3 NYPD Cops Attacked with Machete Near Times Square on New Year’s Eve, Suspect with Alleged Islamic Extremist Ties in Custody
A suspect with possible Islamic extremism ties is in custody after three police officers were injured in a machete attack near Times Square on New Year’s Eve.
The cops were attacked at approximately 10:11 p.m. on Saturday at W 52nd Street and 8th Avenue, outside a police screening area for the New Year’s Eve festivities in Times Square, New York City Police Department (NYPD) commissioner Keechant Sewell told reporters at a press conference Sunday.
“Unprovoked, a 19-year-old male approached an officer and attempted to strike him over the head with a machete. The male then struck two additional officers in the head with the machete,” Sewall said.
One of the officers fired their weapons at the suspect, hitting him in the shoulder, and he was arrested shortly after.
Two of the injured officers were taken to Bellevue Hospital, where they were noted to be in stable condition. One of the wounded officers, who had been on the force for eight years, suffered a laceration to the head. Another officer, who had graduated from the police academy on Friday, was also struck in the head and suffered a laceration injury.
Another officer, who received unknown injuries, was taken to Mount Sinai West hospital and is expected to recover.
The alleged suspect was later identified as Trevor Bickford, 19, of Wells, Maine, the New York Post reported, citing law enforcement sources.
While Bickford has no criminal history, police sources told the Post that the FBI in Boston had had the alleged suspect on their radar, including having him placed on a guardian list due to his radicalization. Furthermore, Bickford’s aunt reported his radicalization to authorities because he allegedly said he wanted to fight in Afghanistan.
Other law enforcement sources told the New York Daily News that Pickford is a “radicalized terrorist.”
The NYPD released an image of the weapon used in the attack, which commissioner Sewall described as a “large knife.”
Bickford was also taken to Bellevue Hospital, where he is being treated for his injuries. His charges are pending, the Post noted.
Police are asking for anyone who has information on the incident to come forward and contact them.
You can follow Ethan Letkeman on Twitter at @EthanLetkeman.
Will Islam Convert the West?
The trans craze suggests that we are highly vulnerable.
Kim Ghattas’s book, Black Wave, describes the revolutionary fervor which swept across much of the Muslim world in the wake of the Iranian Revolution of 1979. The movement was marked by the sudden reappearance of a wave of black hijabs, abayas, and burqas in countries in which the wearing of such symbols of submission had all but disappeared.
During this period, millions of Muslims converted. But they didn’t convert away from Islam. Rather, they converted from a passive and conventional form of Islam to a more militant and expansionist form.
Having re-Islamized much of the Muslim world, Islamists have in recent years set their sights on the conversion of the West.
But is a conversion of that magnitude possible? In his best-selling novel, Submission, Michel Houllebecq describes how it is possible and even probable. But although many Christians and other non-Muslims do convert to Islam each year, we haven’t yet seen the landslide-type shift to Islam predicted in Submission.
But we may be getting there. In 2013, Nazma Khan founded World Hijab Day, an annual event “to raise awareness and normalize the wearing of the hijab.” The event was intended to present the hijab as a symbol of a woman’s right to choose what she wants to wear. World Hijab Day was soon being celebrated in hundreds of colleges and universities. And thousands of young women and young men fell for the pitch that the hijab is somehow liberating.
The ease with which large numbers of college students succumbed to the notion that the hijab is a beautiful symbol of freedom is one indication that many young people are highly susceptible to propaganda campaigns.
Another indication of youthful susceptibility to dubious trends is the trans craze which is now sweeping through our society. The notion that a boy can become a girl and a girl, a boy flies in the face of both science and religion. Yet faith in the reality of this miraculous transition is spreading rapidly. In the UK, for example, the number of children and young adults who identify as transgender increased by 4,000 percent between 2009 and 2018. And according to the Daily Caller, the Montgomery County public school district in Maryland saw a 582% increase in the number of students identifying as gender non-conforming over the last two years.
Moreover, according to one report, 40 percent of liberal arts college students now claim to be LGBTQ. This includes 61 percent of Wellesley students and 70 percent of students at Smith.
