As the UK’s contribution to worldwide carbon emissions is less than 1 per cent and doesn’t affect global temperatures a jot, the worthies’ repeated justification for net zero is that Britain is obliged to set an example to the rest of the world. You may be pleased to hear, then, that in one respect the UK is indeed being held up as an example. See, say, the Nick Freitas (not Fuentes) YouTube video ‘Britain is gone, and America is next’. Alas, Britain serves as a cautionary tale, illustrative in conservative American circles of what happens to a western country that neglects to check wholesale Muslim immigration.
In another video, ‘The immigration crisis that will destroy the West’, Freitas strolls through Whitechapel. ‘Where am I?’ he asks, panning a cityscape of hijabs and shopfront signs in Arabic. ‘I recognise this place… This looks very much like the markets in Dhaka or Chittagong. There’s only one problem. This is the United Kingdom.’ Cue ominous music and a Union Jack flapping outside parliament.
Campaigning for the midterms, Republican senatorial candidate Ken Paxton has found the culturally compromised state of the UK and other European countries a useful rhetorical tool for fighting the ‘Islamification’ of Texas. As state attorney general, Paxton was instrumental in designating the Muslim Brotherhood and the Council on American-Islamic Relations as terrorist groups under Texas law.
Paxton also helped stall permission for what was originally called EPIC City (more recently softened by its Islamic sponsors to the sweet, anodyne tag ‘The Meadows’), a proposed 400-acre housing development replete with 1,000 homes, a large mosque, a community centre and a religious primary school. Scrapping the plan has become a cause célèbre for traditionally minded Texans. Although the development would not technically bar non-Muslim residents, early advertising clearly conveyed the intention to create an Islamic enclave (otherwise, why would Imran Chaudhary’s East Plano Islamic Center bother to build it?). For opponents, the proposal signifies absence of assimilation and the threat of a parallel legal system.
At fewer than 500,000 people among a population of 32 million, the number of Muslims in Texas is proportionately small at roughly 2 per cent. Yet their numbers have more than tripled this century. The state now sports some 350 mosques and Islamic centres, about 50 mosques having opened in only the past two years. Brits know as well as anyone that Muslim immigrants tend to clump – which intensifies the impression of territory being claimed. Lone Star Muslims are heavily concentrated around Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth.
The Republican campaign to restrict further Islamic architectural and institutional inroads in Texas has focused on stopping the spread of ‘Sharia’. But in truth, you don’t have Sharia without Islam, and you don’t have Islam without Muslims. ‘Sharia’ is a fig leaf. In the state legislature, the ‘Sharia Free’ Texas Caucus really means ‘Muslim Free’. Let’s face it. Republicans don’t want any more Muslims in Texas.
The Islamification issue isn’t about any unconstitutional imposition of foreign jurisprudence. It’s about culture. While many American states have steadily lost their distinction, Texas persists in having an identifiable flavour. Even outside the US, most folks are familiar with the drawl, the hats, the boots and the barbecue. Despite having become 84 per cent urban, Texans profess attachment to wide open prairies, cattle ranches and oil rigs – captured in the legacy series Dallas and, more recently, Landman (an even more corrupt version of modern-day Texas with Billy Bob Thornton that I recommend). In theory, the culture treasures freedom, self-reliance and ruthlessness. Texas remains a particular place, Texans a particular people.
In truth, you don’t have Sharia without Islam, and you don’t have Islam without Muslims
But only just. Lest Republicans such as Paxton seem intolerant, the state has absorbed so many Hispanic immigrants that Latinos constitute its largest ethnic group at 41 per cent, while white Americans are down to 37 per cent. So maybe it’s understandable that the minarets on those hundreds of mosques poke some Texans right up the bum.
Nationally, the question dominating multiple British podcasts – are Islam and the West compatible? – simply doesn’t feature in the US. Americans are behind. And we are not prepared for this issue. With our ‘nation of immigrants’ propaganda, proud dedication to religious liberty and under-examined more-the-merrier vibe, most Americans are uncomfortable finding fault with what they perceive hazily as a race or ethnicity rather than a political ideology. Putting up barriers to folks of a certain faith seems un-American. Yanks conceive of foreign cultures mostly in terms of food – not as typified by female genital mutilation, cousin marriage, doctrinal contempt for outsiders, rape gangs, sexual abuse, real misogyny rather than the fake sort of the ‘down with the patriarchy’ crowd, anti-Semitism, homophobia and a peculiar propensity for blowing things up.
The Senate race in Texas is tight. Currently a nose ahead, the Democratic candidate, James Talarico, is boastfully Christian, but he’s otherwise a standard progressive out to protect the rights of ‘our neighbours with a uterus’ who notoriously declared that ‘God is nonbinary’ and who’s been scoffing barbecue to beat the band, the better to live down the ugly heresy that he used to be a vegan. What besides cowboy hats makes Texas Texas? Since 1980, it’s been a solidly red state. Trump won it in 2024, even securing a majority of Hispanic votes. If the Dems pilfer this seat, they will never stop crowing about it. And if the Dems take back the presidency, the Islamification of Texas will be just the beginning.
When I was a kid, we worked puzzles called ‘What doesn’t belong in this picture?’. You know, an image with a fork, a knife, a spoon and a shovel. Not sure I’d want to live there, but I’ve been to Texas and have a soft spot for the place. So I’m sorry, but watching a PBS video of hundreds of sexually segregated men in white kufis and veiled women praying in the East Plano Islamic Center on the outskirts of Dallas – so crowded that it’s resorted to overflow rooms – I can’t help but see a shovel.
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