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If ‘Islamophobia’ means whatever activists say it means, then the law means whatever activists say it means.
Zohran Mamdani has wasted no time turning religious language into shocking political branding. This month, he invoked Muhammad while defending Democrats’ mass-migration posture. He also became the first New York City mayor to skip the installation of a Catholic archbishop.
Public officials can practice any faith. They can speak openly about it. The line gets crossed when government starts treating one religion as a protected political category — especially through the criminal code.
To overthrow liberal democracy, the far left needs Islam’s numbers, while Islam needs the far left’s organization.
That line is about to be obliterated in Virginia.
A Bangladesh-born Democrat state senator, Saddam Azlan Salim, introduced SB624, a bill aimed at writing a formal definition of “Islamophobia” into Virginia’s assault and battery laws. The bill would single out Islam for special treatment. No other religion would receive the same statutory carve-out.
The bill defines Islamophobia as “malicious prejudice or hatred directed toward Islam or Muslims.” The definition applies “regardless of whether the victim is actually a practitioner of Islam, provided that the perpetrator targeted such victim based on a perceived adherence to such faith.”
Is it Islamophobic to walk a dog or eat bacon or spread the gospel in the presence of a devout Muslim? If not, why not? And do we really want to test it?
People use Islamophobia as a cudgel to silence legitimate criticism of doctrine, immigration policy, and jihadism at home and abroad. A vague, politically loaded term does not belong in criminal law. It invites selective enforcement. It chills speech. It hands politicians a ready-made pretext to jail dissenters.
Call it what it is: one more step toward a blasphemy-style speech regime, enforced by the state.
In a world in which leftists — and even some conservatives — believe “hate speech isn’t free speech,” Salim’s bill should set off alarm bells for any civil liberties group that claims to defend the freedom of speech and the free exercise of religion.
And yet the American Civil Liberties Union has remained resolutely silent.
The ACLU’s “Religious Liberty” page claims it exists “to safeguard the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious liberty by ensuring that laws and governmental practices neither promote religion nor interfere with its free exercise.”
Given that Islam commands the erasure any kind of secular and sectarian division, you’d think the ACLU’s rabid dogs would be on guard against its encroachment.
Instead, the ACLU maintains a page dedicated to opposing “anti-Muslim discrimination,” while boasting of its opposition to a Jewish charter school in Oklahoma.
RELATED: Free speech in Britain is worse than you think

The “red-green alliance” between domestic communists and Muslim invaders is the greatest threat currently facing Western countries today.
In a talk at Oxford University’s Student Union, Peter Thiel laid out the stark choice between the West continuing to flounder under the illusion that clean energy policies would drive global prosperity and the Islamic worldview, which prioritizes domination.
To overthrow liberal democracy, the far left needs Islam’s numbers, while Islam needs the far left’s organization. They have a common enemy — conservatives defending the countries their ancestors built for them — but without that enemy, these groups should actually despise each other.
The same day Mamdani invoked the name of the warlord Muhammad in the cause of open borders, the ACLU’s Instagram page shared a post about how hard it is to be “a queer teen in Idaho!” (Strangely enough, no mention about how hard it is to be a queer teen in any of the more than 50 countries that have been enslaved by Islam.)
This year we will mark the 10th anniversary of the Pulse Night Club shooting, when Omar Mateen — a Muslim Democrat — murdered 49 gay people and wounded 50 more. But in the ACLU’s response, the organization refused to mention Mateen’s name and indeed warned that his massacre of sexual minorities fit a “more politically convenient narrative fed by anti-Muslim fear and hate.”
What a reassuring thing to say to all the affected families in Orlando!
The ACLU is not an organization that subscribes to any kind of moral code. At best, it is a drive-by lawsuit factory. At worst, it is a legal arm of terrorists that openly welcomes foreign donations, which undermines American sovereignty. All the ACLU cares about is power — which, come to think of it, is something the group truly has in common with jihadists.
Jared Whitley