Dr. Lisa Littman of Brown University suggests that the explosive rise in the number of adolescents identifying as trans is largely a factor of peer contagion—not only pressure from other students at school but also from social media peer influencers on the internet. Sadly, instead of countering the contagion, schools often compound it. Teachers introduce students to books about transgender ‘celebrities’ such as Jazz Jennings, and schools keep insisting that all identities should be celebrated.
What does the trans craze have to do with conversions to Islam? The point is that if peers, schools, and social media can accelerate one trend, they can accelerate another. If they can normalize trans, they can normalize Islam. In fact, as I have noted, universities have already become willing participants in the campaign to normalize hijabs. Would they become willing participants in a campaign to stifle criticism of Islam? Of course, they would. They already have. Over the last dozen or so years Arab Gulf-State kingdoms have donated hundreds of millions of dollars to American universities to ensure that students gain only a favorable impression of Islam.
Would the spread of Islam be good for our society? You might as well ask if the spread of transgenderism is good for society. By and large, educators don’t ask those kinds of questions. Educators at all levels are much more interested in fashion—fashions in ideas, fashions in religions, fashions in sexuality and gender, and fashions in historical revisionism (e.g., racism explains everything). Educators may say they are interested in the common good, but they tend to equate the common good with what’s happening now.
Are drag queens in vogue? Then the kids need to know right away. How else can they choose an identity unless they know all the available identities? That’s the way a significant number of educators and their influencers think. Few of them question whether it’s good to normalize drag. The only question for them is “how can we expose kids to more drag?” And their answer, more likely than not, will be to institute a mandatory “drag pride day” during which the queens can display their wares to the kids.
Which reminds me: “International Day to Combat Islamophobia” is fast approaching. Last March, the United Nations declared March 15 to be the annual date for marking the need to combat “Islamophobia.” Why March 15? Because on that date in 2019, a white man killed 51 Muslims during prayer services at two Christchurch, New Zealand mosques.
Doubtless, the educational activists and influencers are already drawing up plans for schools to mark this tragic day. The kids, they will argue, need to know about Islamophobia and they need to know that Islamophobia is caused by white supremacy.
It won’t matter that violent attacks on mosques by non-Muslims are a rarity. And it won’t matter that deadly attacks on Christian churches by Muslims are an almost daily occurrence in Africa.
What matters is that International Day to Combat Islamophobia will give educators an opportunity to portray Muslims as victims of Islamophobia—just as they’ve successfully managed to portray the transgender “community” as victims of transphobia. It will also provide an opportunity to invite Islamic speakers to come to school and explain that Islam stands for peace, justice, and equality for all. For good measure, the kids can be told about all the athletes, musicians, rappers, and other celebrities who have converted to Islam.
I’ve noted some similarities between the movement to normalize trans and the movement to create sympathy toward Islam. But there is a difference. The trans fad may turn out to be a transitory phenomenon. Transgenderism is so obviously out of touch with objective reality and so obviously harmful to children and adolescents that it may turn out to be a short-lived fad. Moreover, the fact that a strong organized parent resistance to transgenderism has arisen may hasten its demise.
Islam, on the other hand, is not a fad. Although there may currently be a faddish interest in Islam, Islam is a 1400-year-old faith. And it has a history of conquest and of conversion that we can’t afford to ignore. Islamic empires were among the largest in history, and in the first centuries of its existence, Islam managed to convert about half of the Christian world to itself. Moreover, in contrast to the transgender movement, the resurgence of Islam in recent decades has met with very little resistance. Although jihadi militants are often hunted down by armed forces –as, for example, in the Philippines—there has been little pushback against Islamic cultural jihad. For example, with a few exceptions, parents have been reluctant to resist the whitewashing of Islam in school curriculums. After all, Islam is a religion and there is a taboo in our culture against criticizing religions (except for Christianity, which is fair game). And then, of course, there is the fear factor. In France, teachers who aren’t sufficiently respectful of Muhammad risk decapitation. Thanks to the fear factor, French teachers are now reluctant to say anything remotely critical of Islam.
