Sharia Colonizes the West

“When your Lord revealed to the angels: I am with you, therefore make firm those who believe. I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them.”
—Qur’an 8:12

“If we can, you know… we will take [over America], but in… means that the law allows us [sic]. Here, we’re gonna’ make da‘wah [proselytize Islam] to the people. …[I]f America becomes majority Muslims [sic], then, insh’Allah [Allah willing], we choose to implement Sharia.”
—Imam Dr. Fadi Kablawi,
Sermon to the Masjid as-Sunnah an-Nabawiyah North Miami,
January 26, 2024

In 2011, novelist and Daily Wire wit Andrew Klavan made a video for PJ Media’s now-defunct YouTube arm entitled “How to Behave During an Islamic Massacre.” Klavan’s comedic monologue, part of his satiric “Klavan on the Culture” series, included a pearl of sage counsel: “Holding homicidal Muslims responsible for their savage brutality will only annoy them, and could cause you to be accused of Islamophobia: the irrational fear of being decapitated.”

Nearly a decade and half later, Klavan’s axe block humor is perhaps even more prescient than he intended. With Islam so unapologetically on the march, it would appear that almost every Western society today, broadly speaking, has gone ahead and taken his “advice.”

Truly, in many ways, an ominous normalization of Islamic cultural mores, political influence, and even legal strictures has begun to take root across America and especially Europe. Needless to say, willful blindness to the fact that the non-Muslim world is arguably more Islamic since 2001—not to mention October 7, 2023—is a crucial step on the way to willful headlessness.

The undeniable presence of Sharia (the Islamic legal system) within Western societies is worthy of fear and debate of the same intensity with which they are regularly ridiculed or suppressed. And living under Sharia, however faint the future possibility may be, should be cause for anyone in that condition to wish he or she had been willing to “annoy” its would-be implementors in the past. Yet, provably, the bad news is that, at best, such a future is not a faraway one.

Concern surrounding Islamic cultural, political, and legal influences should be an automatic reaction in the West, but fear of all the now typical insults—so omnipotent yet so meaningless—prevents decent people from expressing their natural apprehensions, let alone of having intelligent debates. And a great many of those apprehensions stem from genuinely altruistic revulsion at how Islam and Sharia treat Muslims themselves, particularly women and children. If that is “bigotry” and “intolerance,” then every compassionate human being should wear those slanders as medals of moral clarity.

Sharia is jihad

Sharia (often translated as “justice”) is the system by which an Islamic society is to be governed and controlled. In Islam, both theology and law come from the all-important Islamic “trilogy”: the Qur’an (believed to be the words of Allah delivered through Muhammad), the Sirah (the “life” or biography of Muhammad), and the Hadith (the many thousands of oral “traditions” preserving Muhammad’s sayings and actions).

Islam, let alone Sharia, cannot be understood without the person of Muhammad. Qur’an 33:21 says that “Indeed, in the Messenger of Allah you have an excellent example for whoever has hope in Allah and the Last Day, and remembers Allah often.” This—buttressed by 90 other verses—is understood to mean that Muhammad is the perfect example of conduct for every Muslim. Combined, the Sirah and Hadith form what is called the Sunnah (“way” or “path”) of Muhammad. Given that Muhammad was a warlord who ordered no fewer than 44 assassinations of his enemies, first consummated his marriage to his “favorite” wife A’ishah when she was nine (and still playing with dolls), rid Arabia of its Jews by expulsion and massacre, and embarked on at least 61 acts of jihad in the final decade of his life, upholding such a man as an “excellent example” to be imitated is more than worrying. And since the Sharia is a summation of Qur’an and Sunnah—of which about a third concerns jihad—jihad itself is an integral, load-bearing pillar of the Sharia, if not nearly fungible with it. Sharia, therefore, is the application of Muhammad’s jihadist example to everyday life.

