[Want even more content from FPM? Sign up for FPM+ to unlock exclusive series, virtual town-halls with our authors, and more—now for just $3.99/month. Click here to sign up.]
It’s happened all over Western Europe. In Amsterdam, several neighborhoods, including the Oud-West, De Pijp, and De Baarsjes, are now heavily Muslim. So are Molenbeek, a Brussels suburb, and Gruddalen, the vast valley that forms much of the eastern half of Oslo. Four out of ten people in Tower Hamlets, London, are Muslims, as is nearly thirty-five percent of the population of Luton. Several of the banlieues, or suburbs, of Paris are no-go zones; Marseille is about one-third Islam. The Rinkeby district of Stockholm is heavily Muslim, as are parts of Malmö, not to mention the Nørrebro neighborhood of Copenhagen.
Many of these areas can fairly be described as Muslim enclaves. Regular police stay out of some of them, leaving it to the Islamic moral police to patrol the streets, as in Iran, keeping their eyes out for Muslim girls or women who are violating sharia law. In these areas, many women are as tightly controlled by their fathers or husbands as they would be in their home villages back in the old country.
Yes, there are non-Muslim residents in these neighborhoods, but their numbers are steadily dwindling. They live in an ever-intensifying state of siege. It’s dangerous for them to come home at night. At school, their sons are beaten up and their daughters are sexually harassed. Every day, they’re reminded who’s in charge, and it’s definitely not them. More than many other people in Europe, they can see the continent’s future very clearly. Needless to say, it’s an Islamic future.
This phenomenon isn’t entirely absent from the United States. The Detroit suburbs of Dearborn and Dearborn Heights, with a total population of about 170,000, are both majority Muslim; on January 20 of this year, Dearborn’s most prominent imam was scheduled to give a benediction at the inauguration, but was disinvited at the last minute when it was discovered that – surprise! – he had a long history of extremism, including participation at a pro-Hezbollah event. Another Detroit suburb, Hamtramck, with a population of about 27,000, elected the country’s first all-Muslim city council a full decade ago. Leftists in Michigan, laboring under the delusion that Muslims are fellow members of the great progressive brotherhood, were delighted with this accomplishment – until 2023, that is, when the council banned rainbow flags from municipal property.
Of course, rainbow flags are the least of what Muslims will ban as their power grows.
Which is why we should all be worried about EPIC City, Texas. I’d never heard of it until just a few weeks ago. Since then, I’ve heard about it again and again. Maybe the word hasn’t gotten to you yet. If not, here you go. EPIC City, according to an April 3 report by Caroline Vandergriff of CBS News, is a proposed “Muslim community” that is a project of the East Plano Islamic Center (hence the name EPIC) in partnership with a real-estate firm called Community Capital Partners. The plan is to construct “a thousand homes, a mosque, apartments, a school and more” on 402 acres in Collin and Hunt counties near the town of Josephine, about an hour northeast of Dallas.
Since the initiative was announced last year, the leaders of the Islamic Center have hired Dan Cogdell, a leading Houston lawyer, “to help them navigate multiple state investigations” that were ordered by Governor Greg Abbott. In reaction to Abbott’s criticism of the EPIC City venture, Cogdell told Vandergraff that his clients “aren’t foreign adversaries” but “Texans.” “Americans.” “United States citizens.” And their only goal, he contended, “is to build a community that allows them to live together with people who value family and faith.”
Yes, that’s what they want to do – but it’s not all that they want to do. They want to do Molenbeek and Tower Hamlets and Groruddalen one better. They want the total Muslim experience: no kafirun (infidels) with their uncovered wives and daughters and haram puppy dogs. If you wanted to defend EPIC City, you might point to the way in which the Amish settled Lancaster, Pennsylvania, or the Mormons’ establishment of Utah. But neither the Amish nor the Mormons have a doctrine of jihadist conquest. They aren’t instructed to despise non-believers or throw homosexuals from rooftops. Their sexual politics may be old-fashioned, but they’re light-years more advanced than Islam’s.