There are major differences between the trans fad and the growth of the Islamic faith. That’s not to say, however, that the trans mania doesn’t have any lessons to teach. Perhaps the most important lesson is that seemingly negligible trends can suddenly escalate into fast-spreading contagions. No one would have predicted ten years ago that the time would soon come when many young people would become desperate to declare themselves trans.
But that’s the trouble with straight-line projections of current trends. Such projections don’t take account of the fact that as trends become more popular and acceptable, they accelerate at a faster rate. Many projections predict that in countries such as England, France, and Germany, Islam will become the dominant faith within 30 to 40 years while Christianity will become a minority religion. But it could happen much sooner than that. Once the trend becomes clear to Christians, their level of discouragement will increase and so will their dropout rate. By the same token, as Islam appears more and more to be the coming thing, conversion rates will begin to grow exponentially.
The fact that Muslims make up only a small percentage of the U.S. population should not blind us to the fact of Islam’s rapid growth elsewhere. Many centuries ago, Islam converted Christian North Africa. Now it seems intent on converting the rest of Africa. Meanwhile, in France and other parts of Europe, military and security professionals warn that a clash with Islam is increasingly likely. And, since the average European is well beyond fighting age, that clash is likely to result in a capitulation to Islam.
If that happens, some of the blame will lie with all those in the media and education establishments who have been naively marketing Islam to the rest of us without calculating the consequences. Much of the burden of blame, however, must fall on the shoulders of Christian leaders, both Protestant and Catholic, who—especially in Europe—complacently looked on as newly-built mosques filled up, while churches emptied, parishes closed, and scandals spread.
William Kilpatrick
William Kilpatrick is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. His books include Christianity, Islam, and Atheism: The Struggle for the Soul of the West, What Catholics Need to Know About Islam, and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Jihad.
JUDICIAL WATCH:
“The greatest criminal threat to the daily lives of American citizens are the Mexican drug cartels.”
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2016/12/the-american-border-with-narcomex.html
“Mexican drug cartels are the “other” terrorist threat to America. Militant Islamists have the goal of destroying the United States. Mexican drug cartels are now accomplishing that mission – from within, every day, in virtually every community across this country.” JUDICIAL WATCH
“Mexican authorities have arrested the former mayor of a rural community in the border state of Coahuila in connection with the kidnapping, murder and incineration of hundreds of victims through a network of ovens at the hands of the Los Zetas cartel. The arrest comes after Breitbart Texas exposed not only the horrors of the mass extermination, but also the cover-up and complicity of the Mexican government.”
New Jersey: Hamas-Linked CAIR Wants January to be ‘Muslim Heritage Month’
Fables, historical revisionism and propaganda.
The New Jersey State Senate is considering joint resolution 105, which would make January “Muslim Heritage Month” in New Jersey. News12 in the Bronx was there to cover Madina Ouedraogo of the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) speaking in support of resolution 105. News12 tells us:
The goal is to increase awareness and appreciation of Muslim American communities in the state. The Council of American Islamic Relations testified on behalf of the new bill in Trenton.
Ouedraogo said:
If the state of New Jersey truly takes great pride in the religious and cultural diversity of its residents It is critical to pass Senate Joint Resolution JR105 which would recognize our large community within the state.
News12 added:
The Council hopes the new bill can bring more awareness to the rise of anti-Muslim incidents in the state.
Aware that there is always something wrong with every newscast that features CAIR, we go to the resolution to see what it says. In line 12 of joint resolution 105, we find this:
WHEREAS, Muslims have made significant contributions that shape our world, including notable achievements in philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, medicine, architecture, music, literature, and the arts…
It is hard to know what exactly they are referring to here. But it sounds as if it might be a rehash of chauvinistic, pro-fascist 1,001 Islamic Inventions propaganda. “1,001 Islamic Inventions” made claims that Muslims invented or discovered chess, the crankshaft, bathing, the circumference of the Earth, manned flight, robots, etc. But these boasts are either fables, such as a single line in an ancient poem, or just warmed-over Greek civilization.
If the resolution is referring to this kind of esoteric knowledge, then the state of New Jersey should not celebrate it. And if CAIR’s endorsement was the first warning sign, the hint of revisionist history was the second.