Furthermore, as moderately well known today, the Sharia allows for amputation as punishment for theft; the lashing and stoning of adulteresses (some falsely accused); execution or imprisonment of rape victims (rape being classified as “adultery”); rape victims requiring four male witnesses as proof; execution of homosexuals; clitorectomy; a woman’s legal testimony being worth half of a man’s; wife beating; child marriage; forced veiling; chattel slavery; execution for apostasy; execution for mocking Muhammad; and more. (The primary sources for each of these practices are Sunan an-Nasa’i 4873; Sahih Muslim 1690-A; 1690-C; Qur’an 24:13; 15:74; Muslim 349; Qur’an 2:282; 4:34; 65:4; 24:31; Muslim 1602; an-Nasa’i 305; and Qur’an 9:61 respectively.) It goes without saying that such customs are universally and rightly illegal in the civilized world.

Still, one of the most important and surprising aspects of Islam is that the non-Muslim, the Kafir, is a subject of supreme doctrinal importance within its foundational texts. In fact, when combined, no less than 51% of the core Islamic texts—Qur’an (64%), Sirah (81%), and the sahih (“authentic”) Hadith collection of Muhammad al-Bukhari (37%)—is devoted to non-Muslims. This was true in pre-modern times and it remains true now. While—contrary to all hysteria—Jewish law (Halakhah) does not sanction subjugation or degradation of non-Jews, and does not apply to anyone outside the Jewish people, Sharia, by contrast, does apply to non-Muslims.

Even more disturbing is that Islam does not actually possess a version of what Christians call the “Golden Rule.” Instead of what could be called “symmetrical” ethics, Islamic morality is dualistic: one set of ethics apply to Muslims, another to the Kafir. While, for instance, the Qur’an (3:110) calls Muslims “the best nation produced [as an example] for mankind,” thus due mutual respect within the group (see 48:29), the Kafir, on the other hand, can be freely hated (40:35); mocked (83:34); plotted against (86:15–17); terrorized and beheaded (8:12); murdered “wherever you overtake them” (4:91); crucified (5:33); fought, subjugated, and extorted (9:29); taken hostage (47:4); labeled “unclean” (9:28); taken and “possess[ed]” as a sexual slave (4:24); damned as “the worst of creatures” who will abide “in the fire of Hell” (98:6); and deceived (Bukhari 3029, 4037). What’s more, Muhammad’s followers—as justified by Qur’an 8:39, 9:33, 48:28, and 61:9—are obligated to make Islam the religion of the entire world. Therefore, Sharia colonialism is a form of jihad.

Sharia is here

All the more alarming is the fact that, in varying degrees, Sharia exists and is being normalized in Western society. Throughout America, Europe, and the Anglosphere, Islamic legal and cultural practices have been slowly—sometimes even quickly—accepted with a minimum of pushback.

Crucially, jihad is not necessarily violent, with there being four types: of money, speech, writing, and of the sword. Jihad is not just physical conflict but civilizational war, utilizing all aspects of civilization in order to defeat the Kafir. Thus, silent, creeping Sharia is a far more dangerous mechanism of Islamic colonialism than violent terrorism.

There are four stages of what might be called “Islamization.” The first, Dar al-Suh (“House of Treaty”) implies a land strong enough to keep Islam out—thus a people with whom Muslims, in a militarily inferior status, must sign a treaty of mutual boundaries. The second is Dar al-Harb (“House of War”), in which Muslims make war upon weakened non-Muslim lands through immigration, “communal” demands, then violent conquest; finally, with their population past a critical a point, they begin jihad on a constant basis—jihad which can be neither criticized nor punished. The third is Dar as-Islam (“House of Islam”): Islam has conquered, and the Kafir vanquished.

By far the most affected Western venue is Europe, which—though India and Bangladesh arguably are much worse—has seen the influx of millions of Muslim immigrants and migrants within the last decade alone. Sharia, however, has been operational there for decades, flourishing in the shadows long before non-Muslims managed to document it. Europe and India are nearing the sunset of the second stage of jihad, America its blinding dawn.

Further, it cannot be stressed enough that incidences of Sharia colonization are in far too great a supply to permit investigation of three continents in fewer words than Mein Kampf. Therefore, a highly abridged selection of British and American tribulations alone are sufficient for illustration.

U.K.

In England, Sharia seems to be so deeply engrained in what genuinely was once one of the greatest civilizations in human history that it is mostly received with ignorant “tolerance” or learned apathy. While violent jihad has rocked the country on an ever increasing basis since the 7/7 massacres of 2005, it is irrelevant in comparison to what former comedian and Internet polemicist Pat Condell once summarized as “cultural terrorism.” This terrorism—lubricated by large slates of society propagandized with artificial guilt over the British Empire’s supposed savagery, and propagandists who themselves wish to gain power from the chaos—has slowly wormed its way through the foundations of decent, post-racial Britishness to a possibly irreversible degree.

