room to operate through institutions, advocacy groups, media, and electoral politics without any scrutiny.

Using Hollywood to Attack the UAE

Paramount+’s espionage series is an American adaptation of the French Le Bureau des Légendes, created for the U.S. version by Jez and John-Henry Butterworth. George Clooney and Grant Heslov are among its executive producers. Its second season premiered in June 2026, in which Michael Fassbender is a CIA officer who has spent years undercover in the region. His lover, Samia, is Sudanese. In Season 2 she is imprisoned and eventually falls into the hands of an Emirati intelligence officer, Saeed Al-Bukhatir, who interrogates her, threatens members of her family, takes her to Abu Dhabi, and attempts to force her into advocating a particular political arrangement for Sudan.

That is the fiction. The reality in Sudan is more complicated.

Omar al-Bashir’s dictatorship was an Islamic state built through an alliance between the military and Hassan al-Turabi’s Islamic movement. After Bashir fell, those networksbecame the army. Reuters reported in 2023 that Islamic movements retained significant influence within military structures; by 2025, senior Islamic figures were openly describing the war as a vehicle for the return of the Islamic state and thousands of Islamic-linked fighters were fighting alongside the army. By 2026 the matter had become serious enough that the United States designated the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhoodas a terrorist organization.

The SAF has not fought this war alone. Iran supplied drones that helped the army regain momentum. Turkey’s Baykarsent at least $120 million in military equipment, including TB2 drones and warheads. Egypt and Saudi Arabia backed the SAF. The important point is not that all four countries were backing the Muslim Brotherhood for the same reason, they were not. It is that Iran, Turkey, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia all ended up supporting, in different ways, the side of the war which the Muslim Brotherhood controls.

Neither side in Sudan’s war should be exonerated. However, when a Western audience watching The Agencyencounters a sinister Emirati intelligence apparatus coercing a Sudanese woman while the Muslim Brotherhood’s long history of influence over Sudan’s state, army, and civil war goes unmentioned, the result is an audience left misinformed about the reality of the conflict.

It should not be difficult to look at the UAE’s record and understand why its role in Sudan would be portrayed this way. A country that has spent years confronting the Muslim Brotherhood and opposing Brotherhood-aligned movements across the world was always likely to become a villain in a Hollywood culture already shaped by radical-left influence and sustained pressure from Muslim Brotherhood-linked networks. Abu Dhabi has made itself the main enemy of the Muslim Brotherhood. For more than a decade, the Emirati government has dismantled Muslim Brotherhood-linked networks at home and opposed them abroad. In 2014, it formally designated the Muslim Brotherhood and numerous associated organizations as terrorist entities, including CAIR.

The UAE’s threat to the Muslim Brotherhood increased since it normalized relations with Israel. The Abraham Accords established full diplomatic relations between Israel and the UAE in 2020 and opened cooperation in trade, tourism, technology, security, investment, and other areas. The Muslim Brotherhood’s narrative depends on grievance: grievance against Israel, grievance against Western power, grievance against secular Arab governments, grievance against the existing international order. The UAE has crushed that narrative.

There is no public evidence that Brotherhood-linked groups directly dictated The Agency’s treatment of the UAE. But given the documented effort by MB advocacy organizations to influence Hollywood, it is hardly unreasonable to ask whether that wider network helped shape the climate in which such portrayals are produced. If the Muslim Brotherhood-linked movements have already succeeded in gaining access to Hollywood’s narrative machinery, then we are yet to see what that influence will produce over the next decade.

Danny Burmawi is the chief executive of the Ideological Defense Institute

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On June 25, Canada’s Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Qatar’s Ministry of Interior, framing it as a step forward in combatting transnational crime, terrorism, and its financing. The five-year agreement commits both governments to facilitate arrangements between the Qatar National Police and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) to advance police-to-police cooperation. It follows Prime Minister Mark Carney’s January 2026 visit to Doha, which produced a broader partnership on trade, investment, and defense.

The announcement was polished, the language reassuring. The logic, though, ran completely backwards.

Qatar is not a counter-terrorism partner. It is the most important state patron of the Muslim Brotherhood and a longtime host to Hamas’ political leadership. The wealthy Gulf state is also home to the International Union of Muslim Scholars (IUMS), a transnational clerical body founded in 2004 by the late Yusuf al-Qaradawi, widely regarded as the Muslim Brotherhood’s most influential spiritual authority. The IUMS, which has long-standing ties to the Qatari government, issued statements after the October 7, 2023, attacks in Israel that praised the Hamas assault and called for violent jihad in support of it.

The record of Qatari commitments is long and unpersuasive. A 2009 State Department cable, published by WikiLeaks in 2010, assessed Qatar’s counter-terrorism cooperation with the United States as the “worst in the region” and faulted Qatar for having “adopted a largely passive approach” to fundraising activities of terrorist groups. By 2014, then-US Treasury Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence David Cohen stated publicly that Qatar had “for many years openly financed Hamas, a group that continues to undermine regional stability.” That same year, bipartisan members of Congress formally requested that the US Treasury impose sanctions on Doha and produce a full report on its financing ties to Hamas, al-Qaeda, and the Muslim Brotherhood.

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When the Arab Quartet—Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates—issued thirteen demands in 2017 that included severing ties with the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaeda, and other designated groups as the price of ending their blockade, Qatar dismissed them as neither reasonable nor actionable. The blockade was eventually lifted in January 2021 with none of the thirteen demands met.

In July 2017, Qatar and the Trump administration signed a memorandum of understanding committing Doha to combat terrorism and cut off financial support to terrorist organizations. It was neither the first such pledge nor the last: Qatar had signed the Riyadh Agreement and its supplementary accord in 2013 and 2014, and would overhaul its anti-money-laundering legislation in 2019. However, the Counter Extremism Project, an advocacy group that tracks terrorism financing, argues that despite this legislation and Doha’s participation in US-led initiatives, Qatari money has continued to reach internationally designated groups.

Events over the past year have made the divergence between Qatar’s public and private conduct harder to overlook. During the 12-day Israel-Iran war of June 2025, Qatar publicly lamented the United States’ “attacks on the sisterly Islamic Republic of Iran”—even as Iranian missiles were being fired at the Al-Udeid Air Base on Qatari soil, housing roughly 10,000 American troops. Qatar also repeatedly told Washington it would not allow American forces to launch strikes from Al-Udeid—warnings that, while ultimately not acted upon, underscore where Doha’s loyalties lie when they are genuinely tested. More recently, Qatar reportedly proposed a secret arrangement with Iran in the weeks before the March strikes: Doha would suspend production at Ras Laffan—a shutdown that would spike global energy prices and pressure Washington and Jerusalem toward an early ceasefire—if Tehran kept the complex off its target list. One official claimed Qatar’s message to the Iranians was that “you will achieve your objectives without striking us.” However, Qatar categorically denied any such arrangement.

Then there is Al Jazeera. Qatar’s state-funded broadcaster is not merely a news channel with editorial blind spots. It is a deliberate instrument of Islamist soft power, spreading Brotherhood-compatible narratives across the Arabic-speaking world with considerable sophistication. In his book The Lost Spring: U.S. Policy in the Middle East and Catastrophes to Avoid, foreign policy analyst Walid Phares argued that Al Jazeera became the “primary ideological and communication network” of the Brotherhood during the Arab Spring in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, and Syria. Its English-language arm performs the same function for Western audiences more subtly, packaging Islamist-adjacent narratives as progressive anti-imperialism.

There are signs that Qatari influence already extends into Canadian classrooms. Juno News reported that the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board brought a long-time trainer with the Qatar Foundation’s Education Development Institute into a new equity coaching role for Palestinian, Muslim and Arab students, a placement that surfaced in an internal board presentation in November 2024, at a time when antisemitic incidents were rising in Ottawa schools. A second case points to institutional ties rather than personnel: Edmonton Public Schools has maintained a longstanding partnership with Qatar Foundation International—the same organization that has contracted with school districts across the United States—while renewing an Arabic language and culture course that has run since 2011. Critics and watchdog reports have long argued that billions in Qatari funding for North American schools and universities serve as a soft-power tool to shape curricula, promote specific political or religious narratives, and influence how students view the Middle East.

The pattern is consistent. Qatar’s private conduct has repeatedly diverged from its public commitments, which is precisely the problem with signing a public safety MOU with Doha. It is a gift of legitimacy to a government that has spent decades working both sides of the ledger. As Amine Ayoub of the Middle East Forum, an American think tank, argues, no state can serve as America’s most critical regional staging ground and a refuge for Hamas at once.

Minister Anandasangaree’s office has not said what due diligence preceded the signing, or how Ottawa intends to verify that Qatar honors what it has committed to here, considering how little its earlier commitments have produced.

National security cooperation runs on trust that the other side is what it claims to be. Ottawa extended that trust to Qatar without saying what it verified, and the United States will now share the consequences.

Joe Adam George is a fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute

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Both Christians and Jews revere what English speakers commonly call the Old Testament. In this sacred text, God declares, “Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot” (Exodus 21:24).

This principle formed the security doctrine that shaped the world before World War II. It was a world most of us today would scarcely recognize—one in which the death penalty was the norm, even in democratic nations such as the United Kingdom, where it was typically reserved for murder and, at times, treason or rape. It was a world of leaders unashamed to project strength, a world in which friend and foe could still be clearly distinguished.

Today’s world is its opposite. We inhabit a society that has grown unfamiliar with the very concepts of justice and morality as they were understood for centuries. Foreigners who rape our daughters are often permitted, by court order and under the banner of human-rights law, to remain in the communities they have preyed upon. Murderers are offered a lifetime of taxpayer-funded comfort in prison. For years the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and much of the mainstream media insisted that a woman could have a penis—until a court finally compelled them to acknowledge the most elementary facts of human biology.