At least one Texan realizes this. In addition to ordering investigations into the shadowy characters involved in the EPIC City venture, Abbott has demanded a construction halt, but has been ignored. Dismissing Abbott’s expressed concern about the possible imposition of sharia law in EPIC City, Cogdell told Vandergraff: “No one associated with that community follows sharia law or is in favor of sharia law.” Nonsense. One survey of Western Muslims after another has shown that an unsettling majority of them want to live under sharia law – and expect to be living under it before too long. The goal of broadening the ambit of sharia law, after all, is a major reason why millions of Muslims moved from their native lands to the West in the first place. It’s called expanding the umma. It’s called turning the Dar al Harb (House of War) into the Dar as Islam (House of Islam), one block at a time. And lying about it to infidels is called taqiyya.
All you have to do to recognize the truth about EPIC City is to glance at the specifics of the plan and the personnel connected with it. The prospectus includes “a K–12 faith-based school.” In other words, a madrass. There’s no mention of a secular school. And who’s the face of this enterprise? No, not some Muslim businessman or doctor or lawyer. Meet Yasir Qadhi, a Pakistani-American theologian who is dean of the Islamic Seminary of America in Richardson, Texas; resident scholar of the East Plano Islamic Center; and chairman of the Fiqh Council of North America, which issues rulings based on sharia law and which has – surprise again! – terrorist ties. (Its parent organization, the Islamic Society of North America, was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the FBI’s 2008 case against the Richardson-based Holy Land Foundation, which had transferred millions of dollars to Hamas.) Qadhi used to identify as a Salafist, but he now claims to have changed his theological views. He’s on the record for having called the Holocaust a hoax and for having made outrageously antisemitic remarks, but he now says that he regrets those statements. It’s Qadhi who is the spokesman for EPIC City and is also its “spiritual leader.”
Have Qadhi’s abhorrent remarks and affiliations bothered the Muslims in Texas to whom EPIC City is being marketed, and who the Texas media would have us believe are freedom-loving religious moderates? Hardly. Within days after the EPIC City project made the news, “more than 500 lots” were snapped up, according to the Dallas News. In February, the East Plano Islamic Center put out word that it had just purchased two additional sites, both of them within a mile of EPIC City, that will be targeted for extensive residential development. And how do the locals feel? While some of them say that they’re going to move away in order to escape the area’s impending transformation, others are delighted that their property values have skyrocketed. This is, needless to say, the very definition of short-sightedness.
Alas, that short-sightedness seems to be widespread. On March 8, a group of people described as “Muslim, Jewish and Christian community leaders in North Texas” held a press conference at which they stood up for the EPIC City project and condemned its critics. Among the participants was Mustafaa Carroll of the Muslim Brotherhood-linked Council of American Islamic Relations, which is considered a terrorist organization by the United Arab Emirates and whose U.S. leader applauded the Hamas massacres of October 7, 2023. Another participant was Deborah Armintor of the pro-Palestinian, anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace. There was plenty of talk about “love” and “solidarity” and “common ground” and the vulnerability of Muslim children – the kind of phony rhetoric that might well fool low-information Texans into believing that they’re dealing with something here other than a stealth jihad of the first order.
So far, EPIC City’s most outspoken critic appears to be Amy Mekelberg, a New York counterjihadist who goes online by the name Amy Mek, and who has noted that EPIC City really shouldn’t come as a surprise to anybody: the nearby cities of Plano and Irving already contain “Islamic-only parks and signage,” “Quran schools that reject Western education,” and “[s]treets named after Islamic figures: Ali Akbar Court, Amal Saleh Drive, Salma Jameel Court, Hafeela Drive, Zulaya Drive, Shemsa Way.” But if the Dallas News has it right, residents of Collin and Hunt counties are less concerned about the newcomers’ religion than about their impact on the environment and infrastructure.
Which just goes to show how much even rural Texans need to learn about Islam. Well, if the EPIC City initiative isn’t stopped in its tracks, they’ll be learning a great deal about it soon enough.