Rape gangs

For many years, gangs of Muslim men groomed, raped, and trafficked countless underage girls in cities like Oldham, Oxford, Rochdale, Rotherham, and Telford, with the full knowledge of the police, social workers, the Blair government, and the BBC, who did nothing (until it was far too late at best).

In one case, rapist Bannaras Hussain was revealed at trial to have sat in a parking lot adjacent to the local police station while forcing one of his child sex slaves, sitting in the passenger seat, to administer a sexual act. “When, shortly afterwards,” counsel for the prosecution told the press, “a police car pulled up alongside them and asked what was going on,” Hussain truthfully told the officer what he was enjoying, and “The police car drove off.” For his part, Hussain’s fellow rapist brother Arshid “fathered” a child with a 14-year-old girl named Sammy Woodhouse. A child to whom a (non-Sharia) court later awarded Mr. Hussain visitation rights.

As regards the police and social workers who abandoned these untold thousands of children, the BBC reported (belatedly) that such dereliction of responsibility stemmed from fear “that if they pursued groups of non-white offenders they might be accused of racism.” Ironically, the British media, in order to conceal the rapists’ religion, resorted (and still resort) to an act of cheap racism: namely, by referring to such criminals as “Asians.” Thereby they smeared and continue to smear millions of law-abiding Hindu and Sikh Britons who happen to look similar in order to avoid being called racist.

Sharia courts

Today, dozens of Sharia courts exist throughout the United Kingdom, one estimate being “85 at least” since 1982. The courts’ existence is often played down with reference to their role being limited to “family disputes,” but, given the maltreatment of women and children allowed under the Sharia, this is no comfort at all. Some British mosques, too, according to (of all things) The New York Times, are in the habit of “offering Shariah councils for family matters” under the table.

In response to years of bubbling controversary, in 2016, the British government launched an official inquiry into the courts, brought on by rumors that “some sharia councils may be working in a discriminatory and unacceptable way… contrary to the teachings of Islam.” Well-documented evidence submitted to the tribunal confirmed that the Sharia courts ruled in favor of imprisoning women who had been raped and beaten within forced marriages. This included news coverage from 2008 exposing a “Muslim Arbitrational Tribunal” as having “worked ‘in tandem’ with police investigations” in six cases of serious domestic violence, resulting in all six cases being withdrawn. This point alone casts considerable doubt upon any protestation that these courts had operated without official knowledge or good will.

Disgracefully, however, the board of inquiry included two Islamic scholars as advisors, one of whom, in 2024, signed a petition—along with the “UK Board of Shariah Councils”’ vice chair—demanding the new Labour government “stop the indiscriminate slaughter of Palestinians.” The inquiry’s final report, published in the winter of 2018, boasts a section called “Evidence of bad practice” (p. 16), which, among its 13 bullet points, lists none of the abuses documented in testimony or in the media. One bullet point could not even be spared for the revelation that the courts sanction clitorectomy, a crime committed regularly for many years within Muslim communities despite being illegal since 1985 and carrying a minimum 14-year sentence.

Despite the assault against justice they constitute, major institutions have apparently accepted these courts and tribunals as an integral part of British society. For example, in 2021, Bristol University Press published a book about Cohabitation and Religious Marriage—distributed online by Cambridge University Press—containing an essay praising the Sharia courts. Bristol University, incidentally, offers a Sharia-compliant loan program for Muslim students.

Even an “award-winning,” female-led firm of solicitors in Manchester, voted the “UK’s Number One” by The Times, provides advice on “Divorce[,] Sharia Law[,] and your legal rights in the UK.” This follows the trend, given that, in 2022, the U.K. Law Society appointed a Muslim as its president, and a DEI protocol called the “Muslim Employment Charter,” which, news coverage of it says, is meant “to make law firms more Muslim-friendly,” has “a major international law firm onboard.” Undergirding that, a 2016 poll showed that 40% of British Muslims supported “implementation of elements of Sharia law,” holding steady from a 2010 poll—one which also revealed that a third of British Muslim students supported killing in the name of Islam.