Eight lines later comes another warning:
WHEREAS, The history of Muslims in the United States dates back to before the country’s founding, originating with enslaved Africans, of whom scholars estimate as many as 30 percent were Muslim, who brought Islamic beliefs and practices with them and contributed in numerous ways to the founding of the nation, including courageous and dedicated military service in every major war from the American Revolutionary War until today.
Again, there is this vague reference to “scholars.” But there are no scholars who will tell you that 30 percent of the slaves brought to America were Muslim. That is because the historical record is not complete enough to know how many people were Muslim.
Also, several of the names that propagandists regularly bring up as examples of a Muslim presence in America are not only outliers, but Fulani.
The Fulani people were busy ethnically cleansing their areas at the time of the Transatlantic Slave Trade era. They were supplying the slaves, and they were not enslaving themselves. They were taking non-Muslims into slavery.
Omar ibn Said, Yarrow Mamout, and Abdul Rahman Ibrahima Ibn Sori are used as examples of American slaves who were Muslims. But these men were all ambushed or waylaid Fulani, and were not representative of large numbers of Fulani being enslaved.
James H. Johnston wrote about one of these Fulani brought to America, and says it right in the book:
…“Muslim slaves were uncommon”
That’s from From Slave Ship to Harvard: Yarrow Mamout and the History of an African American Family, by James H. Johnston.
Another Fulani slave was Rahman Ibrahima Ibn Sori, who was the subject of a Unity Productions movie called “Prince among Slaves.” Daniel Greenfield wrote about it here: “PRINCE OF LIES How a racist Muslim mass murderer of Africans became PBS’s role model.”
Not your typical friendly neighborhood slave.
There is a type of Muslim who will try to appropriate, in the name of Allah, anything that isn’t nailed down. That includes America. CAIR is like that. CAIR is an ardent supporter of teaching the 1619 Project in public schools. The thesis of the 1619 Project is that America began with the arrival of the first slaves.
There is another interesting detail to the Joint Resolution story. One of the bill’s co-sponsors is Ed Durr. Remember Ed Durr? He once spoke bluntly about Islam on social media. But now that he has been elected to the New Jersey State Senate, he is helping CAIR to bring revisionist history into New Jersey classrooms.
My guess is that News12 will not be around for any percentage of that.
“State lawmakers consider bill to name January ‘Muslim Heritage Month,’” News 12, December 19, 2022:
New Jersey lawmakers are considering naming January “Muslim Heritage Month” in New Jersey.Lawmakers have introduced a bill to make it so. The bill is backed by state Sen. Joe Pennacchio….The Council of American-Islamic Relations testified on behalf of the new legislation.“If the state of New Jersey truly takes great pride in the religious and cultural diversity of its residents, it is critical to pass Senate Joint Resolution, SJR-105, which would recognize our large community in the state,” says Madina Ouedraogo, government affairs manager for CAIR-NJ.
CAIR says it hopes the new bill can bring more awareness to the rise of anti-Muslim incidents in New Jersey.
Slaughtered Mothers and Fathers
An Islamic hate that knows no bounds.
Incidents of Muslims slaughtering, or trying to slaughter, their own parents are on the rise.
Most recently, a 30-year-old Muslim man stabbed his own mother in the throat with a knife in France. After characterizing the incident as an “attempted murder,” local authorities said that the “accused has admitted to the crime,” which he “committed for personal and religious reasons.” Further underscoring the latter reason—“religion”—the Muslim would-be matricide was heard crying “Allahu Akbar.”
Two month earlier, and also in France, a Muslim man, 25, beheaded his own father, 60, with a knife. When police arrived on the scene, the Muslim patricide was also heard crying “Allahu Akbar” while fleeing the scene.
That the Muslim men in both of these examples from France deemed it fit to cry Islam’s ancient, jihadist war-cry—which literally means “my god is greater than your x, y, z”—indicates that, whatever their quarrel, these Muslim men at least believed that, in slaughtering their parents, they were acting on behalf of or vindicating Islam.
This was certainly the case of another, well-documented case of Muslim parricide. In September, 2022, a Muslim man bludgeoned his mother and father to death in Nigeria.
