By Victor Joecks Las Vegas Review-Journal

September 26, 2026 - 9:01 pm

Little kids aren’t the only ones who act as if closing their eyes will keep them safe. Look at how many people want to avoid discussing how radical Islam threatens liberty.

In 1992, Imam Siraj Wahhaj said, “If only Muslims were clever politically, they could take over the United States and replace its constitutional government with a caliphate.”

In 2007, Imam Abdul Alim Musa was leading As-Sabiqun, an organization working to create an “Islamic State of North America no later than 2050.”

A survey of current Muslim countries and review of history show that such an outcome would inevitably curtail the freedoms many Americans take for granted.

Today, some Muslim leaders believe that future is inevitable. “Islam will rule the world again,” Colorado Islamic scholar Sheikh Karim Abu Zaid said in May at a conference in Texas.

Last year, the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism &Policy released a report on the Muslim Brotherhood’s efforts to subvert Western democracies from within. The group said the organization was halfway through its 100-year plan.

In the short term, these Brotherhood-aligned movements “exploit democratic procedures while rejecting the principles that underpin them, which enables them to participate in political systems without adhering to those systems’ underlying values,” the report found. Over the long term, “these activities create institutional precedents that favor concessions to extremist demands through sustained pressure.”

This may seem far-fetched as you sit in the greatest, most powerful and richest country in the history of the world. But Europe shows the perils of ignoring the threat of Islam.

In 1950, Muslims made up 2 percent of the population in Europe. After waves of migration from countries such as Syria and Pakistan, Muslims made up 6 percent of the population in 2020.

Many of those Muslim migrants don’t share values Westerners take for granted. Norway offered migrants classes on Western norms in a bid to prevent rape. The United Kingdom recently started giving migrants a nine-page guide explaining that women there don’t need a man’s permission to work or travel. Also, “if you have sex with someone who does not want to, this is called rape. Rape is a serious crime,” the guide states.

It sounds absurd, until you realize what happened. For decades, British officials overlooked rape gangs made up of “predominantly Muslim Pakistani gangs,” the Rape Gang Inquiry Report stated. It said 250,000 victims was a “conservative estimate.”

“Perpetrators from Pakistani Muslim and other Muslim backgrounds operated under an honour- and shame-based clan code that treated non-Muslim girls, especially white working class girls, as property available for sexual use,” the report stated.

This pattern isn’t comfortable to notice because many Muslims are nice people and appear happy to live in Western societies. Also, there are religious differences among Muslims. But if the radicals who seek to remake the country use the term “Islam” to describe themselves, it’s a legitimate term to use.

Think of it this way: After the New York Knicks won the NBA Championship, fans poured into the streets to celebrate. That led to chaos, vandalism and even gunfire. It’s not Knicks-phobia to say Knicks fans rioted after their victory even though not every Knicks fan engaged in such behavior. Nor is it Islamophobia to point out the conflicts between Islamic teachings and the Western ideals and Judeo-Christian values the United States rests upon. The term “Islamophobia” is typically used as an attempt to silence those who point out those differences.

But as the many girls who were raped in the United Kingdom can attest, ignoring this problem doesn’t solve it.

Contact Victor Joecks at vjoecks@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-4698. Follow @victorjoecks on X.