Halal meat

Like Judaism, Islam maintains specific requirements for meat preparation, but, unlike Jews, some Muslims have been demanding that Islamic dietary practices be made the norm for all, rather than the exception.

In 2024, the Cowbridge Comprehensive School in Wales announced that it would serve only halal-slaughtered meat in its cafeteria. Despite the fact that only 0.2% of the local population is Muslim, the school went ahead with this gastronomic alteration “in response to community needs.” As far back as 2013, The Guardian found that “Three-quarters of schools under Waltham Forest Council control [in outer London] serve only Halal meat.”

Additionally, school food handlers have been fired for serving non-halal meat to Muslim children, and there is evidence that Islamic food producers (as an example of financial jihad) use their profits to support Hamas.

U.S.

America’s position on the road towards Islam dislodging constitutional government is certainly well behind the U.K., but the evidence shows that the seeds have been sown. The same refusal to, in Condell’s words, “name the poison” which exists in England prevails in America, paving the way for far worse to come.

Muslim Brotherhood

Founded in 1928 by Hasan al-Banna (Egyptian Nazi sympathizer and leader of anti-Jewish riots) to spread the rule of Islam across the globe, the Muslim Brotherhood has operated all but freely within the United States for decades.

In 2004, the FBI discovered a Brotherhood manifesto entitled “An Explanatory Memorandum: On the Strategic Goal for the Group In North America.” The chilling document, dated May 22, 1991, proclaimed that the Brotherhood’s take on the American Dream was

a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.

That sentence—alluding to Qur’an 9:33’s command to make “the religion of truth to manifest… over all religion”—also sums up the Brotherhood’s strategy for defeating the American way of life. Through quiet subversion and clever deception; through inviting Americans, “by their hands,” to dismantle American civilization for them; through the Sharia doctrine of taqiyah, the concept of deception and propaganda in the furtherance of Islam. This has chiefly been done by abusing the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious freedom and Americans’ rightful disdain for bigotry in order to seek that welcoming culture’s elimination. Through use of harmless sounding front-groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), and Muslim Students’ Association (MSA), the Brotherhood has worked tirelessly and successfully to further its destructive aims within the framework of American civic life.

Perhaps the most powerful front-group is CAIR, a lawfare organization which regularly libels good-faith critics of jihad and Sharia as guilty of “Islamophobia” and “hate.” In 2024, for example, its Oklahoma branch applauded the defeat of a state bill banning Sharia—which provably oppresses Muslims—because, contrary to the primary source evidence, “Sharia law teaches tolerance and respect for religious diversity.”

CAIR has good reason to be so combative and aggressively dishonest, since, during the infamous 2007 Holy Land Foundation trial, it was exposed as the Brotherhood’s foremost America-based Hamas money-laundering operation. CAIR’s leader, Nihad Awad, has openly said that “I am in support of the Hamas movement”—itself a Brotherhood off-shoot. And, despite the FBI severing ties with them in 2009, Awad and CAIR enjoyed the Obama DOJ’s protection, and even advised the Biden White House on the subject of “Islamophobia.” It was only disavowed at the presidential level in 2023 after Awad said that October 7 made him “happy.”

The MSA, too, wields immense power as the mother organization of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), the nationwide campus mafia which terrorizes Jewish college students. SJP and its allies managed to devote roughly the entire 2023 and ’24 academic year to ferocious pro-Hamas protests, while intimidated yet supportive administrators enabled and protected it. The MSA also has a da‘wah (proselytism) wing, which attempts to convert college students to Islam, and is involved in trying to make campuses more “Ramadan-friendly.” Administrators should know that—according to the example of Muhammad—Ramadhan is not just an Islamic holiday but a month-long spree of jihad in which hundreds of innocent people are killed every year, as those who kill during it are sure to enter Paradise. And MSA or SJP members see victories as Islamic victories. Particularly in the context of anti-Semitic BDS resolutions passed through student governments, MSA affiliates have celebrated with chants of Allahu akbar! and jubilant social media posts such as “Hamas & Shariah have taken over UC Davis.” (The day after that UC Davis resolution passed, the Jewish campus fraternity was vandalized with swastikas.) During the 2024 pro-Hamas protests, Muslim students at Columbia and UCLA who were part of the illegal encampments held prayer ceremonies as a visible gesture of victory.