The reason? “My parents don’t like the prophet Muhammad because I adore him, [and] they called me a mad [crazy] person,” Munkaila Ahmadu, 37, explained in a video recorded by police. “[So] I killed them, because they refuse[d] to accept the truth concerning the prophet Muhammad. I killed them because they abused the prophet and their punishment is death—there is no repentance for any person who abused the Prophet.”
He is certainly not alone in such logic. After a Muslim mob stoned and burned to death a Christian college student, Deborah Emmanuel, accused of blaspheming Muhammad, a Muslim cleric justified the atrocity by saying, “When you touch the prophet we become mad [crazy] people…. Anyone who touches the prophet, no punishment — just kill!”
Showing no remorse whatsoever for murdering his father (70) and mother (60), Ahmadu instead boasted of how “I will [soon] be free because Allah is with the righteous person; that is why I am not worrying over my action…. I am now in police custody because, by human thinking, I did a wrong thing but in the sight of Allah and the Prophet what I did is the right thing” (emphasis added).
Is this true? Unfortunately, yes. “Executing” those who “blaspheme” against the prophet of Islam is as old as Islam itself and traces straight back to Muhammad, who was first to call for the slaughter of those who mocked or called him “mad.”
But even beyond the issue of blasphemy, another of Muhammad’s doctrines—that of al-wala’ w’al-bara’ (which can be simply translated as “love and hate”)—requires Muslims to hate anyone perceived to be in opposition to Islam.
Koran 60:4 is the cornerstone verse of this doctrine. As Osama bin Laden once concluded, after quoting that verse:
Such, then, is the basis and foundation of the relationship between the infidel and the Muslim. Battle, animosity, and hatred — directed from the Muslim to the infidel — is the foundation of our religion (The Al Qaeda Reader, p. 43).
Similarly, after citing Koran 60:4, the Islamic State confessed to the West that “we hate you, first and foremost, because you are disbelievers.” As for any and all political “grievances,” these are “secondary” reasons for the jihad, ISIS said:
The fact is, even if you were to stop bombing us, imprisoning us, torturing us, vilifying us, and usurping our lands, we would continue to hate you because our primary reason for hating you will not cease to exist until you embrace Islam. Even if you were to pay jizya and live under the authority of Islam in humiliation, we would continue to hate you (emphasis added).
Even so, surely this hate has nothing to do with slaughtering fellow Muslims—especially one’s own mother and father?
Actually, the doctrine of al-wala’ w’al-bara’ encompasses even these killings. Consider Koran 58:22, another key verse that calls for hating non-Muslims:
You shall find none who believe in Allah and the Last Day on friendly terms with those who oppose Allah and his Messenger — even if they be their fathers, their sons, their brothers, or their nearest kindred.
According to Ibn Kathir’s mainstream commentary on the Koran (The Al Qaeda Reader, pp. 75-76), this verse refers to a number of Muhammad’s Companions who slaughtered their own kin during the battle of Badr: one slew his father, another his brother, a third—Abu Bakr, the first revered caliph of Islamic history—tried to slay his son, and Omar, the second righteous caliph, slaughtered several of his relatives.
As Ibn Kathir explains, Allah was immensely pleased by their unwavering zeal for his cause and rewarded them with the highest level of paradise, as captured by the latter part of Koran 58:22:
Allah has inscribed the faith in their very hearts, and strengthened them [against their kin] with a spirit from himself. He will admit them to gardens watered by running streams, where they shall dwell forever.
In short, no one—not even fathers and mothers—are safe from the jihad.
There is a final and highly relevant lesson from all this: If Muslims are called on to hate and even murder their own flesh and blood—including fathers, sons, brothers, and wives—whenever they are perceived as mocking Muhammad or merely opposing Islam, is it any surprise that so many Muslims hate the “natural” enemies of Islam—foreign “infidels,” such as those who live all throughout the West?
While officialdom vehemently denies this reality, others in the West are apparently learning that, in Donald Trump’s words, speaking after a series of Islamic terror strikes in late 2015: “I think Islam hates us. There’s something there that — there’s a tremendous hatred there. There’s a tremendous hatred. We have to get to the bottom of it.”