We live in a world shaped by a false doctrine: “An eye for an eye would leave the whole world blind.”

This maxim has molded the modern West’s understanding—or rather its misunderstanding—of justice and security. It has been promoted by some of the most influential voices of the modern era. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story, “The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind.” King, influenced by Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolence, helped popularize the idea. The precise phrasing later appeared in the 1982 biographical film Gandhi, spoken by Ben Kingsley in the title role—though screenwriter John Briley later confirmed that he invented the line and that Gandhi himself never uttered it.

I regard this doctrine as a false prophet, one that promises salvation and a utopia that has never existed and never will. It has misled not only Christians but also many among the people of the Torah, who, in the generations after the Holocaust, helped spread the concept. In Fiddler on the Roof, a villager cites “An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.” Tevye the milkman replies, “Very good. That way the whole world will be blind and toothless.”

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Through this lens most contemporary events are now interpreted. It is the prism through which the majority of Western commentators and thought leaders view the world.

A Muslim murders Jews in broad daylight while shouting “Allahu Akbar”? It must be a response to Jewish occupation and oppression of Palestinians. An Afghan Muslim murders Americans, Britons, or other Europeans in broad daylight? It must be a reaction to Western imperialism and colonialism. Six thousand terrorists invade Israel, murdering, raping, and kidnapping hundreds of Israelis in the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust? Give them a state, and peace will follow.

Everything is rationalized. Everything is framed as an endless cycle of cause and effect. We are told we must never respond in kind, lest we intensify the vicious circle. We must never execute those who murder us and our people, because “that way the whole world will be blind and toothless.” When Westerners become the targets of violence, we are instructed that the cycle must end with us. And so we find ourselves permanently on the receiving end—lest we be accused of mere meaningless vengeance.

What is most striking is that the doctrine “an eye for an eye would leave the whole world blind” has produced the opposite result. Those who are left blind and toothless are overwhelmingly Westerners, compelled to watch the rape of their daughters, the murder of their people, and the gradual invasion of their countries while remaining silent. Despite living in an era of unprecedented hostility and aggression since the Second World War, large parts of the West remain wholly committed to this creed, like cultists committed to self-harm.

As reported by Sky News, a June 2026 YouGov survey of more than 2,300 British adults found that only 6 percent said they would volunteer to fight in the face of an “imminent” invasion. Fourteen percent said they would serve if conscripted; 17 percent said they would refuse to defend the country under any circumstances. Official findings from the Ministry of Defence corroborate the broader problem. The Strategic Defence Review 2025 described a “workforce crisis” in the Armed Forces, attributing it to “poor recruitment and retention, shoddy accommodation, falling morale, and cultural challenges.”

Comparable polls across other major Western European countries and the United States reveal a systemic pattern. A Gallup International survey from late 2023 asked, “If there were a war that involved your country, would you be willing to fight for your country?” In Italy, only 14 percent said yes (78 percent no). In Germany the figures were 23 percent yes and 57 percent no. In Spain they were 29 percent yes and 53 percent no. In the United States—still the last major beacon of relative hope—41 percent said yes and 34 percent said no.

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A 2025 NATO-wide survey conducted by Riga Stradiņš University and the Center for Geopolitical Studies Riga (September–October 2025, more than 31,000 respondents) found Italy and Slovakia among the lowest at roughly 25 percent willingness. Germany and the Netherlands ranked near the bottom as well. The United States stood at around 37 percent. Turkey—where Islam explicitly teaches the principle of qisas, or retaliation in kind—led at 88 percent.

“An eye for an eye would leave the whole world blind” has produced a Western world that sees virtually no justification for the use of force—not even in defense of its own home against invasion. The postwar order has created an abomination. It has eroded traditional values and inverted right and wrong. With its mainstream media, International Criminal Court, left-wing orthodoxy, radical individualism, and self-serving politicians, this order now constitutes an existential threat to Western civilization.

The West must return to its traditional Judeo-Christian foundations. We must embrace President Trump’s doctrine of “a head for an eye,” as he stated this week in response to Iranian terrorism and aggression. Our lives depend on it.

Khaled Hassan is a fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute

When the men who wrote the First Amendment guaranteed the free exercise of religion, they had a specific picture of religion in their heads, and Islam was not in it. The world they knew was Christian and Jewish. Religion, to them, meant what a person believed about God, how he prayed, what he held to be right and wrong, a matter of conscience, lived out in private and in the pews, and walled off from the apparatus of the state. They were not legislating about a system that aspires to run the state itself, write its laws, and order the lives of believers and non-believers alike under a single divine code. They had no reason to. Nothing in their experience looked like that.

That gap between what the Founders meant by religion and what Islam actually is may be the quietest and most consequential confusion in the modern West.

The Western concept of religion is, at bottom, a Christian inheritance, and it carries Christian assumptions whether or not anyone still believes the theology. Chief among them is that faith is private. What a person holds about God is between him and his conscience; he is free to believe, to doubt, or to walk away, and no civil authority hands down a creed. The separation of church and state did not happen to this tradition by accident. It grew out of it. The thing being separated, an interior, voluntary faith, was already understood to be separable.

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Islam does not sit inside that definition. It is not a body of beliefs and rituals that happens to have political opinions attached. Prayer and fasting are one part of it; alongside them stand a theory of state law, rules of war, a judicial code, and detailed provisions for governing non-Muslim populations under Muslim rule. To peel the spiritual away from the political and keep only the first is not a reform. It is a mutilation of the thing itself.

Put the question the way the Founders would have had to face it. Had they been staring across the Atlantic at an Islamic caliphate rather than at the Christian empires of Europe, it is hard to imagine them extending the protections of the First Amendment to a system whose announced purpose was to replace constitutional self-government with rule by divine law, a system that treats the consent of the governed not as the source of legitimate authority but as a usurpation of God’s. The Amendment was written to keep the state out of the church. It was not written to license a church that intends to become the state.

The reassuring claim is that the political reading of Islam belongs to a fringe, a small, loud minority of radicals at odds with the quiet majority. The largest survey ever taken of Muslim opinion does not support that claim. In 2013 the Pew Research Center polled some thirty-eight thousand Muslims across thirty-nine countries. Asked whether sharia should be enshrined as the official law of the land, majorities said yes across most of the Muslim world, and in several countries the majorities were overwhelming:

Strip away the euphemisms and the incompatibility between Islam and Western constitutionalism comes down to three collisions, none of them about extremism and all of them about the system as it has been taught for more than a thousand years.

The first is the separation of powers. Islamic governance gathers authority in the caliph, whose mandate descends from God rather than rising from the governed, and classical theory builds in nothing like the deliberate division of legislative, executive, and judicial power that the American framers treated as the central safeguard against tyranny. Where the entire design assumes a single divinely sanctioned authority, there is nothing to separate.

The second is the vote. In Islam the ruler is not chosen by the population at large. He is selected by a body of qualified scholars, and the office is closed to women and to non-Muslims by definition. The republican premise, that legitimate power flows upward from the consent of all the people, has no counterpart in Islam, where legitimacy flows downward from God through His law and the men qualified to interpret it.

The third is freedom of religion. The First Amendment protects the right to hold any faith or none, and above all the right to change one’s mind. Islamic law prescribes death for the apostate. The right that the First Amendment guards most jealously is the one Islamic law most flatly forbids.

This leaves the West with a dilemma: move to restrict Islamic political activity, and a government risks open conflict with Muslim populations at home and Muslim states abroad, and lays itself open to the charge of trampling the very liberties it claims to be defending. Decline to move, and the steady growth of Muslim populations in Western cities, together with the patient political pressure to accommodate Islamic law piece by piece, wears down the constitutional order from the inside.

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The most direct way out does not run through Western policy at all. It runs through the Muslim world, which is the only place the underlying tension can actually be resolved. That would mean one of two things. Either Islam develops and formally institutionalizes a genuinely private, spiritual practice, one that explicitly renounces sharia as a project of state governance and means it, or it states honestly Islam remains what its own texts describe, an expansionist political and legal order at odds with the foundations of the modern constitutional state, and the world deals with that fact rather than pretending it away. What cannot continue indefinitely is the present arrangement, in which the political claims are real, advancing, and unacknowledged.

For decades the West managed the question by insisting it did not exist. That option has closed. Western cities are changing in plain view. Saying clearly what Islam is, and what the First Amendment was and was not built to protect, is not bigotry. It is the bare precondition for an honest conversation about everything that comes next, a conversation the West can no longer afford to keep postponing.

Brother Rachid is a senior fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute

Both of these framings are available in the Western discourse on any given day, but stand at the angle of what the thing actually was and you will see the Nakba was a theological assault that failed. It was the attempt to extinguish a non-Muslim sovereignty newly declared on land that Islam regards as its own, an attempt prosecuted by five Arab armies that invaded the day after the state was born, lost the war they had started, and produced, in their losing, the refugees they have wept over ever since.

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On the morning of January 7, 2015, two brothers walked into the offices of a satirical magazine in Paris and killed twelve people over a cartoon. Before they opened fire, one of them announced why they had come: the magazine had drawn the Prophet, and they were there to enforce the law. France guarantees the right to mock a prophet, but the law the brothers carried into that building punishes the act with death.

The reflex, every time, is to call this a problem of integration, or a few extremists who have misread their own religion. It is neither. It is two legal orders, each coherent on its own terms, returning opposite verdicts on the same act, and the gap between them is structural.

The Western doctrine is simple to articulate. The state holds no opinion about which ideas are true. It may not punish speech for its content, only for a narrow band of harms: incitement to imminent violence, fraud, defamation of a private person. The American text says, “Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech.” From Schenck in 1919 through Brandenburg in 1969 to Snyder v. Phelps in 2011, the Supreme Court has treated the protection of offensive, blasphemous, and hated speech as the entire point of liberty. Justice Brennan put it in one line in Texas v. Johnson: government may not ban an idea simply because society finds it offensive.

