UK’s dire warning: Resist Islamist politics — or lose America's freedom

Imagine a country where politicians call for the punishment of anyone who blasphemes against Islam. A country with candidates for public office who openly call Jews “cockroaches.” Imagine a country where the police conspire with Islamists to keep Jews out of a major city center. You’re picturing the United Kingdom. Not Iran, not Gaza, but Britain — the birthplace of liberty, now cowering under the boot of strident Islam. To any American who’s unconcerned that radical Muslims and rabid anti-Zionists are conquering your citadels of power, I say look at my country.

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There’s the soon-to-be Michigan senator, Abdul El-Sayed, with his familial links to the Muslim Brotherhood. This is a guy who happily hangs out with Hasan Piker, the rich-boy Twitcher who called Zionism a “mental illness” and said “it doesn’t matter if rapes f–king happened” on Oct. 7. There’s Ilhan Omar, who has made an art of Islamic self-pity. Alarm bells should have exploded when she described 9/11 as “some people did something” and said Israel has “hypnotized the world.”

That’s classic Islamo-left bigotry — simultaneously minimizing Islamist terror and defaming the Jewish nation as the octopus-like controller of world affairs. And of course there’s Zohran Mamdani, the lodestar of the hysterically anti-Zionist left, whose own wife boosted social-media posts celebrating Hamas’ pogrom. Don’t be blasé about any of this. Don’t chalk it up to another mad fad on the left. And don’t write off my warning as nothing but “racist” hysteria.

Many in Britain did just that, and look at us now. Islamist politics is unavoidable here. A Labour member of Parliament, Tahir Ali, has demanded laws that would punish anyone who “desecrates” the Koran. He was pushing at an open door: The Labour government is working on a new definition of “Islamophobia” that will chill public discussion about, or criticism of, Islam. Brits have lost their jobs for making jokes about Islam. A schoolteacher has been in hiding for five years after he was hounded by Islamists for showing his students a picture of Muhammad in a classroom chat about free speech.

We already have an Islamic blasphemy law, in spirit if not in letter. Islamist politicians are increasingly emboldened: This spring, the UK Green Party stood a candidate who called Israelis “Jewish cockroaches,” just months after the party’s deputy leader, Mothin Ali, defended Hamas’ terror as a legitimate “fight back” against “settler colonialists.” Last month, the Greens adopted a motion saying “Zionism is Racism” that called for the erasure of the Jewish state — a genocidal policy dressed in the rags of woke-speak.

This is a party supported by both Muslims and the keffiyeh kids of the upper middle classes — the same constituencies that cheer for El-Sayed and Mamdani. Could America’s Democrats go down the same dark road as Britain’s Greens, fully abandoning working people in favor of cozying up to nutters who hate the Jewish state? I fear they’ve already begun. The Labour government also panders to Britain’s four million Muslims. Its war on “Islamophobia” and its cruel sanctions on the Jewish settlements in the West Bank are pure red meat, designed to keep the Muslim vote rolling in.

Our deadly experiment with political Islamism is even being imposed by local law enforcement. Last year, the West Midlands Police banned fans of the Israeli soccer team Maccabi Tel Aviv from attending a match in Birmingham — under pressure, it later transpired, from local Islamists. The cops effectively made a British city “Judenfrei.” Joseph Goebbels would be proud. But America doesn’t need to follow us. You can turn things around. Our mistake is that we bowed to the great lie of our age: that all cultures are equally valid.

We drank the Kool-Aid of multiculturalism , with its lethal drivel about how there’s nothing special about Western civilization, and in fact much that’s wrong with it. Don’t do this. Don’t surrender the wonders of your intellectual and artistic heritage at the altar of cultural appeasement. All that’s required is a muscular assertion of Western civilization. You must mount an unabashed defense of the glorious traditions of the American republic against any loser who labels it as corrupt — or “blasphemous.”

The rise of Islamized politics should be met not with fear or fatalism, but with defiance. We need more people willing to say that the free-thinking, free-speaking Western way of life is morally superior to the Islamist way of life. That might be scandalously unfashionable, but it’s right. Say it, mean it, live it. Brendan O’Neill is chief political writer for the British online magazine spiked .