For those paying attention, we’ve gotten to the bottom of it a long time ago.
Raymond Ibrahim
Raymond Ibrahim, author of Defenders of the West, is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
American Military Families Sue French Company for Supporting Islamic State in Syria
Family members of American troops killed during the battle against the Islamic State in Syria filed suit this weekend against Lafarge SA, a French construction company that pleaded guilty before a U.S. court in October to supporting ISIS and the al-Qaeda-linked Nusra Front.
Lafarge was fined $778 million by a U.S. district judge in Brooklyn on October 18 after pleading guilty to providing material support to terrorism.
Lafarge and its Syrian affiliate were, in essence, accused of paying $6 million in protection money to ISIS, al-Qaeda, and other armed groups so they could operate a cement plant in the Jalabiyeh region of northern Syria during the brutal civil war that began in 2011. Another million dollars was paid to “third-party intermediaries” who facilitated the bribes.
The plant also purchased raw materials from ISIS-controlled local suppliers, and paid exorbitant “tolls” to various terrorist gangs and militias so its employees, supplies, and products could pass through their checkpoints. By the end of the cement plant operation, Lafarge was cutting ISIS in on a percentage of gross sales in a grotesque form of “taxation.”
According to court documents, the cement plant cost about $680 million to build, and Lafarge earned a little over $70 million from its activities. U.S. prosecutors hoped the massive fine would send a signal to international corporations that funding terrorism is never justified.
An internal security patrol member escorts a woman giving a middle-finger gesture, reportedly a wife of an Islamic State group fighter, in the al-Hol camp in al-Hasakeh governorate in north-eastern Syria, on July 23, 2019. (DELIL SOULEIMAN/AFP via Getty Images)
“The defendants partnered with ISIS, one of the most brutal terrorist organizations the world has ever known, to enhance profits and increase market share – all while ISIS engaged in a notorious campaign of violence during the Syrian civil war,” said Deputy Attorney General Lisa O. Monaco when the fine was imposed in October.
U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York Breon Peace added that Lafarge sought to “leverage its relationship with ISIS for economic advantage, seeking ISIS’s assistance to hurt Lafarge’s competition in exchange for a cut of Lafarge’s sales.”
On Sunday, ABC News reported the families of three fallen U.S. service members filed suit against Lafarge for “unspecified economic and compensatory damages.”
The lawsuit referenced Lafarge’s guilty plea and the court documents from October, restating the prosecution’s case that the French company had a “business partnership with ISIS” that gave the Islamic State “seed capital it needed to transform from a fledgling militia in the early 2010s into a brutal terroristic behemoth with the capability and intent to kill Americans.”
Men, suspected of being affiliated with the Islamic State group, gather in a prison cell in the northeastern Syrian city of Hasakeh on October 26, 2019. (FADEL SENNA/AFP via Getty)
“Defendants put their economic self-interest above all else – ultimately making over $70 million in sales through their partnership with ISIS – even while ISIS was slaughtering innocent civilians, including Americans,” the lawsuit said.
ABC named the three U.S. service members and discussed the charges brought by their families:
Navy Chief Petty Officer Jason Finan of California was killed by an ISIS-planted IED in Iraq on Oct. 20, 2016. His widow and his parents said they have “experienced severe mental anguish, extreme emotional pain and suffering” since his death, according to the lawsuit.
Navy Senior Petty Officer Scott Cooper Dayton of Virginia was killed by an ISIS-planted IED in Ayn Issa, Syria, on Nov. 24, 2016. His widow and children are among the plaintiffs.
Former Marine David Berry was a 12-year combat veteran from Virginia, and was killed by an ISIS attack on the Corinthia Hotel in Libya on Jan. 27, 2015. At the time, Berry was working for a private contractor.
The family lawsuit pointed out that in addition to the offenses Lafarge pleaded guilty to in October, the company placed “tons of valuable cement and raw materials” in the hands of ISIS and the Nusra Front by “failing to safely shut down and evacuate the cement plant.”
