This essay was submitted anonymously. While I agree with most of it, there are parts that I have some problems with; I plan to write a rejoinder. But it is an important topic and too many people are afraid to bring it up for fear of being labeled Islamophobic.
The Muslim Question
When I
am weak I demand freedom from you, because that is according to your
principles. When I am strong, I will take it from you, because that is
according to my principles.
----Frank
Herbert, Children of Dune
Is it time for Americans to start raising the “Muslim
Question”?
Even writing that phrase makes me ill. The phrase that
inspires it, “the
Jewish Question,” exudes bigotry, hatred, violence. That phrase was
omnipresent in 19th century Europe, and that “question” was answered
by the Holocaust. Today the Jewish Question has been replaced (as James Lindsay
has
argued) by the “Israel Question,” which (he notes) is simply the Jewish
Question by proxy. That large swaths of the world wish to answer the Israel
Question the same way large swaths of the world answered the Jewish Question
seems to me clear, particularly post October 7. The basic premise in both
questions, by those asking them, is that they wish to eliminate their targets
(Jews, and/or Israel). That’s where the bigotry, the hatred, come in.
The “Muslim Question” feels the same.
The “Islam Question” also makes me uncomfortable, but less
so: it’s acceptable, or should be, to examine and critique and possibly reject
problematic ideas, political theories, and worldviews, including religions. That
is of course the “principle” by which antizionists defend their relentless “critiques”
(and calls for the elimination) of the Jewish state. The Oxford Union recently
debated the matter framed just that way: “Is the West Right to be
Suspicious of Islam?” (The vote was 57-41 in favor of “no.” In light of what
follows below I find it a little difficult to agree.)
The “Muslim Question” seems to address not the ideas but the
people who hold them, and perhaps wish to spread them.
It feels like bigotry.
But then I look at the world around me—or at least my
newsfeed thereof, assuming that that feed is generally reliable. (If it is not,
I solicit, thirst for, correction, not least because I am uneasy with the
conclusion toward which I am heading.)
Start with this
November 2025 report from the Institute for the Global Study of
Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) on the Muslim Brotherhood’s 100-year plan for
Islam to conquer North America. Yes you read that right. We’re actually approaching
the 50-year mark already (2028) and in fact everything seems to be going
according to that plan. This is the framework in which to place all that
follows.
The Muslim Brotherhood is not the only Islamic group with
global aspirations; we find state sponsorship of similar movements in Iran,
Turkey, and elsewhere. But given that we have an explicit copy of the Muslim
Brothers’ actual plan, we shall focus on them.
This recent Wall Street Journal op-ed
shares ISGAP’s concerns. This
article gives some of the broader background.
To see what they’re all worried about, consider this guy exhorting
a large crowd in Times Square that Islam won’t stop until it’s in every home.
This Islamic
scholar in California agrees, proclaiming that America is “our” country
because every country is “Allah’s” country.
There’s this Minnesota
scholar or imam who encourages his listeners to
become mayors, congresspeople, and if possible the President, so that Islam may
spread in America. He also announces that Muslims are here to replace “the
privilege of old” (does he mean Jews?).
This Muslim
scholar, trained in Saudi Arabia but now with a
Ph.D. from Yale University and living in Texas, boasting about rapidly growing
Muslim population and political power all across the West. As if to illustrate,
there’s this Texas
rally, where many Muslim men take over the streets
and beat their chests.
Is it really
true that Hamtramck, MI, is now a city fully
captured by Islam, a “parallel Sharia society”?
Then there’s this guy, “quiet and polite” at the Oxford Union debate, arguing that
a global Caliphate ruled by Sharia would be a good idea, not least because
democracy, liberalism, and secularism don’t work. He also endorses polygamy,
cutting off the hands of thieves, and capital punishment for adultery, because
Sharia endorses those things.
And for those who thought that the
October 7 massacre was merely part of a national liberation movement and if you
just fed them Israel they’d be satisfied, here’s Hamas leader Mahmoud al Zahar laying claim to "the
entire 510 million square kilometers of Planet Earth,” where they will remove
not just Zionism but “treacherous Christianity.”