And while government has been nearly unable to react to the deafening storm of anti-Jewish campus jihad, it has managed to place the Muslim Brotherhood in a position to influence religious freedom policy (the perfect domain of Sharia normalization). In 2024, the Biden administration announced the appointment of Mohamed Elsanousi, a longtime ISNA member, to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. Elsanousi must be fully aware that almost nobody in government knows anything about the Brotherhood’s network, since he proudly includes his 12 years as a senior member of ISNA in his official online bio. A bio which also boasts of a bachelor’s degree in “Sharia and Law” from the International Islamic University in Pakistan.

Mosques

As terrorism expert Steve Emerson’s award-winning 1994 film Terrorists Among Us: Jihad in America documented a generation ago, throughout the 1980s and beyond, Brotherhood operatives regularly fundraised for overseas jihad in mosques and at conferences across the country. Some keynote speakers—such as al-Qa‘idah co-founder Abdullah Azzam—were active terrorists on leave from the Afghan, Chechen, and Israeli theaters. These coincided with the growth of Usamah bin Laden’s recruitment and fundraising network, which eventually spread to 35 countries worldwide, as well as a minimum of 38 American cities.

It is known today that many individuals tied directly to 9/11, and the major jihad episodes prior to it, were, from both within and abroad, associated with the Masjid al-Farooq in Brooklyn. The mosque, founded in 1976, was a major fundraising center for al-Qa‘idah and Hamas going back to the 1980s, but none of this was fully understood prior to 2001. Despite everything discovered after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and even 9/11, the mosque’s brightly colored façade still graces Brooklyn with open doors.

This inability on the part of government and law enforcement to investigate mosques has undoubtedly resulted in unnecessary confusion, not to mention human carnage. One of the most egregious examples is the case of the Islamic Society of Boston, founded in 1981 by convicted terrorist conspirator Abdulrahman Alamoudi, with the late Brotherhood “spiritual leader” Yusuf al-Qaradhawi as a board member. Since then, the ISB and its ISNA-owned “mega-mosque” off-shoot, the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center, have produced 14 (known) associates, former members, and students who are at large, dead, in prison, or have been deported for involvement in terrorism—including the Boston Marathon bombers. It was this mosque which, in 2010, asked a field trip group of local high school students to participate in Islamic noontime prayers.

Local researchers formally briefed the FBI (at its request) about the mosque as far back as 2009, detailing its terrorist connections and vile curriculum, including instructions on wife-beating. But, at a congressional hearing two months after the Marathon bombing, FBI director Robert Mueller claimed that he knew nothing about the mosque’s leadership or conduct.

The Qur’an

The free speech and establishment clauses of the First Amendment allow Americans to criticize or mock any religious text, but, in the eyes of the U.S. government, the Qur’an has been off limits for years. America is still a mostly Christian country, but disrespect shown towards the Christian Bible is never nearly as controversial as any slight to the Qur’an’s dignity.

In 2005, a series of guidelines were issued for personnel serving at Guantánamo, requiring those guarding terrorists to wear “[c]lean gloves” if a copy of the Qur’an must be touched, and to treat it “as if it were a fragile piece of delicate art.” When an obscure, attention-seeking Florida pastor put the Qur’an on “trial” and burned it in 2011, President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and General David Petraeus vigorously condemned the burning of the “holy Qur’an.” Because Muslims in Afghanistan rioted and murdered at least 14 people in response to the pastor’s actions, the U.S. government chose to elevate a bound sheaf of paper over Americans’ First Amendment rights to be peacefully crude or offensive.

In the course of Operation Enduring Freedom, American leaders chose to transplant Afghan morality to America—arguably placing Qur’an 9:33 over the Constitution they swore to uphold, protect, and defend.

A fitting post-script is that, in the midst of the Biden administration’s catastrophic 2021 pull-out from Afghanistan, CNN claimed that a Navy veteran, Zachary Young, had somehow committed a crime in selflessly rescuing women and children from the clutches of the victorious Taliban. Nearly three years later, in its defense against Young’s well-deserved $1 billion defamation suit, CNN’s legal team cited the fact that the Taliban has “implemented Sharia law, banning women from leaving the country” as reason for their innocence.