The case is a civil suit filed under the U.S. Anti-Terrorism Act of 1990, which permits individuals to recover damages from businesses that provided financial support to foreign terrorist organizations.
“We expect more families to join the lawsuit and we look forward to bringing the case to trial before a jury of New Yorkers,” plaintiffs’ lawyer Lee Wolosky of Jenner & Block LLP said in a statement on Saturday.
Will Islam Convert the West?
The trans craze suggests that we are highly vulnerable.
Kim Ghattas’s book, Black Wave, describes the revolutionary fervor which swept across much of the Muslim world in the wake of the Iranian Revolution of 1979. The movement was marked by the sudden reappearance of a wave of black hijabs, abayas, and burqas in countries in which the wearing of such symbols of submission had all but disappeared.
During this period, millions of Muslims converted. But they didn’t convert away from Islam. Rather, they converted from a passive and conventional form of Islam to a more militant and expansionist form.
Having re-Islamized much of the Muslim world, Islamists have in recent years set their sights on the conversion of the West.
But is a conversion of that magnitude possible? In his best-selling novel, Submission, Michel Houllebecq describes how it is possible and even probable. But although many Christians and other non-Muslims do convert to Islam each year, we haven’t yet seen the landslide-type shift to Islam predicted in Submission.
But we may be getting there. In 2013, Nazma Khan founded World Hijab Day, an annual event “to raise awareness and normalize the wearing of the hijab.” The event was intended to present the hijab as a symbol of a woman’s right to choose what she wants to wear. World Hijab Day was soon being celebrated in hundreds of colleges and universities. And thousands of young women and young men fell for the pitch that the hijab is somehow liberating.
The ease with which large numbers of college students succumbed to the notion that the hijab is a beautiful symbol of freedom is one indication that many young people are highly susceptible to propaganda campaigns.
Another indication of youthful susceptibility to dubious trends is the trans craze which is now sweeping through our society. The notion that a boy can become a girl and a girl, a boy flies in the face of both science and religion. Yet faith in the reality of this miraculous transition is spreading rapidly. In the UK, for example, the number of children and young adults who identify as transgender increased by 4,000 percent between 2009 and 2018. And according to the Daily Caller, the Montgomery County public school district in Maryland saw a 582% increase in the number of students identifying as gender non-conforming over the last two years.
Moreover, according to one report, 40 percent of liberal arts college students now claim to be LGBTQ. This includes 61 percent of Wellesley students and 70 percent of students at Smith.
Dr. Lisa Littman of Brown University suggests that the explosive rise in the number of adolescents identifying as trans is largely a factor of peer contagion—not only pressure from other students at school but also from social media peer influencers on the internet. Sadly, instead of countering the contagion, schools often compound it. Teachers introduce students to books about transgender ‘celebrities’ such as Jazz Jennings, and schools keep insisting that all identities should be celebrated.
What does the trans craze have to do with conversions to Islam? The point is that if peers, schools, and social media can accelerate one trend, they can accelerate another. If they can normalize trans, they can normalize Islam. In fact, as I have noted, universities have already become willing participants in the campaign to normalize hijabs. Would they become willing participants in a campaign to stifle criticism of Islam? Of course, they would. They already have. Over the last dozen or so years Arab Gulf-State kingdoms have donated hundreds of millions of dollars to American universities to ensure that students gain only a favorable impression of Islam.
Would the spread of Islam be good for our society? You might as well ask if the spread of transgenderism is good for society. By and large, educators don’t ask those kinds of questions. Educators at all levels are much more interested in fashion—fashions in ideas, fashions in religions, fashions in sexuality and gender, and fashions in historical revisionism (e.g., racism explains everything). Educators may say they are interested in the common good, but they tend to equate the common good with what’s happening now.
Are drag queens in vogue? Then the kids need to know right away. How else can they choose an identity unless they know all the available identities? That’s the way a significant number of educators and their influencers think. Few of them question whether it’s good to normalize drag. The only question for them is “how can we expose kids to more drag?” And their answer, more likely than not, will be to institute a mandatory “drag pride day” during which the queens can display their wares to the kids.
