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Posted on 09/24/2026 6:01:33 AM PDT by MtnClimber
What happens when Western liberals stop distinguishing between religious tolerance and political surrender?
There was a time when “Never Forget” truly meant something in mainstream circles.
Twenty-five years after September 11, in some corners of America and Western Europe, it has become worth asking exactly what we were supposed to remember. The obvious answer was the nearly 3,000 people who were murdered by Islamist terrorists in a brazen attack on the American way of life. But there has been another critical lesson buried in the rubble: Western civilization will not survive if it becomes so afraid of offending people that it stops defending the principles that made it worth defending in the first place.
That question has become increasingly uncomfortable as Islam, Islamic political movements, and competing ideas about religious law have gained influence in Western Europe and the United States.
This is not an argument against Muslims, most of whom are ordinary people living their lives, raising families and pursuing the same things everyone else wants. It is an argument about what happens when Western liberals, in their eagerness to embrace multiculturalism, stop distinguishing between religious tolerance and political surrender.
Britain offers a useful warning. Sharia law does not constitute a parallel national legal system in Britain, and the British government has made clear that sharia councils have no official status in the country’s justice system. But these councils do operate within Muslim communities, particularly regarding family and religious matters.
A 2018 government review found evidence that some councils had practices that disadvantaged women, including problems involving divorce and other family matters. The review specifically concluded that some women’s rights and freedoms had been infringed.
That distinction matters. Giving a religious community the freedom to practice its faith is one thing. A woman feeling that she must navigate a religious authority to obtain a divorce, or believing that her civil rights are somehow subordinate to a religious code, is something else entirely. Now consider that Sharia zones are well-established and growing in America.
The West’s answer to that problem should be obvious: civil law remains supreme, individual rights remain individual rights, and nobody gets a lesser set of protections because of the community into which they were born.
Yet increasingly, the opposite instinct seems to be taking hold. Liberal politicians and activists seem to love to bend over backward to accommodate cultural practices they would condemn as oppressive if they came from any source other than Islam.
I grew up in Paterson, New Jersey, a city that gives me a particularly personal perspective on this transformation. Paterson has one of the largest Muslim communities in the United States, and in 2020 the city amended its noise ordinance to allow mosques to broadcast the Muslim call to prayer, or adhan, over loudspeakers between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m., for up to five minutes.
Reasonable people can disagree about noise ordinances and religious expression. That is precisely why these questions should be discussed honestly rather than treated as forbidden territory.
Paterson also has an especially dark connection to the history of Islamist terrorism in America. In the months before September 11, several of the hijackers lived in the city, and reporting at the time indicated that as many as 11 of the 19 hijackers spent time at one Paterson address.
That history does not make Paterson’s Muslim residents responsible for the crimes of terrorists. It does, however, make the city’s experience a reminder that integration, assimilation, and national security are not subjects that should be dismissed as bigotry simply because they are uncomfortable.
And then there is Michigan. Abdul El-Sayed’s Senate campaign presents a fascinating case study in the political coalition now emerging on the American left. El-Sayed is openly progressive, supports Medicare for All and has attracted support from prominent socialists. Yet he has also been careful to distance himself from the Democratic Socialists of America, telling The Wall Street Journal, “I’m not technically or practically DSA.” The Journal has nevertheless described his politics as firmly left-leaning, while noting his support for policies associated with the progressive movement.
This is where the concept of “taqiyya” enters the conversation as a potentially dangerous tool in the Islamification of the West. Taqiyya is a real Islamic concept concerning the concealment of one’s faith or larger worldview to hide one’s religious identity when facing persecution or to mislead a non-Muslim population in an effort to potentially gain advantages against “infidels.”
It is not a blanket Islamic commandment to lie to political opponents, but the political phenomenon the word evokes is still worth examining. We can see the current relevance of the term in the strategic presentation of one set of beliefs to one audience while emphasizing a softer version to another, as El-Sayed talks to different segments of his potential constituency.
El-Sayed can say he isn’t a socialist while advocating a collection of policies that are plainly associated with modern American socialism on the campaign trail. But Fox News recently highlighted audio in which El-Sayed acknowledged that his Medicare for All proposal would increase taxes. So, in plain terms, he knows he is lying to us.
You can dismiss that simply as politics. I mean, politicians repackage ideas all the time. But voters should be allowed to ask whether the packaging accurately describes what is inside the box.
And that is the larger problem. Western liberals have become remarkably aggressive when identifying Christian nationalism and conservative traditionalism as the so-called patriarchy and labeling them “dangerous,” while becoming remarkably forgiving of extreme and uncivilized Third World behaviors when they appear inside a minority community they regard as politically useful.
That double standard is potentially deadly. A free society does not promise every culture that it can bring all of its internal rules into public life without scrutiny. It promises individuals the freedom to practice their religion while remaining equal under one civil law.