Europe holds the same core, for now. Article 10 of the European Convention protects the freedom to hold and impart ideas without interference by the state, and the Strasbourg court has ruled, case after case, that criticism of religious doctrine, however provocative, is protected expression.

Islamic law regulates speech about religion through two offenses: blasphemy, sabb Allah, sabb al-rasul, the insulting of God or His Messenger, and apostasy, ridda. Surah al-Ahzab warns that “those who abuse Allah and His Messenger, Allah has cursed them in this world and the Hereafter and prepared for them a humiliating punishment” (33:57). When the jurists turned the prohibition into law, it became a capital matter that deserves death.

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A second verse, Surah al-Ma’idah 5:33, supplies the law of muharabah, waging war against God and His Messenger, and prescribes death, crucifixion, amputation, or banishment. The jurists did not confine this to men with swords. Words judged to destabilize the Islamic order were folded into the same frame. Al-Mawardi, Ibn Hazm, and Ibn Taymiyya, across schools and across centuries, worked out the legal treatment of the blasphemer and the apostate in detail. On apostasy the four Sunni schools converge: the public renunciation of Islam, the ultimate act of dissent by speech, carries death unless the speaker recants.

The most authoritative Sunni compilation, Sahih al-Bukhari, records the Prophet’s instruction in the words of Ibn Abbas: “Whoever changed his Islamic religion, then kill him” (Vol. 9, Book 84, Hadith 57). The narration is graded sahih, authentic, by the scholars of every school, and it is the primary proof-text for the apostasy penalty across the tradition, and the reason why many Islamic country still criminalize apostasy. On insulting the Prophet, the jurists built from prophetic precedent the rule that sabb al-nabi is a hadd offense, capital, and carrying no offer of repentance at all.

No US court has ever upheld a blasphemy conviction; the Supreme Court voided the last such statute in 1952. Washington cannot prosecute a cartoon, a novel, or a verse-by-verse attack on the Qur’an, and no campaign will change that by frontal assault, because the First Amendment was built to break the frontal assault. So, the assault changed shape. The blasphemy claim learned to travel under a Western passport, and the passport reads hate speech.

The jurist said criticism of the Prophet is forbidden because God forbade it. That argument cannot move an American court an inch, so the demand is retranslated: the same speech must be restricted not because it wounds God but because it wounds a vulnerable community, Islamophobia, dignity, safety, harm. The demand is identical. Only the vocabulary changed, and the new vocabulary is one a Western government already believes it may act on. Groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations have largely set down the language of the sacred and picked up the language of harm, because harm is the lever that moves the Western machine.

This is why the European model, not the Saudi one, is the real danger to American liberty. No one will persuade the United States to adopt the death penalty for apostasy or write the Prophet’s name into the criminal code; that route is sealed. Europe offers a quieter one. After the Second World War, much of the continent wrote hate-speech exceptions into its free-expression guarantees, Article 10 protects expression, then permits restrictions to guard the “rights of others” and public order, and the prosecutions come through that opening. The Dutch state put Geert Wilders through years of criminal trial for, among other things, comparing the Qur’an to Mein Kampf. He was acquitted of the religious-criticism charges; Dutch judges ruled that attacking a religion as an ideology is not a crime. But the machinery existed to drag an elected member of parliament through a decade of jeopardy for criticizing a book. In America the cartoonist fears the assassin, and the state condemns the assassin. In Europe the cartoonist fears the prosecutor, and the state is the prosecutor.

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That procedure is what is being pressed onto American institutions, through the side doors, because the front door is bolted. It comes as campus codes that recast religious criticism as harassment. It comes as corporate and platform policies that quietly file criticism of Islam under abuse, needing no constitutional authority because they impose no prison, only the lost job, the locked account, the quiet erasure from public life.

That is the danger, and it never has to repeal the First Amendment. It only has to build a second enforcement system beside it, one that speaks the warm dialect of safety and inclusion while delivering the verdict the jurists wanted all along. The brothers in Paris enforced the law with rifles. The quieter project enforces the same law with a vocabulary America already congratulates itself for using.

The system reaches its perfection at the moment it no longer has to act at all, when the cartoonist does not draw the cartoon, the editor kills the column, the professor drops the topic, not because a court forbade it but because each has quietly calculated the cost and decided it is not worth the ruin. A blasphemy law on the books punishes a hundred people. A blasphemy law in the mind disciplines millions. America is being asked to forget what its own freedom is for, one compassionate exception at a time, and a nation will guard itself against the rifle long after it has forgotten how to guard itself against the silence it has learned to call good manners.

Abd Al-Fadi is a fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute.

For the last 30 years, objective critical study of Islam has essentially been forbidden in Western academia. Most work is by those who haven’t studied Islamic law (sharia), much less Arabic, and most of that produced, somewhat understandably, focuses on jihad and terrorism.

However, as Muslims continue to mass migrate to the West and once well-ordered Western societies witness exponential increases in sex crimes, it has become imperative to study and critically assess sexuality within Islam.

The common misconception in the West is that Islam as an institution is sexually conservative; even repressive. This impression flows from the requirements of Muslim women to wear the hijab/niqab/burqa and to stone adulterers; however, this is highly misleading: the institution of Islam is hyper-sexualized with rape and sexual slavery central to Islamic law.

While it is true that the Qur’an requires Muslim women to draw cloaks around them, and that this has morphed into the requirement to don the hijab/niqab/burqa, the specific Qur’anic instruction requires this be done so that Muslim women ‘are recognized and not harmed’ (Surah Al-Azhab 33:59).

Thus, the theological requirement to wear the hijab etc. is not one of modesty per se but one of demarcation; it protects them from Muslim men and prevents them from ‘harm.’

Likewise, stoning adulterers applies to Muslim relationships. It is entirely lawful under sharia for Muslim men to rape slaves.

The Islamic Framework

To fully understand Islam’s rape problem, one must grasp six key Islamic concepts:

First, morality in Islam, particularly Sunni Islam, is entirely shaped by the Qur’an and the Hadith. That is to say, the direct word of their god and the sayings and doings of their prophet, Muhammad, shape the entire Islamic moral framework. What is set out therein is referred to as sharia, or Islamic law, but this is, in many ways, a false distinction: Islam is sharia and sharia is Islam.

Second, as evidenced by the command to demarcate Muslim women, Islam principally delineates humanity into two castes of people: Muslims and non-Muslims.

Third, within this already highly discriminatory framework, Muslim women are treated differently again. While women are discriminated against in a range of areas, from inheritance to their standing as witnesses, there is no concept of consent in inter-Muslim sexual relations.

Fourth, while there is an austere sexual environment for young Muslim men outside of wedlock, particularly for those who are poor, a major and divinely ordained outlet is the sexual slavery of non-Muslim women.

Fifth, prostitution is lawful in Islam under certain conditions. It is specifically provided for in the Qur’an and there is strong evidence to suggest the relevant verse has been relied on by the Muslim rape gangs in the United Kingdom.

Sixth, it is important to understand that Islam is a belief system that leans into carnal pleasures: Contrary to Judaism and Christianity, their heaven, or ‘paradise,’ is simply the promise of lustful worldly desires.

Morality in Islam

Morality in Islam is merely the rules set out by their scriptures. The word ‘morality’ in this context carries no deeper meaning. Whatever is termed ‘halal’ is fine and whatever is termed ‘haram’ is forbidden. It is, quite literally, no more complex than that. Mehdi Hasan, prior to refining his apologia, summed it up perfectly:

‘…in Islam what is halal is halal what is haram is haram. We do not bend our law, our morality… never… We know that keeping the moral high ground is key. Once we lose the moral high ground, we are no different from the rest of non-Muslims, from the rest of those who mean to live their lives as animals, bending any rule to fulfill any desire. Once we do that, we are lost!’ [2]

Thus, a Muslim of good Islamic moral standing is one who follows the law, i.e., sharia, and in so doing does only that which is ‘halal.’ There is no further consideration and, when a Muslim uses the word ‘moral(s),’ there must be a rebuttable presumption the word takes the meaning of ‘conduct in accordance with sharia.’

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Muslims and Non-Muslims

Islam is, on a literal construction, the most discriminatory framework ever built with discrimination against non-Muslims a central Qur’anic theme. Selected passages say, among other things:

• Non-Muslims are the worst of creatures (Surah Al-Bayyanah 98:6)

• Non-Muslims are no better than animals (cattle) (Surah Al-Araaf 7:179)

• Non-Muslims are the ‘clear enemy’ (Surah An-Nisa 4:101)—note this is identical terminology used for Satan (e.g. Surah Al-Baqarah 2:208; Surah Ya Sin 36:60)

• Non-Muslims wish to lead Muslims astray (Surah 5:41)

• Non-Muslims are deluded (Surah 67:20)

• Non-Muslims are dirty (Surah At-Tawbah 9:28)

• No other religion is acceptable (Surah 3:85)

• Former Muslims who do not repent cannot be saved (Surah 9:66)

• Non-Muslims are allied against Muslims (Surah At-Tawbah 9:32–33)

• Muslims should not be allied to non-Muslims (Surah Al-Ma’idah 5:51)

• Muslims should not trust non-Muslims (Surah Al-Mumtahanah 60:1)

• Their god has forsaken non-Muslims (Surah Muhammad 47:12)

• Their god will punish non-Muslims in a brutal fashion (Surah Al-Hajj 22:19–22)

• Their god will punish Muslims who take non-Muslims as friends (Surah Al-Mujaadilah 58:14–15)

• Muslims should “cast horror/terror” into disbelievers (Surah Ali Imran 3:151)

As is plain, Islam’s rigid theological doctrine imposes the ultimate ‘in-group–out-group’ moral framework. It is not a case of cherry-picking verses, it is a core irrebuttable theme. On a strict interpretation, there are no ‘human rights’ or even ‘universal rights,’ there are simply rights for Muslims with non-Muslims protected only to the extent they have treaties with Muslims or, in the case of Christians, Jews, and Sabaeans (now extinct), are subjugated and pay to the Muslims a yearly tax (the jizya) (Surah At-Tawbah 9:29).

