The New York Times, bringing to bear all of the magisterial tones it can still muster, is angry with President Donald Trump, and wants you to be angry with him, too. Trump has once again offended leftist pieties, this time by giving the impression that he opposes Sharia, the law of Islam that governs every aspect of life and makes for the paradises on earth that we see in Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and elsewhere.
As far as the Paper of Record is concerned, Trump’s apparent critical stance toward Sharia is tantamount to opposing Jewish or Catholic religious law, and what right-thinking leftist would do that, except every last one of them when the issue is not about Trump? Consistency and leftism, however, run on tracks that never come within a glancing acquaintance of one another, and so the New York Times Editorial Board on Thursday declared the president hypocritical for defending the religious freedom of Jews and Christians while patriotic politicians in his coalition have criticized Islamic law.
The Times proclaimed that “irrational fear of Shariah — a set of principles, based on the Quran, that guide life for Muslims, much as biblical precepts guide Christians and Jews — is another way in which anti-Muslim hate is translating into policy.” There are various legislative attempts to tackle Sharia, the Times explained, and “these efforts are based on ludicrously false pretenses. Extreme versions of Shariah are a problem in some countries, including Afghanistan and Iran, but they are not a threat in the United States. American Muslims are not attempting to impose Shariah principles on others.”
And so Muslims in the U.S., the Times laments, have the sads, and feel scared, as you can see from the four jihad attacks on American soil in the first two weeks of March.
The New York Times’ warning about “Islamophobia” relies on its readers’ ignorance of facts that it likely didn’t report about, or report about fully and accurately. The Times is all about constructing a narrative to support leftist political causes, not reporting the news. So it downplays and misrepresents jihad attacks, ignores Muslim declarations of imminent takeover, remains willfully ignorant about the Sharia imperative to conquer and subjugate non-Muslims, and then presents concern about Islam and Sharia as irrational racism, bigotry and “Islamophobia.” Well, sure, that’s what it is, once you’ve eliminated all the facts.
In late February, a speaker at a Muslim rally in Times Square mocked concern over Sharia, and then confirmed it: “Who’s seen those videos where they’re like, ‘Oh my God, the Muslims are taking over New York City!’ Seen those? You seen those? Let them know that we are taking over New York City! Takbir!” And the crowd responds with an enthusiastic “Allahu akbar.”
The Muslim Brotherhood, meanwhile, has been working in the U.S. over the past two decades and is dedicated in its own words, according to a captured internal document, to “eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within, and sabotaging its miserable house, so that it falls, and Allah’s religion reigns supreme over other religions.”
Many Muslims in the U.S. seem to have the idea that this is the goal. Back in Dec. 2025, a Somali Muslim in the U.S. made a video. Holding a large photo of Trump, the young man said, “My biggest fear in life is that this man may never witness our full takeover…. He’s old and sick, I know, he may not witness our full takeover. But I promise you that his sons will witness.”
This is “extremism,” right, and a hijacking of the true, peaceful Islam, right? Well, no. The Qur’an also tells Muslims to fight against “the people of the book,” that is, primarily Jews and Christians, until they pay the jizya, a special tax, and “feel themselves subdued” (9:29), that is, submit to the hegemony of Islamic law and accept second-class status.
There is much more of this, but lest you think that these are dusty, forgotten verses that no modern Muslim takes seriously, note that Majid Khadduri, an internationally renowned Iraqi scholar of Islamic law, explains that “the Islamic state, whose principal function was to put God’s law into practice, sought to establish Islam as the dominant reigning ideology over the entire world.”
In a similar vein, in his 1994 book The Methodology of Ijtihad, Imran Ahsan Khan Nyazee, an assistant professor on the faculty of Shari’ah and Law of the International Islamic University in Islamabad, quotes the twelfth century Maliki jurist Ibn Rushd: “The primary goal of the Muslim community, in the eyes of its jurists, is to spread the word of Allah through jihad.”
Iran’s former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad put it more simply some years ago, saying: “Have no doubt … Allah willing, Islam will conquer what? It will conquer all the mountain tops of the world.”
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Some of this comes from the idea that the Muslims will first conquer Constantinople and then Rome. That’s based on a tradition of Muhammad in which he says that Constantinople will be conquered first (as it was in 1453), and that Rome will be conquered later. An internationally renowned Islamic preacher, the late Sheikh Yousef Al-Qaradawi, quoted this hadith a few years ago and added: “This means that Islam will return to Europe as a conqueror and victor, after being expelled from it twice – once from the South, from Andalusia, and a second time from the East, when it knocked several times on the door of Athens.”
The Times never reported any of that or other quotes like these, and has nothing to say about it. It would interfere with the narrative. The Gray Lady couldn’t possibly equate Sharia with Jewish and Christian religious law, and consign all suspicion about it to bigotry, while discussing Muslims boasting about taking over and actively plotting to do so. And so it didn’t tell its readers about that, and excoriates the patriotic lawmakers for acting upon their awareness of it. That’s how leftist opinion is formed.