Speaking of Planet Earth, here is an enormous throng of Muslim men commandeering a public
park in Sweden for their prayers.
Social media shows me a dozen such
clips every day.
Shouldn’t you be worried by these
clips, if you are Christian? If you are secular, or atheist? If you are gay?
Even if you are a socialist?
If you are a “moderate Muslim,” who
does not demand the destruction of Jews and Christians?
If you just don’t want your
neighborhood, much less the whole world, to fall under Islam?
But it isn’t just anecdotes. There
is troubling
data about the high percentage of Muslims one may
label “extremist.” Recent
data suggest that nearly
half of American Muslims have a positive view of Hamas, which would mean that “some 2 million Muslims in
America support a Muslim Brotherhood Islamic terrorist organization that is
financed and backed by Iran,” most of whom also support specifically the
October 7 massacre. Lest you think that is merely a problem for the Jews, note the
belief endemic across the Muslim world that the Jews (and Israel) are just the
“Little Satan” to America’s “Big Satan.” There is overwhelming
overlap between those who support Hamas and the October 7 massacre and
those in favor of totalitarian governments (such as Iran) that see themselves
as the civilizational enemies of the West.
And the Muslim Brotherhood themselves adopt the view that the world
may be divided into two realms: the House of Islam and the House of War.
You either submit to Islam, or there is a war coming your
way.
This isn’t just a Jewish problem.
On the European front, there’s this
troubling report in Tablet on the Muslim
Brotherhood’s “assiduous campaign to acquire influence within the
ordinary institutions of French life”:
The actor France has identified is the Muslim
Brotherhood and the political-Islamist ecosystem surrounding it. The method is entryism:
the gradual penetration of schools, associations, religious institutions,
charities, municipalities, political parties, and administrative structures.
The objective described by French officials is the cultivation of communities
in which Islamist norms gain authority while republican principles
progressively retreat.
That this is well underway
in America also seems clear:
The evidence begins with the public documents of
Muslim political organizations themselves. Council on American Islamic
Relations’ Muslims Vote operation lists a coordinated election program:
Increase Muslim registration and turnout, document Muslim candidates,
distribute national voter guides and congressional scorecards, survey Muslim
political attitudes, cooperate with other Muslim organizations, and promote a
unified “Muslim Policy Platform.” CAIR described its 2024 plan as a means of
ensuring that Muslim voices would shape the national election.
Similar work is being done
by many other Islamic organizations, including EmgageUSA and The U.S. Council
of Muslim Organizations - Civic Action Network.
Muslim Mayor Mamdani of
New York City is just the tip of this iceberg. Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed, fresh
off his primary victory, will be Mamdani on steroids—and on the national stage.
But this also gets to the difficult
issue at the heart of the matter.
Mamdani was elected, and
El-Sayed was victorious, in free and fair elections. Political organization is
an entirely legitimate activity that every interest group should be free to
pursue. I accept (insist upon!) the basic tenets of American liberalism,
including democracy, pluralism, toleration, religious freedom, and the rest.
Absolutely every person should be free to pursue the religion of their choice,
and that includes building social networks, organizations, and political
lobbying.
Lord knows the amount of
antisemitic suspicion cast upon Jews when they pursue their own social and
political organizing and lobbying (AIPAC, anyone?), and I do not wish to
support the analogous bigotry when it comes to Islam and Muslims.
“There is no place for
hate in America,” as every elected leader finds themselves proclaiming so
regularly that one suspects the phrase isn’t entirely accurate.
And to be sure—I think we
are sure, despite the numbers mentioned above—“most American Muslims aren’t extreme.” “Moderate Muslims,” as the article in the preceding
link describes them, those willing to allow the same rights and freedoms to
others, deserve absolutely the same rights and freedoms as all Americans.
I accept and insist upon
it.