Inter-Muslim Sexual Relations

Most will recognize that Muslim men may have four wives (Surah An-Nisa 4:3) and most will also recognize that Muslim men may beat their wives (Surah An-Nisa 4:34).

However, what is almost totally absent from discourse is the fact that Muslim men may, on a strict interpretation of sharia, rape their wives:

‘Your women are fertile soil for you so go to your fertile soil* as you wish and send before and fear God and know that you will meet him and give good tidings to believers.’ (Surah Al-Baqarah 2:223) [*the word is ‘tilth’ which is tilled soil i.e., soil conditioned for growing crops.]

Thus, sharia provides that sexual relations between a married Muslim man and Muslim woman are not conditional on consent and, if a wife rebels, for example, does not allow intercourse to occur, the husband, on a literal reading of Sura An-Nisa 4:34, has divine authority to beat her.

Many may struggle to accept the existence of such a moral framework but of all the MENAPT countries (Middle East, North Africa, Pakistan and Turkey), founded on sharia as they are, only Tunisia expressly provides a criminal sanction for the act of spousal rape.

Additionally, sharia provides that sexual maturity for girls is nine years of age. Although there is some further discourse about maturity of mind and body, the Qur’an makes plain a prepubescent girl can be married (Surah At-Talaq 1; 64-65), there is a significant body of Hadith traced through Aishah (one of Muhammad’s many wives) that Muhammad had sex with her when she was nine (Sahih al-Bukhari 3896; 5133; 5134; 5158; Sahih Muslim 1422a; 1422b; 1422d).

Many in the West simply cannot comprehend that the Islamic construct of morals permits a fully grown man to have sex with a nine-year-old child whether she wants to or not but that is simply the way it is. It is ‘halal’ and therefore it is moral. That is the Islamic moral universe. This framework is so antithetical to our Western morality, founded on Christianity as it is and refined by millennia of European philosophy, that most simply cannot comprehend this objective evil, let alone define and recognize it. It is so frightening that, to many, it is best ignored.

Which brings us to another ugly point. In sharia, there is no word for ‘rape.’ Instead, there is the concept of Zina which roughly takes the meaning ‘unlawful sexual intercourse.’

There is a body of sharia concerning Zina drawn from the Qur’an and Hadith but, for Muslim male-female relations, it is sufficient to say that unmarried individuals face 100 lashes (Surah An-Nur 24:2), an unmarried Muslim with a married Muslim could additionally face exile and married Muslims are to be stoned to death (Sahih Muslim 1697/1698a).

However, what does not fall within Zina is sexual intercourse with slaves—this is not unlawful within sharia. In fact, it is morally right.

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Sexual Relations with Non-Muslims

Arguably the largest gap in modern discourse is the fact that slavery is not just a quaint relic of Islam, it is central to it. It is referenced throughout the Qur’an with the focus on sexual relations between Muslim men and their female slaves.

Muslims are, by theological doctrine, slaves to their god. It’s why so many are called ‘Abdul,’ followed by one of the many names of their god, which translates to ‘slave of god.’ Non-Muslims, on the other hand, are unclean (Sura At-Tawba 9:28), forsaken by the god of Islam (Sura al-Mu’minum 47:12), no better than cattle (Sura Al-Araaf 7:179), and are, in fact, the worst of creatures (Sura Al-Bayyana 98:6). They are subordinate to Muslims in every way and may be taken as slaves by Muslims.

Slavery in Islam is incredibly different from the understanding of slavery in the West. In the Western psyche, when images of slavery are conjured, they are commonly associated with the use of black men to pick cotton and black women as house help. The concept of slavery is very different in Islam, flowing as it does from killing all male combatants and enslaving their women and children which become ‘booty.’ Central to it is sexual slavery where Muslim men may do as they please to non-Muslim female slaves.

For example, many in the United Kingdom will be familiar with the current discourse about cousin marriage in the Pakistani community. This flows from Surah An-Nisa 4:23, which provides a precise listing of the types of women forbidden to Muslim men and cousins are not on it; they are therefore ‘halal.’ What does not currently form part of that discussion is the next verse which, much more egregiously, prescribes that Muslim men may have sex with their slaves, even if those females are already married.

The consequence of that verse is that a Muslim man may rape his female slaves as often as he desires without fear of consequence from his god, even if that female slave is already married and even if that slave is as young as nine. This is reflected elsewhere in the Qur’an, for example, Surah al-Mu’minun 23:1-6 and Surah Al-Ma’arij 70:28-30, which both expressly provide Muslim men will be successful/free from punishment where they have sexual relations with their slaves.

In classical Islamic jurisprudence, slaves are generally only permissible through conquest. Islam apologists often state women and children are not to be killed in war and, while Hadith validate this argument (Sahih al-Bukhari 3014; Sahih Muslim 1744b), what they do not tell you is their fate is worse than death: Women and children are to be taken as slaves (Sahih al-Bukhari 4024).

Of course, many will rightly point out that we in the West are not ‘at war’ with Islam and thus this element of sharia is redundant. While it is true that the West is not at war with Islam, it is also an inescapable fact that Islam is, by theological doctrine, at war with the West. While a larger topic, it is sufficient to note the Qur’an gives global dominion to Islam (e.g., Surah Al-Baqarah 2:115; 255; Surah An-Nisa 4:131; Surah At-Tawbah 9:33), multiple verses directly command Muslims to fight non-believers (e.g., Surah An-Nisa 4:76; Surah At-Tawbah 9:29; 73) and Muhammad is quoted in Hadith as saying he was ‘…ordered to fight all of mankind until they say there is no god except god…’ (Sahih al-Bukhari 392).

Taken together, this branch of sharia places the West into what is referred to as the Dar al-Harb, which roughly translates to the Abode of War. Although without a strict Qur’anic basis, this doctrine splits the world in two i.e., Dar al-Islam (the Islamic world) and Dar al-Harb. The latter is to be conquered, subjugated and forced into Dar al-Islam.

This approach to conquest and women is not just abstract theology; it plays out in the real world backed up by no less than 1,400 years of well-documented history. The most obvious modern example being the genocide of the Yazidis in Iraq by the Islamic State followed by the sexual slavery of their women and children. In that case, there have at least been some prosecutions in Germany for Crimes Against Humanity but far from enough.[3]

Prostitution in Islam

Perhaps the most troubling verse in the Qur’an is Surah An-Nur 24:33. This verse provides that a Muslim man may force his young slave girls into prostitution for money provided she does not wish to remain chaste (and it logically follows if she is not chaste already then she cannot wish to remain so). If there is no money involved, it appears the qualification of chastity is removed and the Muslim man may simply force her into prostitution. It sets out a very precise test and there is clear evidence it has been deployed by Muslim men in the United Kingdom. In fact, this verse explains the entire typology of sexual slavery and enforced prostitution illustrated by the Muslim Rape Gangs (aka the Grooming Gangs).

Islam’s Paradise

As is perhaps unsurprising for an ideology born in the desert, paradise in Islam includes luscious terrain, flowing rivers and, crucially, wine and maidens (Huris). The Qur’an is replete with references to marrying Muslim men to these ‘Huris’ (Surah Ad-Dukhaan 44:54; Surah At-tur 52:20), untouched by man or jinn (Islamic spirits) (Surah Ar-Rahman 55:56; Surah Ar-Rahmaan 55:74) who will have eyes like pearls as a reward for the Muslim men’s earthly deeds (Surah Al-Waaqiah 56:22-24; Surah As-Saaffaat 37:48).

What we in the West view as debauched desires form the basis of heaven in Islam. An objective cynic might observe that these revelations concerning sexual slavery and paradise tapped into the fact Muhammad’s male followers, it seems, were motivated to fight by the reward of sex, either in this world or the next. This is particularly the case when read against Surah al-Baqarah 2:216, which betrays the fact Muhammad’s male followers did not enjoy fighting and had to be compelled by their god to do so.

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Europe’s Rape Problem

After the Second World War, for reasons that cannot be sensibly explained,[4] Muslims have been permitted to self-import en masse into western Europe. The last 30 years have seen an exponential increase with waves upon waves of male, fighting-age illegal migrants from Muslim countries supplementing unsustainable levels of legal migration from the same.

These illegal migrants are often of little means and their education and morality, unsurprisingly, flows from religious education in their home jurisdiction. Their moral universe, which can only be objectively described as deeply supremacist, includes the following:

• They are now in the Dar Al-Harb.

• Their ultimate reward in paradise includes sex.

• Non-Muslims are slave material.

• There is no concept of consent for having sex with slaves.

• Girls as young as nine are permissible.

• Sharia takes primacy over man-made laws i.e., the laws of the land.

It is even reasonable to conclude that raping European females is a driving factor for some migrants given Qur’anic exegesis gives Muhammad as personally authorizing the rape of European women, seen as extra seductive, by his subordinate in return for jihad.[5]

This theological doctrine bears out in the evidence. Illustratively, it is not uncommon in court for these Muslim migrants to plead ignorance to the concept of consent as a mitigating factor.[6] In one recent case, a convicted Iranian rapist was sent for lessons in ‘understanding consent.’[7] In another, involving the gang rape of a young woman by an Iranian and two Egyptians, one migrant put it more bluntly, simply saying: ‘Rape to me is sex.’[8]

Thus, when considering the underlying ideology, the almost daily headlines of rape and sexual violence, particularly targeting of young girls, is wholly unsurprising. Most European nations feel it, from the 2015 New Year’s Eve sex attacks in Cologne, Germany, to the almost daily headlines in the UK and wider Europe where Muslim men kidnap girls off the streets and rape them. It is similarly unsurprising that European countries with mass-migration have seen up to 500% increases in rapes since the early 2000s while countries like Poland, which has refused to take migrants, have experienced no material increase.

