(Daily Signal)—The 25th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks bears witness to a strange phenomenon in American politics: after a quarter century of battling Islamist terror around the globe, America finds Muslim political power growing rapidly here at home. “The problem is that Americans have been lied to,” argued Robert Spencer, director of Jihad Watch on “Washington Watch.”
“They have been told that Islam is perfectly benign, [that] it’s a religion like any other, and only racist, bigoted Islamophobes think otherwise. And so, Americans’ guard is down.”
Spencer suggested the problem began in the immediate aftermath. “We’ve been lied to for a quarter century now,” he insisted. “Right after 9/11, six days later, the president of the United States went into a mosque and said, ‘Islam is peace.’ And the fact is, Islam is not peace. It does not teach peace. It is the only major religion that has doctrines of warfare and the necessity to fight and gain hegemony over the unbelievers and deny them basic rights. These things are core elements of Islam. There’s a 1,400-year record of Muslims acting upon those core teachings of Islam.”
Spencer distinguished between Islamic doctrine and the practice of individual Muslims, who may be far less warlike than their professed religion. “We are not wanting to stigmatize innocent people here,” he allowed. “Every individual has a variety of influences, perspectives, priorities, goals, and so on.” He drew an analogy to Christianity, where not every Christian perfectly upholds Christian teaching in all their actions. There are nominal Muslims, just as there are nominal Christians, who wear the label as a cultural identity but live lives indistinguishable from the surrounding secular culture.
“But we also have to face the reality,” Spencer argued. “Islam teaches: kill the unbelievers wherever you find them, kill them or subjugate them; make them pay the special tax, the jizya, and feel their humiliation for having rejected Islam every day. These things are all in the Quran. Not every Muslim acts upon them, and there may be a variety of reasons why.”
One reason is rooted in Islamic theology itself. “When the Muslims, according to Islamic theology, are a small group that is politically powerless, then they teach tolerance,” said Spencer. “When they gain sufficient numbers, they start to be more aggressive. We are indeed seeing that in Europe. … [And] we actually are seeing that also in the United States.”
An independent inquiry recently found that gangs in the U.K. primarily comprised of Pakistani Muslims have systematically raped and abused a quarter million British girls.
“It’s one of the oldest attitudes of warfare,” Spencer continued. “Know your enemy. And that’s the one thing we have failed to do since 9/11 is know the enemy. We’ve actually refused to know the enemy and stigmatized those who speak about the ideology of the enemy as Islamophobes. The whole idea of Islamophobia is a tool to intimidate people into thinking it’s wrong to oppose jihad, violence, and Sharia oppression of women and others.”
One aspect of Islam that Americans have been slow to grasp is that Islam is fundamentally political, Spencer continued. “Sharia law covers every aspect of life, including the political sphere and the way that the government ought to be organized. And it does pertain to non-Muslims. It has very specific rules that deny basic rights to non-Muslims in Sharia-ruled societies.”
Because Islam stipulates its own governmental system, it inherently conflicts with the freedom and representative government provided in the U.S. Constitution. “In the Islamic world, for 1,400 years, there has never been a free republic,” argued Spencer. “This is no accident. This is based on the theology of Islam and the idea of Allah as absolute will, the absolute ruler who’s not even bound by any consistent moral law.”
“You want to see what Sharia is?” he asked. “Look at the Islamic Republic of Iran. Look at Saudi Arabia. Look at Afghanistan. Does anybody in the United States want to live in any of those countries? Particularly women should ask themselves that.”
Thus, said Spencer, “you’ve got two forces that hate America and want to bring down the existing order and replace it with a supranational, open borders, authoritarian state. And that would be socialism and Islam. They both are fighting against the traditional constitutional order of the United States. … Right now, the socialist aspect is in the ascendancy. But I think we’re going to see much more of the Islamic aspect as the Muslims in the United States grow in numbers and power.”
In fact, Muslim politicians are already making inroads in the socialist wing of the Democratic Party. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a Democrat, stormed to victory out of nowhere in 2025, and now Democratic nominee Adbul El-Sayed is leading the U.S. Senate race in Michigan, according to some polls.
El-Sayed’s anti-Semitic leanings have raised such concerns that progressive Jewish leaders in the state sent him a petition of “non-negotiables,” pleading for him to moderate his anti-Semitic positions, such as opposition to Jewish self-determination in the nation of Israel. “American Jews now feel forced to fight for the party they long claimed as their political home, asking its leaders to treat explosive bigotry and violence against our community as the national emergency it is not with platitudes, but with urgency and moral clarity,” the rabbis wrote.
As Spencer suggested, even Muslim politicians on the Left, like Mamdani and El-Sayed, are currently stressing their socialist policies over their Muslim identities. But the anti-Semitism long seen throughout the Muslim world is now rampant on the socialist Left, as demonstrated by their protests against Israel after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack in 2023.
This adoption of Muslim sentiments on the Left has occurred because Democratic politicians have provided weak or no resistance to the movement, Spencer reasoned. “When you’re talking about Democrat politicians in particular [not opposing Sharia], they’re just chasing votes, because the facts are not hard to find,” he said. “When leftist politicians pretend, as Abdul El-Sayed does, that Sharia is just religious and has nothing to do with non-Muslims, this is something that politicians are repeating because they want votes. … The reality is they want Muslim votes, and they’re willing to sacrifice the freedom of Americans to get them.”
Spencer lamented the fact that “nobody is on this issue.” He praised a “Sharia-Free Caucus” founded in Congress last year as “the first time in 25 years that people in the political realm are speaking honestly about what Sharia really is.” But the growing influence of Muslims in U.S. politics suggests that the success of this caucus is not a foregone conclusion.
Thus, America is at a crossroads on the 25th anniversary of 9/11. Will it continue to hold out open arms to sincere believers in a religion that opposes America’s system of government? Or will it wake up to the dangers of Sharia? Will Muslims in America continue to accumulate more power? Or will they overreach and provoke a backlash just as the transgender movement did?
“We have to deal with what we’re up against. We have to face the reality of the situation,” urged Spencer. “If anything comes out of this 25th anniversary, it is that we need to shed all this propaganda and start speaking about this problem realistically.”