The same Tablet article quoted above noted this concern. It observes that the
recent French legislation dealing with the Muslim Brotherhood infiltration
remains contested:
Critics warn that vague definitions could cast
suspicion upon ordinary Muslim citizens engaged in civic life. That concern
deserves consideration. Washington himself cautioned that vigilance against
foreign influence must remain impartial lest suspicion become another
instrument of manipulation.
That is as it should be.
And yet France also managed to make a key distinction:
France nevertheless crossed an intellectual threshold
that most Western governments have avoided. It distinguished private religious
observance from a political movement that may employ democratic freedoms
tactically while pursuing a comprehensive vision of law, society, education,
and government. That distinction carries enormous consequences.
Kind of like what these guys
are talking about, who are talking about infiltrating the West. Kind of in the
way that the father of the new Muslim Democratic candidate for Michigan Senator
has ties to
the Muslim Brotherhood. Nothing to see here, folks.
Is this new construction near
a major public university an expression of the civil rights of Muslims or a
massive mosque fortress to advance Islam across the West?
And there is the heart of the matter. The “freedom to
practice one’s religion” is not the “freedom to impose one’s religion on
others.” The hard (impossible?) question is to determine precisely where one
ends and the other begins.
That is “the Muslim
Question”—a matter of distinguishing between our genuine Muslim neighbors and
our potential Muslim conquerors.
It might be instructive here to compare the Jewish Question
with the nascent Muslim Question.
For much of the 20th century the Jewish Question
was deeply informed by the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This
infamous forgery, appearing in 1903 then spreading rapidly around the world,
sketches the alleged plot of the Jews to conquer the world and subjugate or
eliminate all the non-Jews. It envisages a “messianic era” in which the entire
globe lives “under the House of David.” There is a straight line from this
book, through Hitler and the Nazis, to the Holocaust. In a massive act of
projection, they believed that the Jews were genocidal world-conquerors and so they
had to “defend themselves” from the Jewish menace by annihilating the threat.
But of course that was all a lie.
There are no Elders, there is no such plot, and all the Jews
ever wanted at most was a thin sliver of land to call their own in which to fight
amongst themselves.
Even before the Protocols, the Jewish Question was
informed by similar thinking. The European antisemites obsessed with the Jewish
Question were concerned that the Jews were becoming too influential, gaining
too much power, maneuvering into a position of control over non-Jews in order
to advance their own ends.
All of that was a lie, too. Europe’s emancipation of the
Jews did lead to Jews becoming a greater part of European society, even
prospering, even becoming “influential” (despite always being a miniscule
minority). But many of the Jews who prospered wanted nothing more than to
assimilate into the majority culture. At most they wanted the freedom to
practice their own religion and culture, free from persecution and pogrom. Even
in areas where they became “influential,” they never had plans to make those
areas, much less those countries, Jewish.
What made the Jewish Question antisemitic, bigotry, is that
it was ultimately based on the defamatory premise that the Jews were “up to
something,” including taking power over non-Jews and turning them into Jews or
enslaving them.
It was all a lie.
In contrast, there are something like Muslim
“Elders,” or at least a major international organization wishing to play that
role, the Muslim Brotherhood (not to mention state sponsors of similar groups).
And they do have such a plan, their protocols,
as documented by ISGAP above, to conquer the world and make other countries
Islamic. My brief description of the fictional Protocols above serves as
a short summary of the Muslim Brothers’ actual plan.
Unlike the Jews ever did, Muslims already dominate a
significant portion of the globe, some 2 billion of them with some 50+
Islamic-majority countries and many others with strong Islamic minorities. The
Jews were never more than some 17 million, before the Holocaust, and only ever
had that one little sliver of a country.
And they, the Muslim Brotherhood, seem actively to be
undertaking and advancing that plan to conquer the rest of the globe, including
Europe and the West.
Is it possible to look at the various “anecdotes” above,
which occur by the dozen each day, and not see them in the context of that
framework?
As far as I can tell, I’m not making any of this up.
Other than in the fake Protocols has there ever been
one instance of a Jew publicly proclaiming a plan to take over the globe? Or
even one single country, by infiltrating and making use of its democratic
processes to advance their political power then take it over? (If you want to
argue they did something like that in Israel, fine—but at least note that
Jewish ambitions have never been for anything beyond their little sliver
of an ancestral homeland.)