Moreover, this is not simply a problem for recent illegal immigrants. Taking the United Kingdom as an example, there are over 2,000 mosques and Pakistani communities, famous for practicing cousin marriage and living in ethnic enclaves, as evidenced by census data. You do not need to spend more than five minutes on Google or YouTube to discover sharia views on consent and slavery are being taught in mosques across the UK and polling suggesting a third of British Muslims view the imposition of sharia as desirable.[9]

The logical conclusion of concentrating men with such a moral framework leads to controversies like the UK’s ‘Grooming Gangs’ scandal. Of course, ‘grooming gangs’ is a gross misnomer. They are, in reality, gangs of Muslims engaged in sexual slavery and enforced prostitution of non-Muslim girls, permitted as these acts manifestly are by a literal reading of sharia.

The reality is there is no difference between the ideology these men follow and that of the Islamic State. Contrary to what many politicians would have you believe, Islamic State was simply what it said on the tin: An Islamic state. In other words, Muslims, following Islam in its raw, unfettered form. It is precisely the reason we see Muslims carrying out the same depraved acts i.e., rape, sexual slavery and enforced prostitution, in Europe as they have in the Middle East.

The difference, of course, is that where Western governments were all to keen to take action against the Islamic State, they remain unwilling to grasp the nettle and instead are busily engaged in downplaying the crimes they have visited on their people through mass migration. For example, alleging the perpetrators were involved with drugs and alcohol. Maybe the men did drink, maybe they didn’t. It doesn’t really matter. What matters is these men subsist within a moral framework that permits these acts. Branding victims with initials,[10] beating them,[11] and, in at least three cases, killing them.[12] This is notwithstanding the most depraved sexual activity with children that simply cannot be processed by most Western minds.[13]

And it is far from isolated. An analysis suggests that 1 in 16 Pakistani men Rotherham were suspects.[14] With a circle of knowledge this broad, these acts cannot be anything other than institutional. The scale of these atrocities would simply be impossible in a non-Muslim community. It should similarly come as no surprise that the wives of these men regard white girls as ‘filth’[15] and that the men have reportedly prayed in the next room after raping a victim.[16] What’s worse, Muslim sex slavers have been found to subsist in over 50 British towns and cities.[17]

Of course, apologists and those complicit in the crimes tend to revert to the slogan ‘it’s just bad men,’ deliberately obfuscating the truth. But the evidence speaks for itself:

Afghan migrant Jan Jahanzeb was recorded as saying, moments before he and another Afghan migrant raped a girl he kidnapped: ‘Oh my god, I’m a Muslim in one minute.’ [18]

In another case from 2024, a victim made the following statement:

‘I was only 11. You made me do a test to see if I was still a virgin or not. At that moment my abuse started. You made it sound like it was a crime to be a virgin. You made me feel ashamed of being a virgin. That same day you sent me off and forced me to commit a sexual act and my innocence was stolen. You started to pass me around as if I was a fresh piece of meat, man to man, city to city.’ [19]

As is evident, the Muslim man tested whether his child victim was chaste. Having presumably been a virgin, the Muslim man appears to have then convinced her that she did not wish to be chaste and, apparently successful in this endeavor, immediately started prostituting her out.

It is the exact test for forced prostitution as set out by Qur’an 24:33.

In fact, the typology prescribed by Qur’an 24:33 neatly plays out in every rape gang. That is, as explained by Sir Trevor Phillips OBE, former chair of the United Kingdom’s Equality and Human Rights Commission:

‘The girls are first attracted by usually young men from within those communities. Flash cars, cigarettes, they give them drugs, all the rest of it... and I did… this film 10 years ago, and what the girls tell you, “This is my boyfriend” because they think that is what’s happening. Only later do they discover they’re hooked on drugs, they need the alcohol and all of that and then they’re passed around amongst older men.’ [20]

In other words, a relationship forms between a Muslim man and a young girl. Once he has had sex with her [and she is self-evidently no longer chaste] and has control over her by vice or violence, he pimps her out to dozens of Muslim men. Exactly as verse 24:33. Exactly as sharia permits. This behavior is therefore ‘halal’ and morally virtuous.

That is the truth of the matter. The mass sexual slavery and enforced prostitution of little girls by gangs of Muslim men and the mass rape of women and girls across Europe by Muslim migrants is founded in the institution of Islam. A virulent, hyper-sexualized supremacist ideology that views non-Muslims as chattel for slavery and sexual abuse.

Until we confront the hideous truth that Islam has a rape problem—and confront it we must—the sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, and mass rape of European women and girls will continue.

Jonathan Smith is a contributor at the Ideological Defense Institute.

____________________

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Notes

[1] Hardy, Jack. “Chilling Moment Afghan Asylum Seekers Drag 15-year-old Girl Into the Bushes Before Raping Her: Pair Jailed Over ‘horrific’ Attack.” Mail Online, December 8, 2025. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15364309/Teenage-asylum-seekers-raped-15-year-old-schoolgirl-park-filmed-dragged-away-footage-horrifying-cause-riot.html.

[2] Hasan, Mehdi (Tom Marshall), “Mehdi Hasan Says Non-Muslims and Atheists Live Like Cattle,” December 19, 2018,

[3] See, for example, the German case of Taha al-J: 3 StR 230/22

[4] Unless you accept Islamic migration as a deliberate attempt to destroy Christian hegemony.

[5]The tafsir of Ibn Kathir for verse 9:49 is explicit that the prospect of raping European females was permitted in return for jihad.

[6] See, for example, the sentencing remarks in R v. Jahanzeb [2025] [3.5; 3.7], https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/R-v-Jahanzeb-and-Niazal.pdf.

[7] McDonald, Dan. “Migrant Crisis: Iranian Boy, 14, Avoids Jail after Being Convicted of Raping Schoolgirl as Victim’s Family Left ‘Furious.’” GB News, April 25, 2026. https://www.gbnews.com/news/migrant-crisis-iranian-avoids-jail-raping-schoolgirl-victim-family-furious.

[8] Dartford, Katy. “Asylum Seeker Accused of Filming Brighton Beach Rape Claims: ‘Rape Is Sex’” LBC, April 2, 2026. https://www.lbc.co.uk/article/asylum-seeker-brighton-rape-sex-5HjdXHQ_2.

[9] J.L. Partners and Henry Jackson Society, “British Muslim and General Public Attitudes Polling,” April 2024, https://henryjacksonsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/HJS-Deck-200324-Final.pdf.

[10] R v. Dogar, June 27, 2013, [54]. https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/JCO/Documents/Judgments/sentencing-remarks-r-v-dogar-others.pdf.

[11] Ibid, [53].

[12] See the cases of Lucy Lowe, Charlene Downes and Becky Watson. NB A fourth victim, Laura Wilson was murdered but not a sex related victim of the gangs—it was her sister. The murder of Becky Watson was denied and instead framed as a prank with no official findings otherwise.

[13] See for example, the sentencing remarks in R v. Dogar, June 27, 2013, [53-54]. https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/JCO/Documents/Judgments/sentencing-remarks-r-v-dogar-others.pdf.

[14] Ashworth-Hayes, Sam. “The True Horror of the Rotherham Grooming Scandal.” The Telegraph, January 13, 2025. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/01/13/grooming-gang-victims-rotherham/.

[15] Alibhai-brown, Yasmin. “Wives of Men Jailed for Rape Blame the Victims Too.” Daily Mail, September 30, 2017. https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-4936754/Wives-men-jailed-rape-blame-victims-too.html.

[16] Moffett, Rebekah. “New Grooming Gang Report Avoids Discussing Islamic Connection.” Christian Concern, July 15, 2022. https://christianconcern.com/comment/new-grooming-gang-report-avoids-discussing-islamic-connection/.

[17] Chapman, Adam. “MAPPED: The 50 Towns and Cities in Britain Rocked by Grooming Gangs Abuse—Is YOUR Area Included?” GB News, January 6, 2025. https://www.gbnews.com/news/uk/starmer-grooming-gangs-uk-areas.

[18] Hardy, Jack. “Chilling Moment Afghan Asylum Seekers Drag 15-year-old Girl Into the Bushes Before Raping Her: Pair Jailed Over ‘horrific’ Attack.” Mail Online, December 8, 2025. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15364309/Teenage-asylum-seekers-raped-15-year-old-schoolgirl-park-filmed-dragged-away-footage-horrifying-cause-riot.html.

[19] Patrick Christy quoting a grooming gang survivor in the sentencing of R v. Saddiq and Ors [2024] (citation unavailable and case name approximated).

[20] Trevor Philips. “Why White Victims of Grooming Gangs Is Different, ‘They Covered It Up’.” Times Radio, March 5, 2026.

Jonathan Smith is a contributor to the Ideological Defense Institute

‘Oh my god, I’m a Muslim in one minute.’

The recorded words of Afghan migrant, Jan Jahanzeb, moments before he and another Afghan migrant, Israr Niazal, raped a 15-year-old English girl he had kidnapped.[1]

ISLAM’S RAPE PROBLEM

For the last 30 years, objective critical study of Islam has essentially been forbidden in Western academia. Most work is by those who haven’t studied Islamic law (Sharia), much less Arabic, and most of that produced, somewhat understandably, focusses on jihad and terrorism.

However, as Muslims continue to mass migrate to the West and once well-ordered Western societies witness exponential increases in sex crimes, it has become imperative to study and critically assess sexuality within Islam.