There is a profound difference between saying, “You are free to worship Allah,” and saying, “Your community’s religious norms should determine the rights of women, children, or dissenters.” The first is religious liberty. The second raises questions about whether liberalism is being asked to surrender the very principles that sustain it.
The same applies to free speech. Western societies cannot simultaneously declare that offensive speech is protected and then create informal systems in which certain religious sensibilities receive special protection from criticism. Once politicians learn that outrage, intimidation, or accusations of bigotry can silence criticism, everyone eventually pays the price.
That is why the political evolution represented by figures like El-Sayed deserves serious scrutiny, not because he is Muslim, but because his candidacy sits at the intersection of several powerful movements: progressive economics, identity politics, religious identity, and a growing willingness among parts of the Western left to accommodate illiberal ideas when they come wrapped in the language of minority rights.
America should remember what happened on September 11 without turning that memory into suspicion of every Muslim neighbor. But remembering also means refusing to become so terrified of appearing intolerant that we lose the ability to distinguish tolerance from capitulation.
The West does not need to choose between religious freedom and cultural self-preservation. It needs to understand that the first depends upon the second. A civilization that cannot defend its own laws, its own women, its own free speech, and its own cultural confidence will eventually discover that multiculturalism without a common civic standard is not diversity. It is disintegration.
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Yes some people are afraid to offend anyone. But the ones behind this despise our civilization, our country, society in general. This is the sickness that infects the left and it has spread to an alarming degree.
They not only have let these people in they are encouraging them to hate us. You see it everyday with hateful disaffected minorities and immigrants who hide behind their own racism claiming we are all racist.
We are teaching these people in our schools that we are racist and that they should hate us.
“This is not an argument against Muslims, most of whom are ordinary people living their lives, raising families and pursuing the same things everyone else wants.”
Or, said another way: islam is the religion of peace.
You cannot fight your enemy if you can’t identify your enemy.
Thanks for posting.
TRUE. “ Ordinary people”?? MoFos are not.
And here's an example of the Great Surrender.
Muslims are either terrorists, or supporters of terrorists.
They are not here to assimilate - they're here to conquer. Their "religion" requires it of them.
“This is not an argument against Muslims, most of whom are ordinary people living their lives, raising families and pursuing the same things everyone else wants”
This is an unsupported argument.
It may not be true.
Muslims in Europe, for example, seem to be welfare leeches in the main.
“This is not an argument against Muslims, most of whom are ordinary people living their lives, raising families and pursuing the same things everyone else wants”
This is an unsupported argument.
It may not be true.
Muslims in Europe, for example, seem to be welfare leeches in the main.
The author misses the point. The point is that islamism and leftism are both pursuing the disintegration (destruction) of Western Civilization.
So, this here is wrong:
“A civilization that cannot defend its own laws, its own women, its own free speech, and its own cultural confidence will eventually discover that multiculturalism without a common civic standard is not diversity. It is disintegration.”
One must understand the problem correctly to have a chance of fixing it.
What on Earth is “political taqiyya”? Why not speak plain English?
I would be weary of Muslim neighbors. Why? Yes, they might not worship at a mosque and consider themselves not religious...but if asked, they must bow to the will of the Iman’s request to harbor/vote/participate in, etc. a defense of Islam. Otherwise, they are threatened (like we are!) or their family harmed in the country from which they came.
If they come here and become Christians, family in USA and their home country are threatened. Some cannot go back to their home country. Is that what we want here? If not, we are heading rapidly in that direction by allowing them complete jihad without a shot to take over.
As a friend remarked, many in their area have Talerico signs. Yet, they are pulling up to churches with little kids joyfully running from their car to church and family all smiles. A vote for any democrat on the ballot is a vote for all that scene to END for them and their children in probably ten years.....The Bible tells us we will suffer persecution as Christians. I believe it is Islam again that will do so in the USA as it is worldwide right now.
P
Dems are using our own Constitution against Americans to replace it with a socialist gov’t.
There is no “radical Islam”.
There is only Islam.
Cut to the chase. Islam is rolling over all of Western Civilization.
A thousand years ago, Christondom put steel in its spine, pushed back on the hordes of Muslim barbarians with Crusades, and returned Spain and Slavic countries to Christian realms.
With Christianity diminished, who will slow or stop the persistent advance to Islam? Democrat/Communists? Socialist appeasers? The DSA?
Know Chrisianity, no Islam. No Christianity, know Islam.
AS AMERICA TURNED HER BACK ON THE LORD,
SHE SOUGHT TO EARN A REWARD.
SO QUICKLY TO ISLAM SHE FLED
AS SHE STOOD THERE...AND BLED!
Muslims in Europe, for example, seem to be welfare leeches in the main.
—
Ask a muslin which he is first, American or muslim? The answer is always muslim.
Muslims are not just welfare leaches but active participants in taking over the country and institutions wherever they live.
All muslims want Sharia law. If you find one that claims he does not, you are being lied to.
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