The Clarion Project and Andy McCarthy are drawing renewed attention to the existence of radical Islamic enclaves within the United States.  It can be difficult to believe that such things exist, but video uncovered in 2009 shows military-style training at “Islamberg,” one such enclave in New York.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxoykqCSruY

The Clarion Project report included interviews with former members.  These witnesses described how sharia law is enforced, on American soil, through brutal whippings.  In addition to witness reports, they recovered newsletters that describe the practice:

“On these sites where Islamic Law is enforced as much as possible, anyone who commits a crime against the Law of Allah is punished according to Ta’azerat….Here you see one person receiving twenty lashes in one [Sharia] court in South America. He was found guilty of violating the honor of a Muslim lady, a crime for which he received a hard punishment with patience and faith.”

In February of this year, the group that runs these villages — “Muslims of the Americas,” they are called — was invited to the White House to meet with President Barack Obama. They were asked to attend a meeting on religious pluralism, a surprising choice given their spiritual leader’s claims about Jews.  “Jews are an example of human Satans,” Sheikh Mubarak Ali Gilani wrote in a book called  Qur’anic Psychaitry.  “This is why Jews are the founders of Satan worship and Masonic lodges, and are now trying to take over the entire globe in which the global religion is to be Satanism.”

The book goes on to suggest that people in the West know they are dominated by evil Jewish magic, but are helpless to resist.  “Only a qualified Qur’anic psychiatrist can treat and save mankind,” the book claims.  It is a potent combination of anti-semitism, pseudoscience, and the kind of witchcraft-claims that frequently lead to brutal murders in the Third World.

The same group has been at the forefront of trying to establish laws in America that would forbid and punish “blasphemy,” including speech they find insulting to Islam or Muhammad.  Such laws are clearly unconstitutional given the First Amendment.  Nevertheless, such anti-Constitutional views are inculcated by this movement, and are almost certainly taught to members who come to live in these enclaves.

McCarthy describes another such enclave in Chicago, one he wrote about in his book The Grand Jihad.

The area became an upscale enclave, featuring new houses with Arabic script over the doors and sparkling chandeliers.  Mosque leaders built two schools….  “The community was serious about Islam,” [one] worshiper recalled. “It was easier to practice the faith here.”

It was also easier to join the Muslim Brotherhood there. After his arrest in Gaza for helping finance Hamas operations, Muhammad Salah, a Chicago academic (what else?), told Israeli authorities that he’d been recruited into the Brotherhood by Jamal Said, an imam at the Bridgeview Mosque whose salary was subsidized by the Saudi regime.

We must be keenly aware of the establishment of such places, and think carefully what to do about them.  For now, even Ted Cruz’s suggestion of police engagement is taken to be an affront by prominent Democrats.  Though they think they are protecting these people, they are in fact exposing them to radicals who will bring down far worse things upon them.  If these enclaves produce radicals as have neighborhoods in Brussels and Paris, no one will suffer more from the radicalism in these enclaves than the people who live there.