The common misconception in the West is that Islam as an institution is sexually conservative; even repressive. This impression flows from the requirements of Muslim women to wear the hijab/niqab/burqa and to stone adulterers; however, this is highly misleading: the institution of Islam is hyper-sexualised with rape and sexual slavery central to Islamic law.

Whilst it is true that the Quran requires Muslim women to draw cloaks around them, and that this has morphed into the requirement to don the hijab/niqab/burqa, the specific Quranic instruction requires this be done so that Muslim women ‘are recognised and not harmed’ (Surah Al-Azhab, 33:59).

Thus, the theological requirement to wear the hijab etc is not one of modesty per se but one of demarcation; it protects them from Muslim men and prevents them from ‘harm’.

Likewise, stoning adulterers applies to Muslim relationships. It is entirely lawful under Sharia for Muslim men to rape slaves.

THE ISLAMIC FRAMEWORK

To fully understand Islam’s rape problem, one must grasp six key Islamic concepts:

First, morality in Islam, particularly Sunni Islam, is entirely shaped by the Quran and the Hadith. That is to say, the direct word of their god and the sayings and doings of their prophet, Muhammad, shape the entire Islamic moral framework. What is set out therein is referred to as Sharia, or Islamic law, but this is, in many ways, a false distinction: Islam is Sharia and Sharia is Islam.

Second, as evidenced by the command to demarcate Muslim women, Islam principally delineates humanity into two castes of people: Muslims and non-Muslims.

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Third, within this already highly discriminatory framework, Muslim women are treated differently again. Whilst women are discriminated against in a range of areas, from inheritance to their standing as witnesses, there is no concept of consent in inter-Muslim sexual relations.

Fourth, whilst there is an austere sexual environment for young Muslim men outside of wedlock, particularly for those who are poor, a major and divinely ordained outlet is the sexual slavery of non-Muslim women.

Fifth, prostitution is lawful in Islam under certain conditions. It is specifically provided for in the Quran and there is strong evidence to suggest the relevant verse has been relied on by the Muslim rape gangs in the United Kingdom.

Sixth, it is important to understand that Islam is a belief system that leans into carnal pleasures: Contrary to Judaism and Christianity, their heaven, or ‘paradise’, is simply the promise of lustful worldly desires.

MORALITY IN ISLAM

Morality in Islam is merely the rules set out by their scriptures. The word ‘morality’ in this context carries no deeper meaning. Whatever is termed ‘halal’ is fine and whatever is termed ‘haram’ is forbidden. It is, quite literally, no more complex than that. Mehdi Hasan, prior to refining his apologia, summed it up perfectly:

‘…in Islam what is halal is halal what is haram is haram. We do not bend our law, our morality… never… We know that keeping the moral high ground is key. Once we lose the moral high ground, we are no different from the rest of non-Muslims, from the rest of those who mean to live their lives as animals, bending any rule to fulfil any desire. Once we do that, we are lost!’[2]

Thus, a Muslim of good Islamic moral standing is one who follows the law i.e. Sharia, and in so doing does only that which is ‘halal’. There is no further consideration and, when a Muslim uses the word ‘moral(s)’, there must be a rebuttable presumption the word takes the meaning of ‘conduct in accordance with Sharia’.

MUSLIMS AND NON-MUSLIMS

Islam is, on a literal construction, the most discriminatory framework ever constructed with discrimination against non-Muslims a central Quranic theme. Selected passages say, inter alia:

• Non-Muslims are the worst of creatures (Surah Al-Bayyanah 98:6)

• Non-Muslims are no better than animals (cattle) (Surah Al-Araaf 7:179)

• Non-Muslims are the ‘clear enemy’ (Surah An-Nisa 4:101) – note this is identical terminology used for Satan (e.g. Surah Al-Baqarah 2:208; Surah Ya Sin 36:60)

• Non-Muslims wish to lead Muslims astray (Surah 5:41)

• Non-Muslims are deluded (Surah 67:20)

• Non-Muslims are dirty (Surah At-Tawbah 9:28)

• No other religion is acceptable (Surah 3:85)

• Former Muslims who do not repent cannot be saved (Surah 9:66)

• Non-Muslims are allied against Muslims (Surah At-Tawbah 9:32–33)

• Muslims should not be allied to non-Muslims (Surah Al-Ma’idah 5:51)

• Muslims should not trust non-Muslims (Surah Al-Mumtahanah 60:1)

• Their god has forsaken non-Muslims (Surah Muhammad 47:12)

• Their god will punish non-Muslims in a brutal fashion (Surah Al-Hajj 22:19–22)

• Their god will punish Muslims who take non-Muslims as friends (Surah Al-Mujaadilah 58:14–15)

• Muslims should “cast horror/terror” into disbelievers (Surah Ali Imran 3:151)

As is plain, Islam’s rigid theological doctrine imposes the ultimate ‘in-group – out-group’ moral framework. It is not a case of cherry-picking verses, it is a core irrebuttable theme. On a strict interpretation, there are no ‘human rights’ or even ‘universal rights’, there are simply rights for Muslims with non-Muslims protected only to the extent they have treaties with Muslims or, in the case of Christians, Jews and Sabaeans (now extinct), are subjugated and pay to the Muslims a yearly tax (the Jizya) (Surah At-Tawbah 9:29).

INTER-MUSLIM SEXUAL RELATIONS

Most will recognise that Muslim men may have four wives (Surah An-Nisa, 4:3) and most will also recognise that Muslim men may beat their wives (Surah An-Nisa, 4:34).

However, what is almost totally absent from discourse is the fact that Muslim men may, on a strict interpretation of Sharia, rape their wives:

‘Your women are fertile soil for you so go to your fertile soil* as you wish and send before and fear God and know that you will meet him and give good tidings to believers.’ (Surah Al-Baqarah, 2:223)

*the word is ‘tilth’ which is tilled soil i.e. soil conditioned for growing crops.

Thus, Sharia provides that sexual relations between a married Muslim man and Muslim woman are not conditional on consent and, if a wife rebels, for example, does not allow intercourse to occur, the husband, on a literal reading of Sura An-Nisa 4:34, has divine authority to beat her.

Many may struggle to accept the existence of such a moral framework but of all the MENAPT countries (Middle East, North Africa, Pakistan and Turkey), founded on Sharia as they are, only Tunisia expressly provides a criminal sanction for the act of spousal rape.

Additionally, Sharia provides that sexual maturity for girls is nine years of age. Although there is some further discourse about maturity of mind and body, the Quran makes plain a pre-pubescent girl can be married (Surah At-Talaq:1;64-65), there is a significant body of Hadith traced through Aishah (one of Muhammad’s many wives) that Muhammad had sex with her when she was nine (Sahih al-Bukhari:3896;5133;5134;5158; Sahih Muslim:1422a;1422b;1422d).

Many in the West simply cannot comprehend that the Islamic construct of morals permits a fully grown man to have sex with a nine-year-old child whether she wants to or not but that is simply the way it is. It is ‘halal’ and therefore it is moral. That is the Islamic moral universe. This framework is so antithetical to our Western morality, founded on Christianity as it is and refined by millennia of European philosophy, that most simply cannot comprehend this objective evil, let alone define and recognise it. It is so frightening that, to many, it is best ignored.

Which brings us to another ugly point. In Sharia, there is no word for ‘rape’. Instead, there is the concept of ‘Zina’ which roughly takes the meaning ‘unlawful sexual intercourse’.

There is a body of Sharia concerning Zina drawn from the Quran and Hadith but, for Muslim male-female relations, it is sufficient to say that unmarried individuals face 100 lashes (Surah An-Nur 24:2), an unmarried Muslim with a married Muslim could additionally face exile and married Muslims are to be stoned to death (Sahih Muslim:1697/1698a).

However, what does not fall within Zina is sexual intercourse with slaves – this is not unlawful within Sharia. In fact, it is morally right.

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SEXUAL RELATIONS WITH NON MUSLIMS

Arguably the largest gap in modern discourse is the fact that slavery isn’t just a quaint relic of Islam, it is central to it. It is referenced throughout the Quran with the focus on sexual relations between Muslim men and their female slaves.

Muslims are, by theological doctrine, slaves to their god. It’s why so many are called ‘Abdul’, followed by one of the many names of their god, which translates to ‘slave of god’. Non-Muslims, on the other hand, are unclean (Sura At-Tawba, 9:28), forsaken by the god of Islam (Sura al-Mu’minum, 47:12), no better than cattle (Sura Al-Araaf 7:179) and are, in fact, the worst of creatures (Sura Al-Bayyana 98:6). They are subordinate to Muslims in every way and may be taken as slaves by Muslims.

Slavery in Islam is incredibly different from the understanding of slavery in the West. In the Western psyche, when images of slavery are conjured, they are commonly associated with the use of black men to pick cotton and black women as house help. The concept of slavery is very different in Islam, flowing as it does from killing all male combatants and enslaving their women and children which become ‘booty’. Central to it is sexual slavery where Muslim men may do as they please to non-Muslim female slaves.

For example, many in the United Kingdom will be familiar with the current discourse about cousin marriage in the Pakistani community. This flows from Surah An-Nisa (4:23) which provides a precise listing of the types of women forbidden to Muslim men and cousins are not on it; they are therefore ‘halal’. What doesn’t currently form part of that discussion is the next verse which, much more egregiously, prescribes that Muslim men may have sex with their slaves, even if those females are already married.

The consequence of that verse is that a Muslim man may rape his female slaves as often as he desires without fear of consequence from his god, even if that female slave is already married and even if that slave is as young as nine. This is reflected elsewhere in the Quran, for example, Surah al-Mu’minun, 23:1-6 and Surah Al-Ma’arij, 70:28-30 which both expressly provide Muslim men will be successful/free from punishment where they have sexual relations with their slaves.

