Rosa

Tonight, as I was leaving a restaurant on 14th Street in New York around 10 p.m., this Muslim woman took a prayer rug and a niqab out of the trunk of her car, put the niqab on, laid the prayer rug down, and started praying on the street. I grew up as a Muslim in the Islamic world, and let me tell you: this is absolutely part of an organized effort to flood the public square in the West with Islamic symbolism. First of all, there is no Islamic prayer at 10 p.m. Even if she missed the Isha prayer, which takes place earlier in the evening, she has until dawn to make it up. So why choose to pray on the street at 10 p.m.? Second, a Muslim woman who does not wear a niqab or hijab in her daily life would never normally have a niqab sitting in the trunk of her car. She is clearly not strict enough to wear it every day, so why would she suddenly be so strict about missing a prayer that she carries a niqab in her trunk specifically for this purpose? Third, in almost any Islamic country, you would never see a woman praying on the street at 10 p.m. This would be completely unacceptable. If she were genuinely worried about praying, she could simply wait until she got home, especially since a missed Isha prayer can be made up before dawn. I can tell you with full confidence that these scenes we keep seeing of Muslims praying in the streets of the West are intentional. They serve to assert dominance, normalize Islam in the public square, seize ground, and demand exceptional treatment that immediately turns into claimed rights. Bad-faith acts like this are signals of the same project that turned many cities in Europe into shitholes. Exceptional threats demand exceptional measures. Islam must be banned in the West because it is not a religion; it is a hostile political ideology. Until that happens, the West will continue losing ground to this ideology every single day.