The Muslim Question, then, seems to me to have a legitimate
foundation that the Jewish Question never had.
“Islamophobia” suggests an irrational fear (hence bigotry)
of Islam. But what if the fear of Islam is perfectly rational, because there
really is such a plan and it is well underway, and it threatens our preferred
way of life, including our specifically liberal way of life? What if the
accusation of Islamophobia is actually a weapon, forbidding us from expressing
perfectly legitimate concerns about the actual supremacist theocratic plans of
some very influential Muslims?
Senate Democrats refused
to attend a hearing on the Muslim Brotherhood plan, charging Republicans
with “engaging in anti-Muslim politics.” Are the Republicans being
“Islamophobic,” or are the Democrats wrongly failing to fear Islam?
And if it is legitimate (i.e. non-bigotry) to fear Islam, is
it not legitimate to fear, or at least worry about, those Muslims who are the
actual agents who would carry out that plan?
As an American liberal who wants every person to have the
freedom to pursue their religion as fully as possible, am I right to be
concerned not just about the religion, the set of ideas and values, but about
those individuals of that religion who do not share that liberalism and wish
for their religion literally to defeat and subjugate all other religions?
It is anathema to an American liberal to ask people to give
up any aspects of their religion—but perhaps not if those aspects are directly
inconsistent with the principles of liberalism. Karl Popper’s famous “Paradox of Tolerance”—that
a tolerant society that tolerated those who reject tolerance would eventually
lose to the intolerant—is actually easy to resolve, at least in principle: a
liberal society, one formed by a social contract of mutual obligation to allow
the “other” the same freedoms one wishes to exercise oneself, may set the
limits of its toleration to those who share the commitment to toleration.
We need not tolerate those who reject our foundational principles
of toleration.
Sam Harris has said that, “The problem is extreme Islam. The
solution is moderate Islam.” That sounds about right to me. Perhaps “moderate Muslims”
are those who, while committed to their own faith, are equally committed to the
freedom of all others to leave that faith, to practice other faiths, or to have
no faith at all. So defined, a “moderate Muslim” would have no truck with the
Muslim Brotherhood project, and perhaps also actively oppose it.
It threatens them, too.
Further, again, it is plausible that “most” American Muslims
are moderate. I believe that. I know more than a few. But there are dangerous
forces that incentivize
their remaining quiet. You will not find many willing to go public with
their reservations, and this unfortunately strengthens the extremists. The
pattern is tough to combat, and the result is effectively the same as a
conspiracy. Everyone knows what they are allowed to say and demand. A
decentralized conspiracy, in a way.
Their silence, understandable as it is, provides a shield
for the not so moderate Muslims.
For fear of critiquing or infringing upon the “moderates” we
allow the not-so-moderates full sway. I cannot determine precise numbers, but
unfortunately we also do know that some American Muslims are not so
moderate, perhaps many are not, and there are clear signs that these are
gaining steam, per the clips above, and dozens others.
In this context, every otherwise innocent incident of Muslim
accommodation—every new mosque, every restaurant or food truck obtaining halal
certification, every proposed
footwashing station in an airport, every commission to advance
Muslim political representation, every Muslim serving on a city council or
other position (especially where Muslims
occupy every such position), every multicultural event teaching about Islam
and having
girls try on hijabs—even when done by moderate Muslims with entirely
innocent intentions—becomes one more advance of the plan.
As upsetting and anti-liberal as this is, must we now start
to feel suspicious of our Muslim neighbors—because they either are actively
part of the Muslim Brotherhood plan, or if not, are advancing it simply by
pursuing their otherwise liberal-sanctioned freedoms?
What are we supposed to do in this situation?
That is the Muslim Question, or the beginning thereof, and the
beginning of what necessarily must be a long and complicated and difficult and
perhaps dangerous discussion.
It is perhaps time to begin that conversation.
Tuesday, August 18, 2026
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