In classical Islamic jurisprudence, slaves are generally only permissible through conquest. Islam apologists often state women and children are not to be killed in war and, whilst Hadith validate this argument (Sahih al-Bukhari:3014; Sahih Muslim:1744b), what they don’t tell you is their fate is worse than death: Women and children are to be taken as slaves (Sahih al-Bukhari:4024).

Of course, many will rightly point out that we in the West are not ‘at war’ with Islam and thus this element of Sharia is redundant. Whilst it is true that the West is not at war with Islam, it is also an inescapable fact that Islam is, by theological doctrine, at war with the West. Whilst a larger topic, it is sufficient to note the Quran gives global dominion to Islam (e.g. Surah Al-Baqarah 2:115;255; Surah An-Nisa 4:131; Surah At-Tawbah 9:33), multiple verses directly command Muslims to fight non-believers (e.g. Surah An-Nisa 4:76; Surah At-Tawbah 9:29;73) and Muhammad is quoted in Hadith as saying he was ‘…ordered to fight all of mankind until they say there is no god except god…’ (Sahih al-Bukhari:392).

Taken together, this branch of Sharia puts the West in what is referred to as the Dar al-Harb which roughly translates to the Abode of War. Although without a strict Quranic basis, this doctrine splits the world in two i.e. Dar al-Islam which is the Islamic world and Dar al-Harb. The latter is to be conquered, subjugated and forced into Dar al-Islam.

This approach to conquest and women isn’t just abstract theology; it plays out in the real world backed up by no less than 1,400 years of well-documented history. The most obvious modern example being the genocide of the Yazidis in Iraq by the Islamic State followed by the sexual slavery of their women and children. In that case, there have at least been some prosecutions in Germany for Crimes Against Humanity but far from enough.[3]

PROSTITUTION IN ISLAM

Perhaps the most troubling verse in the Quran is Surah An-Nur 24:33. This verse provides that a Muslim man may force his young slave girls into prostitution for money provided she doesn’t wish to remain chaste (and it logically follows if she isn’t chaste already then she cannot wish to remain so). If there is no money involved, it appears the qualification of chastity is removed and the Muslim man may simply force her into prostitution. It sets out a very precise test and there is clear evidence it has been deployed by Muslim men in the United Kingdom. In fact, this verse explains the entire typology of sexual slavery and enforced prostitution illustrated by the Muslim Rape Gangs (aka the Grooming Gangs).

ISLAM’S PARADISE

As is perhaps unsurprising for an ideology born in the desert, paradise in Islam includes luscious terrain, flowing rivers and, crucially, wine and maidens (Huris). The Quran is replete with references to marrying Muslim men to these ‘Huris’ (Surah Ad-Dukhaan 44:54; Surah At-tur 52:20), untouched by man or jinn (Islamic spirits) (Surah Ar-Rahman 55:56; Surah Ar-Rahmaan 55:74) who will have eyes like pearls as a reward for the Muslim men’s earthly deeds (Surah Al-Waaqiah 56:22-24; Surah As-Saaffaat 37:48).

What we in the West view as debauched desires form the basis of heaven in Islam. An objective cynic might observe that these revelations concerning sexual slavery and paradise tapped into the fact Muhammad’s male followers, it seems, were motivated to fight by the reward of sex, either in this world or the next. This is particularly the case when read against Surah al-Baqarah 2:216 which betrays the fact Muhammad’s male followers did not enjoy fighting and had to be compelled by their god to do so.

EUROPE’S RAPE PROBLEM

After the Second World War, for reasons that cannot be sensibly explained,[4] Muslims have been permitted to self-import en masse into western Europe. The last 30 years have seen an exponential increase with waves upon waves of male, fighting age illegal migrants from Muslim countries supplementing unsustainable levels of legal migration from the same.

These illegal migrants are often of little means and their education and morality, unsurprisingly, flows from religious education in their home jurisdiction. Their moral universe, which can only be objectively described as deeply supremacist, includes the following:-

• they are now in the Dar Al-Harb;

• their ultimate reward in paradise includes sex;

• non-Muslims are slave material;

• there is no concept of consent for having sex with slaves;

• girls as young as nine are permissible; and

• Sharia takes primacy over man-made laws i.e. the laws of the land.

It is even reasonable to conclude that raping European females is a driving factor for some migrants given Quranic exegesis gives Muhammad as personally authorising the rape of European women, seen as extra seductive, by his subordinate in return for jihad.[5]

This theological doctrine bears out in the evidence. Illustratively, it is not uncommon in court for these Muslim migrants to plead ignorance to the concept of consent as a mitigating factor.[6] In one recent case, a convicted Iranian rapist was sent for lessons in ‘understanding consent’.[7] In another, involving the gang rape of a young woman by an Iranian and two Egyptians, one migrant put it more bluntly, simply saying: ‘Rape to me is sex.’[8]

Thus, when considering the underlying ideology, the almost daily headlines of rape and sexual violence, particularly targeting of young girls, is wholly unsurprising. Most European nations feel it, from the 2015 New Year sex attacks in Cologne, Germany, to the almost daily headlines in the UK and wider Europe where Muslim men kidnap girls off the streets and rape them. It is similarly unsurprising that European countries with mass-migration have seen up to 500% increases in rapes since the early 2000s whilst countries like Poland, which has refused to take migrants, have experienced no material increase.

Moreover, this isn’t simply a problem for recent illegal immigrants. Taking the United Kingdom as an example, there are over 2,000 mosques and Pakistani communities, famous for practising cousin marriage, live in ethnic enclaves as evidenced by census data. You do not need to spend more than five minutes on Google or YouTube to discover Sharia views on consent and slavery are being taught in mosques across the UK and polling suggesting a third of British Muslims view the imposition of Sharia as desirable.[9]

-Video from Al-Furqan Islamic centre in Manchester of imam providing an exegesis of Surah An-Nisa 4:24

The logical conclusion of concentrating men with such a moral framework leads to controversies like the UK’s ‘Grooming Gangs’ scandal. Of course, ‘grooming gangs’ is a gross misnomer. They are, in reality, gangs of Muslims engaged in sexual slavery and enforced prostitution of non-Muslim girls, permitted as these acts manifestly are by a literal reading of Sharia.

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The reality is there is no difference between the ideology these men follow and that of the Islamic State. Contrary to what many politicians would have you believe, Islamic State was simply what it said on the tin: An Islamic state. In other words, Muslims, following Islam in its raw, unfettered form. It is precisely the reason we see Muslims carrying out the same depraved acts i.e. rape, sexual slavery and enforced prostitution, in Europe as they have in the Middle East.

The difference, of course, is that where Western governments were all to keen to take action against the Islamic State, they remain unwilling to grasp the nettle and instead are busily engaged in downplaying the crimes they have visited on their people through mass migration. For example, alleging the perpetrators were involved with drugs and alcohol. Maybe the men did drink, maybe they didn’t. It doesn’t really matter. What matters is these men subsist within a moral framework that permits these acts. Branding victims with initials,[10] beating them,[11] and, in at least three cases, killing them.[12] This is notwithstanding the most depraved sexual activity with children that simply cannot be processed by most Western minds.[13]

And it is far from isolated. An analysis suggests that 1 in 16 Pakistani men Rotherham were suspects.[14] With a circle of knowledge this broad, these acts cannot be anything other than institutional. The scale of these atrocities would simply be impossible in a non-Muslim community. It should similarly come as no surprise that the wives of these men regard white girls as ‘filth’[15] and that the men have reportedly prayed in the next room after raping a victim.[16] What’s worse, Muslim sex slavers have been found to subsist in over 50 British towns and cities.[17]

Of course, apologists and those complicit in the crimes tend to revert to the slogan ‘it’s just bad men’, deliberately obfuscating the truth. But the evidence speaks for itself:

Afghan migrant Jan Jahanzeb was recorded as saying, moments before he and another Afghan migrant raped a girl he kidnapped: ‘Oh my god, I’m a Muslim in one minute.’[18]

In another case from 2024, a victim made the following statement:

‘I was only 11. You made me do a test to see if I was still a virgin or not. At that moment my abuse started. You made it sound like it was a crime to be a virgin. You made me feel ashamed of being a virgin. That same day you sent me off and forced me to commit a sexual act and my innocence was stolen. You started to pass me around as if I was a fresh piece of meat, man to man, city to city.’[19]

As is evident, the Muslim man tested whether his child victim was chaste. Having presumably been a virgin, the Muslim man appears to have then convinced her that she did not wish to be chaste and, apparently successful in this endeavour, immediately started prostituting her out.

It is the exact test for forced prostitution as set out by Quran 24:33.

In fact, the typology prescribed by Quran 24:33 neatly plays out in every rape gang. That is, as explained by Sir Trevor Phillips OBE, former chair of the United Kingdom’s Equality and Human Rights Commission:

‘The girls are first attracted by usually young men from within those communities. Flash cars, cigarettes, they give them drugs, all the rest of it... and I did… this film 10 years ago, and what the girls tell you, “This is my boyfriend” because they think that is what’s happening. Only later do they discover they’re hooked on drugs, they need the alcohol and all of that and then they’re passed around amongst older men.’[20]

In other words, a relationship forms between a Muslim man and a young girl. Once he has had sex with her [and she is self-evidently no longer chaste] and has control over her by vice or violence, he pimps her out to dozens of Muslim men. Exactly as verse 24:33. Exactly as Sharia permits. This behaviour is therefore ‘halal’ and morally virtuous.

That is the truth of the matter. The mass sexual slavery and enforced prostitution of little girls by gangs of Muslim men and the mass rape of women and girls across Europe by Muslim migrants is founded in the institution of Islam. A virulent, hyper-sexualised supremacist ideology that views non-Muslims as chattel for slavery and sexual abuse.

Until we confront the hideous truth that Islam has a rape problem, and confront it we must, the sexual slavery, enforced prostitution and mass rape of European women and girls will continue.