Which reminds me: “International Day to Combat Islamophobia” is fast approaching. Last March, the United Nations declared March 15 to be the annual date for marking the need to combat “Islamophobia.” Why March 15? Because on that date in 2019, a white man killed 51 Muslims during prayer services at two Christchurch, New Zealand mosques.
Doubtless, the educational activists and influencers are already drawing up plans for schools to mark this tragic day. The kids, they will argue, need to know about Islamophobia and they need to know that Islamophobia is caused by white supremacy.
It won’t matter that violent attacks on mosques by non-Muslims are a rarity. And it won’t matter that deadly attacks on Christian churches by Muslims are an almost daily occurrence in Africa.
What matters is that International Day to Combat Islamophobia will give educators an opportunity to portray Muslims as victims of Islamophobia—just as they’ve successfully managed to portray the transgender “community” as victims of transphobia. It will also provide an opportunity to invite Islamic speakers to come to school and explain that Islam stands for peace, justice, and equality for all. For good measure, the kids can be told about all the athletes, musicians, rappers, and other celebrities who have converted to Islam.
I’ve noted some similarities between the movement to normalize trans and the movement to create sympathy toward Islam. But there is a difference. The trans fad may turn out to be a transitory phenomenon. Transgenderism is so obviously out of touch with objective reality and so obviously harmful to children and adolescents that it may turn out to be a short-lived fad. Moreover, the fact that a strong organized parent resistance to transgenderism has arisen may hasten its demise.
Islam, on the other hand, is not a fad. Although there may currently be a faddish interest in Islam, Islam is a 1400-year-old faith. And it has a history of conquest and of conversion that we can’t afford to ignore. Islamic empires were among the largest in history, and in the first centuries of its existence, Islam managed to convert about half of the Christian world to itself. Moreover, in contrast to the transgender movement, the resurgence of Islam in recent decades has met with very little resistance. Although jihadi militants are often hunted down by armed forces –as, for example, in the Philippines—there has been little pushback against Islamic cultural jihad. For example, with a few exceptions, parents have been reluctant to resist the whitewashing of Islam in school curriculums. After all, Islam is a religion and there is a taboo in our culture against criticizing religions (except for Christianity, which is fair game). And then, of course, there is the fear factor. In France, teachers who aren’t sufficiently respectful of Muhammad risk decapitation. Thanks to the fear factor, French teachers are now reluctant to say anything remotely critical of Islam.
There are major differences between the trans fad and the growth of the Islamic faith. That’s not to say, however, that the trans mania doesn’t have any lessons to teach. Perhaps the most important lesson is that seemingly negligible trends can suddenly escalate into fast-spreading contagions. No one would have predicted ten years ago that the time would soon come when many young people would become desperate to declare themselves trans.
But that’s the trouble with straight-line projections of current trends. Such projections don’t take account of the fact that as trends become more popular and acceptable, they accelerate at a faster rate. Many projections predict that in countries such as England, France, and Germany, Islam will become the dominant faith within 30 to 40 years while Christianity will become a minority religion. But it could happen much sooner than that. Once the trend becomes clear to Christians, their level of discouragement will increase and so will their dropout rate. By the same token, as Islam appears more and more to be the coming thing, conversion rates will begin to grow exponentially.
The fact that Muslims make up only a small percentage of the U.S. population should not blind us to the fact of Islam’s rapid growth elsewhere. Many centuries ago, Islam converted Christian North Africa. Now it seems intent on converting the rest of Africa. Meanwhile, in France and other parts of Europe, military and security professionals warn that a clash with Islam is increasingly likely. And, since the average European is well beyond fighting age, that clash is likely to result in a capitulation to Islam.
If that happens, some of the blame will lie with all those in the media and education establishments who have been naively marketing Islam to the rest of us without calculating the consequences. Much of the burden of blame, however, must fall on the shoulders of Christian leaders, both Protestant and Catholic, who—especially in Europe—complacently looked on as newly-built mosques filled up, while churches emptied, parishes closed, and scandals spread.
William Kilpatrick
William Kilpatrick is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. His books include Christianity, Islam, and Atheism: The Struggle for the Soul of the West, What Catholics Need to Know About Islam, and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Jihad.
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