On Islamisation
Lionel Shriver's Spectator piece treats Britain as the warning and Texas as the next case. The UK's net-zero boast, that a country under 1 percent of global emissions must set an example, has failed on carbon and succeeded as a caution. In American conservative circles, she writes, Britain is now the film of what happens when Muslim immigration is not checked. Nick Freitas's videos, "Britain is gone, and America is next" and a walk through Whitechapel that he says looks like Dhaka, are the exhibit.
Ken Paxton has turned that exhibit into a Senate-race argument. As attorney general he helped designate the Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR terrorist organisations under Texas law, and he helped stall EPIC City, since rebranded The Meadows: a 400-acre Plano-area scheme of about 1,000 homes, a large mosque, a community centre and a religious primary school, sponsored by Imran Chaudhary's East Plano Islamic Center. It would not formally bar non-Muslims. Early advertising, Shriver says, made the enclave intention plain. Opponents read it as refusal to assimilate and the seed of a parallel legal order. Stopping it has become a cause for traditionally minded Texans.
The numbers she cites are small and rising. Fewer than 500,000 Muslims in a state of 32 million, about 2 percent, more than tripled this century. About 350 mosques and Islamic centres, some 50 opened in the past two years, concentrated around Houston and Dallas–Fort Worth. Clustering, she notes, is what makes a minority look like claimed ground.
Her sharper claim is that the legislative fight is mislabelled. The "Sharia Free" Texas Caucus is not, in her view, about an unconstitutional foreign code. You do not get Sharia without Islam, or Islam without Muslims. "Sharia" is the fig leaf. Republicans, she writes, do not want more Muslims in Texas, and the issue is culture, not jurisprudence. Texas still has a flavour: the drawl, the hats, the boots, the barbecue, Dallas and Landman, a professed attachment to prairie, cattle and rigs even though the state is 84 percent urban. That particularity is already thin. Latinos are the largest group at 41 percent, white Americans 37 percent. The minarets, she says, are what is left to object to.
Nationally she thinks Americans are behind the British argument about whether Islam and the West are compatible. A nation-of-immigrants story, religious liberty, and a habit of treating foreign cultures as food leave most Americans uneasy at barring a faith.
The Senate race is the stake. James Talarico, the Democrat, is a nose ahead: boastfully Christian, otherwise a standard progressive, protector of "neighbours with a uterus," on record that "God is nonbinary," now eating barbecue to live down a vegan past. Texas has been solidly red since 1980. Trump carried it in 2024, including a majority of Hispanic votes. If Democrats take the seat they will not stop crowing. If they then take the presidency, she writes, the Islamification of Texas is only the start. The close is a child's puzzle, the object that does not belong. A PBS clip of sexually segregated prayer at the East Plano Islamic Center, men in white kufis, women veiled, overflow rooms in use, is the shovel in the cutlery drawer.
https://spectator.com/article/the-islamification-of-texas/?edition=us