____________________

[1] Hardy, Jack. “Chilling Moment Afghan Asylum Seekers Drag 15-year-old Girl Into the Bushes Before Raping Her: Pair Jailed Over ‘horrific’ Attack.” Mail Online, December 8, 2025. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15364309/Teenage-asylum-seekers-raped-15-year-old-schoolgirl-park-filmed-dragged-away-footage-horrifying-cause-riot.html.

[2] Hasan, Mehdi (Tom Marshall), “Mehdi Hasan Says Non-Muslims and Atheists Live Like Cattle,” December 19, 2018,

[3] See, for example, the German case of Taha al-J: 3 StR 230/22

[4] Unless you accept Islamic migration as a deliberate attempt to destroy Christian hegemony.

[5] The tafsir of Ibn Kathir for verse 9:49 which is explicit that the prospect of raping European females was permitted in return for jihad.

[6] See, for example, the sentencing remarks in R v Jahanzeb [2025] [3.5; 3.7], https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/R-v-Jahanzeb-and-Niazal.pdf.

[7] McDonald, Dan. 2026. “Migrant Crisis: Iranian Boy, 14, Avoids Jail after Being Convicted of Raping Schoolgirl as Victim’s Family Left ‘Furious.’” GB News. April 25, 2026. https://www.gbnews.com/news/migrant-crisis-iranian-avoids-jail-raping-schoolgirl-victim-family-furious.

[8] Dartford, Katy. 2026. “Asylum Seeker Accused of Filming Brighton Beach Rape Claims: ‘Rape Is Sex’ | LBC.” LBC. April 2, 2026. https://www.lbc.co.uk/article/asylum-seeker-brighton-rape-sex-5HjdXHQ_2.

[9] J.L. Partners and Henry Jackson Society, “British Muslim and General Public Attitudes Polling” 2024, https://henryjacksonsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/HJS-Deck-200324-Final.pdf.

[10] R v Dogar 27 June 2013, [54]. https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/JCO/Documents/Judgments/sentencing-remarks-r-v-dogar-others.pdf.

[11] ibid, [53].

[12] See the cases of Lucy Lowe, Charlene Downes and Becky Watson. NB A fourth victim, Laura Wilson was murdered but not a sex related victim of the gangs– it was her sister. The murder of Becky Watson was denied and instead framed as a prank with no official findings otherwise).

[13] See for example, the sentencing remarks in R v Dogar 27 June 2013, [53-54]. https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/JCO/Documents/Judgments/sentencing-remarks-r-v-dogar-others.pdf.

[14] Ashworth-Hayes, Sam. 2025. “The True Horror of the Rotherham Grooming Scandal.” The Telegraph. January 13, 2025. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/01/13/grooming-gang-victims-rotherham/.

[15] Alibhai-brown, Yasmin. 2017. “Wives of Men Jailed for Rape Blame the Victims Too.” Mail Online. Daily Mail. September 30, 2017. https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-4936754/Wives-men-jailed-rape-blame-victims-too.html.

[16] Moffett, Rebekah. 2022. “New Grooming Gang Report Avoids Discussing Islamic Connection.” Christian Concern. July 15, 2022. https://christianconcern.com/comment/new-grooming-gang-report-avoids-discussing-islamic-connection/.

[17] Chapman, Adam. 2025. “MAPPED: The 50 Towns and Cities in Britain Rocked by Grooming Gangs Abuse - Is YOUR Area Included?” GB News. January 6, 2025. https://www.gbnews.com/news/uk/starmer-grooming-gangs-uk-areas.

[18] Hardy, Jack. “Chilling Moment Afghan Asylum Seekers Drag 15-year-old Girl Into the Bushes Before Raping Her: Pair Jailed Over ‘horrific’ Attack.” Mail Online, December 8, 2025. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15364309/Teenage-asylum-seekers-raped-15-year-old-schoolgirl-park-filmed-dragged-away-footage-horrifying-cause-riot.html.

[19] Patrick Christy quoting a grooming gang survivor in the sentencing of R v Saddiq and Ors [2024] (citation unavailable and case name approximated).

[20] Trevor Philips. “Why White Victims of Grooming Gangs Is Different, ‘They Covered It Up’.” YouTube. Times Radio, March 5, 2026.

Jonathan Smith is a contributor at the Ideological Defense Institute.

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Europe is host to approximately 46 million Muslims in 2025, roughly 6 percent of the continent’s population of 745 million. The figure was 29.6 million in 1990. The Pew Research Center projects it will exceed 58 million by 2030 even on the most conservative assumptions about future migration. France alone contains an estimated 5.7 million Muslims and contributes roughly 30 percent of its births from a population that is 9 to 10 percent of the total. Germany contains 4.95 million, the United Kingdom 4.13 million. By 2050, on Pew’s midpoint scenario, the Muslim share of the population reaches 30.6 percent in Sweden, 19.7 percent in Germany, 18 percent in France, 17.2 percent in the United Kingdom, and 18.2 percent in Belgium.

A substanitial portion of this population has not integrated into European life. In 2019, Europol recorded 119 foiled, failed, and completed Islamic terrorist attacks across 13 EU member states, with 1,004 arrests on terrorism-related charges. In 2023, the figure rose to 120 attacks. In 2024, 58 attacks were recorded across 14 member states. In February 2024, the Islamic State spokesman released an audio recording titled Kill Them Wherever You Find Them (Quran 2:191), calling for attacks against Western civilians worldwide.

These numbers count only attacks Europol categorizes as terrorism. They do not count the parallel street violence that has reshaped European cities across two decades: the Cologne New Year’s Eve sexual assaults of 2015 in which over a thousand women were assaulted by men identified by German police as overwhelmingly North African and Arab; the British grooming-gang cases that the Casey audit of 2025 finally forced into the political record, with perpetrators overwhelmingly identified as British-Pakistani men exploiting non-Muslim girls. The Swedish gun-homicide rate that has become one of the highest in the developed world, driven by criminal networks operating out of Muslim-majority suburbs; the Berlin knife crime statistics; the French no-go zones. None of this appears in the Europol terrorism figures.

This is the scale at which European migration policy has been operating, and these are the populations the policy has been admitting, retaining, and protecting through procedural mechanisms, family reunification, asylum acceptance, citizenship for the second and third generations regardless of integration outcomes, legal protections against deportation even after criminal conviction. While these populations have been admitted, retained, and protected, the European Union Agency for Asylum has been doing the opposite work in parallel. It has been rejecting the populations the European asylum system was created to protect.

The Syrian transitional Jihadist government has presided over the most systematic persecution of Christian, Druze, and Alawite populations in modern Syrian history. In March 2025, security forces and affiliated militias killed approximately 1,400 people, mostly Alawite civilians, in coastal Syria, in what the United Kingdom House of Commons Library now classifies as targeted sectarian violence. In April 2025, militants associated with the government killed 134 people in a Druze suburb of Damascus. In July 2025, sectarian violence in Suwayda province killed roughly 1,000 civilians and militants and displaced 187,000 people. On June 22, 2025, jihadists attacked Mar Elyas Greek Orthodox Church in Damascus during Sunday mass and murdered 25 Christians. The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom’s July 2025 report documented Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham-affiliated forces conducting “door-to-door interrogations and select executions” of Alawites in January and February 2025, escalating to “full-blown sectarian massacres” by March.

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Yet the European Union Agency for Asylum’s December 2025 country guidance shifted the operative framework for Syrian asylum claims toward presumed safety for return. Germany and the Netherlands have implemented the new framework in their case law. Recognition rates for Syrian Christian, Alawite, and Druze applicants have collapsed across the bloc even as the documented evidence of persecution has accumulated. The evidentiary burden the European system imposes on Syrian minority applicants is impossible to satisfy. A Christian family from a village in Latakia whose church was burned and whose neighbors were executed in March 2025 cannot produce the documentary record the asylum tribunal demands. The perpetrators are the local authorities. The state media will not report the events.

The 1951 Refugee Convention was written for exactly this case, populations targeted by their own government on the basis of religion, ethnicity, or political opinion, for whom internal relocation is not possible because the persecution is state-affiliated or state-tolerated. It is now refusing protection to the populations the principle was written for, while continuing to admit and protect the populations whose ideological orientation produces the security crisis the new vetting architecture is supposedly designed to address.

The corrective requires Europe to make a distinction. A Syrian Christian family from Hassakeh whose church was burned in 2025 is not ideologically hostile to liberal democratic Europe. They are fleeing an Islamic-supremacist regime. The value-set of liberal democratic Europe is what they are trying to reach. The persecuted minorities of the Islamic world, Christians, Yazidis, Druze, Alawites, Ahmadis, Bahá’ís, Mandaeans, have been, on the documented record across two decades, the most successful integrators into European life and the most loyal new citizens of the countries that admitted them. They have been admitted in pitifully small numbers. The populations that have been admitted in mass numbers, across the same period, have produced the violence that plagues the continent year after year.

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Admit the persecuted minorities of the Islamic world. Reject populations whose documented ideological orientation is incompatible with European civilization. Deport those whose presence in Europe was secured through asylum fraud or whose conduct after admission has demonstrated permanent incompatibility with the legal and civic order of the receiving society. The wrong people are inside Europe. The right people are being turned away at its borders. The migration policy of the continent should not continue to admit those who hate Europe and reject those who would have died for the chance to live inside it.

Sally Obeid is a fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute.

What Is IDI ?

The most trusted source of information on the Middle East, Islam, and the ideological threats facing the West.

Subject-matter experts, former Muslims, Arab Christians, and Western thought leaders, coming together to equip policymakers to prevent destructive foreign ideas from being translated into law, restore confidence in the biblical principles that built the West by empowering the Church to reengage the public square, and provide the public with solid analysis to combat the confusion that is making the West vulnerable.

Support IDI