As Klavan admonishes: “With just a little intellectual dishonesty and some unprincipled sniveling, we can put an end to Islamic slaughters peacefully by eliminating their cause: our freedom.”

“Islamophobia”: a weapon of abusive psychological warfare

The term “gaslighting” will appear constantly in any serious abuse counselor’s materials, but the easiest way for an abuse counselor to endure relentless public abuse is to admit the truth that “Islamophobia” itself is the most powerful form of socio-political gaslighting in recent history. It is a method for convincing good people to doubt objective moral reasoning. Reasoning which makes it clear that Islam, both in theory and practice, suffers from severe moral inadequacies, and that having the freedom to condemn injustice wherever it may be includes within Islam. There is nothing irrational, for example, about fearing courts which could, can, and do refuse a woman’s plea for a divorce on grounds of physical cruelty.

Additionally, Marxists traveling under the fake passport stamped “liberal”—who watch The Handmaid’s Tale, a dystopic fantasy of Christian misogyny, and rejoiced at Obergefell v. Hodges—consistently denounce anyone who criticizes evil when it comes from Islam. The Handmaid’s Tale very nicely captures Islamo-Nazi-occupied Iran—where 184,000 girls under the age of 15 were “married” between 2017 and 2022—and Obergefell would never exactly make it to the Supreme Court of Afghanistan, but, even so, people who claim that all cultural values are equal are never so polite to their own. Accusing the truly liberal of “racism” for their concerns is not only racist against Muslims—making them, like toddlers, beneath honest, well-intentioned moral criticism—it also is factually absurd. If Islam were a “race,” then there would not be Muslims of every color—including Muslims who own African slaves. Islam and Sharia are ideas, and, as Sam Harris said famously on Real Time with Bill Maher in 2014, “We have to be able to criticize bad ideas… and… Islam, at the moment, is the motherload of bad ideas.”

The word “Islamophobia” itself has drunk much ink in recent decades—some deserved, most not—and, frankly, should have died of thirst in the choking ash of 9/11. Despite masquerading as a rhetorical air raid shelter for a persecuted minority, it is known to have been first popularized in 1989 following British Muslim pressure groups’ support for Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa for the murder of Salman Rushdie. So, too, given that the cutting edge of British society scandalously sided with the world’s first true Islamic terrorist state against a mild-mannered immigrant novelist, its very origins indicate that Muslims in the West were (and are) hardly as persecuted as advertised.

Identically to interpersonal abuse, the only cure for gaslighting, as for “Islamophobia,” is to reject it. “Islamophobia” is as real as waiters’ fear of the booth fairy, and civilized people must likewise disown it, condemn it, and drown it in suitably abusive humor.

“When you get to the stage where anyone criticizing your beliefs is automatically deemed to have a mental illness,” to quote Condell once more, “that is a sure sign of mental illness. It’s also cultural terrorism.”

Is hope worth our time?

The Western world must understand that it is worth more than the sum of its shortcomings. It is built upon the ideas of individual liberty, God-given dignity, and personal responsibility. Islam, sadly, is not compatible with these values, espousing diametrically opposing ones.

It must be restated that opposition to Sharia is not only an act of Western self-interest, but of empathy. Islamic legal and cultural practices, even now, harm Muslims far more than non-Muslims. It is Muslim women and children who are beaten and raped, dwarfing the number of non-Muslims subjected to the same crimes. Those who express moral disapproval of Sharia do so because Muslim suffering at the present moment irks them as much as their own in the coming years.

Finally, Islam, like the West, despite everything, may be in trouble, too. Even in the face of its vigorous birth rate, Islam’s rate of conversion is anemic. What’s more, its apostasy rate is massive, enough for prominent imams to express public bewilderment—one calling it an “avalanche.” Ex-Muslims are now prominent on YouTube and social media, and their following, while dwarfed and subject to Internet censorship, is reliably growing.

Like Muhammad’s following before them, theirs can be neither ignored nor discounted. Their knowledge and courage may be part of a blind, suicidal West’s last chance for survival—for they, unlike us, know that Andrew Klavan’s “advice” was a joke.