A harbinger of what to expect in the United States?

Europe’s open door policy to Muslim immigrants has utterly failed. Its tolerance of the intolerant tenets of Islamic law and practices under the banner of multiculturalism has also failed. Great Britain is a case in point. Muslims have created their own segregated communities by choice. Even pro-immigration leaders are admitting they were wrong in their optimism that Muslims would willingly integrate into British society over time.

As the saying goes, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” A former head of Great Britain’s Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), Trevor Phillips, came to that realization after doing a 180 degree turn on the issue of Muslim immigrant integration.

As a member of the Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia, he endorsed a report in 1997 that helped popularize the term “Islamophobia.” The report blamed widespread “anti-Muslim prejudice” among Great Britain’s majority population for Muslim immigrants’ “exclusion.” It placed the responsibility for resolving issues holding back “social inclusion” of Muslim immigrants on the British government. As the summary of the report states:

“The need for legal changes is clearly identified in the report. This, it is argued, will consolidate the changes in public opinion and popular understanding which are required and which are outlined throughout the pages of this report.”

Nearly two decades later, Mr. Phillips admitted that he “got almost everything wrong” on Muslim immigration.

“Liberal opinion in Britain has, for more than two decades, maintained that most Muslims are just like everyone else, but with more modest dress sense and more luxuriant facial hair; any differences would fade with time and contact,” Trevor Philips, who commissioned the poll for use in a TV documentary, wrote in a column entitled “An Inconvenient Truth.” His revealing column appeared in the Sunday Times on April 10th. “But thanks to the most detailed and comprehensive survey of British Muslim opinion yet conducted, we now know that just isn’t how it is,” he added.

The poll results dramatically evidence that a significant minority of Muslims living in Great Britain have core beliefs that are in direct opposition to the fundamental precepts of Western secular beliefs, including a pluralistic democracy and fundamental human rights such as freedom of expression, freedom of religion and equality of all people.

The survey firm conducted face-to-face interviews in the spring of 2015 with over 1000 self-identified Muslim adults who were at least 18 years of age. The following are a number of the reported findings, which represent beliefs rooted in sharia law:

“Wives should always obey their husbands” — 39% agree (strongly agree 15%, tend to agree 24%).

“It is acceptable for a British Muslim to keep more than one wife” — 31% agree (strongly agree 14%, tend to agree 16%)

“Would you support or oppose there being areas of Britain in which Sharia law is introduced instead of British law?” — 23% support (strongly support 7%, tend to support 17%)

“Homosexuality should be legal in Britain” — 18% agree (strongly agree 8%, tend to agree 10%) and 52% disagree (strongly disagree 38%, tend to disagree 14%)

These results may understate the true sentiments of the Muslim population, as some respondents may not have wanted to admit to the questioners that they felt the same way.

Trevor Phillips is a former elected member of the Labour Party. He was once predisposed to viewing Muslim immigrants as innocent victims of Islamophobia. Give them time and opportunity for full inclusion into British society and culture, he believed like many British liberals, and everything will turn out all rright. Now he warns those liberals who still believe in the natural progression of Muslim assimilation that the opposite is happening – the growth of a “nation-within-a-nation.”

Mr. Phillips calls for stemming the growth of sharia courts in Great Britain. He wants to end the influence of “Wahhabi patronage” on domestic mosques. And he wants to make sure “that, whatever the composition of a school, its governance never falls into the hands of a single-minority group.”

Some of the more vocal Muslims who insist on following sharia law rather than British secular law threaten the lives of any Muslims who dare to question such self-imposed isolation from mainstream British society. This can lead to self-censorship of opposing views within Muslim communities.

Mohammed Shafiq, a leader of the Ramadan Foundation, which describes on its website its purpose to provide a “positive and accurate image of Muslims,” accused Trevor Phillips of “demonizing Muslims, and this exists within a wider agenda of Islamophobia.” He said that the poll results Phillips cited in his column were a “red herring.” Yet Shafiq demonstrated his own belief in the transcendence of sharia law over secular British law when he attacked a liberal Muslim candidate for a seat in Parliament with the words “defamer of the prophet.” His target’s offense was to dare to tweet an inoffensive cartoon of Jesus and Muhammad. The implication of Shafiqis remarks was that the “defamer” was aware that some Muslims would be upset enough with the cartoon to kill the “defamer.”

Polls are not needed for all to understand the Islamization of Western Europe. And if we are not careful Islamization will spread to the United States in full force. Already, we are seeing signs of such Islamization in places like Minnesota and Michigan.

Somali Muslim residents in the Minneapolis area interviewed by the David Horowitz Freedom Center talked openly about their preference for sharia law. Some believe that it should be illegal in the United States to make fun of the prophet Muhammad. Several agreed that it was right to kill someone who insults Muhammad.

None of this makes any difference to President Obama. Nor does the threat of ISIS infiltration via an ill-conceived refugee program. From 2009 through 2013, the Obama administration granted 680,000 green cards to migrants from Muslim-majority countries. Somalia accounted for 31,000 of this total. Now the administration is looking to increase the number of Syrian refugees into the United States, despite the lack of a reliable vetting process.

“In the Muslim immigrant today, we see the Catholic immigrant of a century ago,” Obama said. “In the Syrian refugee of today, we should see the Jewish refugee of World War II.“

Obama’s political correctness is getting tiresome. Catholic and Jewish immigrants sought to assimilate into American society and accepted their new home’s fundamental values. The Europeans’ experience with waves of Muslim immigrants attests to the fact that many of the immigrants have expected their hosts to accommodate their institutions to the core tenets of sharia law rather than the immigrants having to adapt to the values of Western pluralistic democracies.

Labeling critics of Islamic supremacist ideology and separatism as Islamophobes is intended to shut down rational discourse. It undermines free speech in the service of sharia law. Trevor Phillips learned the “inconvenient truth” by rejecting the pejorative Islamophobia epithet he had once promoted. Obama has shown that he is incapable of doing the same.