Some time ago, the Wall Street Journal published an article titled “Sharia in Minnesota?”:
The land of 10,000 lakes and the welcoming attitude we call “Minnesota Nice” is becoming a window into America’s potential future. Here in Minneapolis, one of the country’s most liveable cities, Muslim activists are introducing an element that is anything but nice.
A disturbing thing happened when taxi drivers at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport – three-quarters of whom are Muslim – began refusing to transport passengers with alcohol. A woman returning from France with wine was turned away by five cabs in a row. Now there are 100 rejections a month, and it has sparked heated arguments.
The Metropolitan Airports Commission has proposed a pilot project with lighting to show which taxi drivers accept passengers with alcohol. The proposal, which was later rejected, would have been the first time a government agency in the US officially recognised Sharia law and distinguished between those who follow it and those who don’t.
Now, some Muslim cashiers at Target stores have begun refusing to scan pork products like bacon and pizza with salami, insisting that other cashiers or the customers themselves must do so.
These incidents suggest a broader strategy.
Minneapolis is the closest the US has come to Scandinavian social democracy, a far northern social project with bike paths, recycled materials and norms of civility, a welfare nirvana where the forced marriage between Islam and the Western way of life is consummated.
In Minneapolis, the Trump administration has just dealt a major blow to illegal immigration, and a double tragedy has taken place. The media’s doxa shows us only good immigrants and activists against the evil president. The story is a little more complicated.
Two years ago, the state of Minnesota introduced its new flag.
“Minnesota has been conquered and is now Islamist,” proclaimed Jacqueline Toboroff, the head of Manhattan Press. “They have replaced the Christian British, Irish, Germans, Scandinavians and Native Americans who have been on the flag since 1858.
Gone are the European settlers who drained the marshes and built civilisation with their hard-working hands and wooden churches. Replaced by an abstract pattern that looks like it’s taken from an Islamic prayer rug.
Since then, Minneapolis became the first city in the US to have Islamic prayer calls five times a day starting at 5am. Subsequently, the city voted unanimously to change its noise ordinance.
Progressivism is imbued with an ethical relativism that draws on thinkers such as Derrida and Foucault, confuses tolerance and submission, and allows pre-modern religious norms to dictate the rhythm of public coexistence.
It’s a Trojan horse strategy, with multiculturalism at the forefront.
In its universalist hubris, the West imports incompatible paradigms in the belief that liberal democracy can digest everything, like an omnivorous colossus.
Trump recently took to the podium at the World Economic Forum in Davos to declare that Western civilisation must defend itself against an existential assault:
“The situation in Minnesota reminds us that the West cannot import masses of alien cultures that have never managed to build a successful society. The explosion of prosperity and progress that has built the West does not stem from our tax cuts. Ultimately, it is due to our unique culture. This is the precious heritage that the US and Europe share.”
Somali activist and author Ayaan Hirsi Ali has said: “The situation in Minnesota reveals a hostile agenda to transform and Islamise the United States using American institutions and the American vocabulary of civil rights.”
Long a haven for progressives (Minnesota was the only state not to vote for Reagan in 1984), the city was radicalised after George Floyd was killed here in May 2020. Riots, demands to stop funding the police and a wave of violence have transformed the city’s image as a social democratic paradise into an urban nightmare. Since the mid-2010s, homicides have increased by 110 per cent.
Minneapolis has a new nickname: “Murderapolis”.
The Somali community – 10 per cent of the total Minneapolis population, according to the American Community Survey – meanwhile, has had a decisive influence on elections. These migrants – fleeing civil war in the 1990s and then jihadist chaos in the 2000s – have built a new life in the skyscrapers of Cedar-Riverside, a neighbourhood also known as the “West Bank” because of its location along the Mississippi River.
Minnesota has been at the centre of a scandal for months surrounding services provided to help the elderly, addicts, disabled and mentally ill find housing. Somali NGOs have stolen hundreds of millions of dollars from the welfare budget.
In one case, they recruited children of Somali parents for autism treatment, even though the child had no autism diagnosis, creating false entitlement claims. The parents received monthly bribes of between $300 and $1,500 per child.
Some of the funds ended up in the hands of al-Shabaab, a group in Somalia affiliated with Al-Qaeda, with the result that the good, tolerant and generous taxpayers of Minnesota ended up as the main sponsors of the terrorist organisation.
This isn’t banal corruption, it’s an asymmetrical economic war that the clans wage with public funds from the state that harbours them.
In Minneapolis, patrols have also appeared on the street enforcing sharia: no alcohol, no drugs, no mixing of the sexes.
Here, sharia didn’t come with proclamations from the caliph, but with cashiers at Target refusing to touch bacon, taxi drivers dumping ladies with bottles of Bordeaux as if they were radioactive, night patrols checking the pavements to stop men and women looking at each other too long.
As Barbara Jordan – an African-American congresswoman and civil rights pioneer who chaired the Clinton-era Commission on Immigration Reform – has said, assimilation stops when the numbers grow: When they make up 1 or 2 per cent, you can integrate them, but when they pass 10 to 20 per cent, society implodes. And when immigrant communities can import their relatives en masse through the so-called family preference programme, the result is ghettoised enclaves where newcomers can pretend they still live at home, only with cooler climates and generous welfare schemes.
That’s why Denmark, which liberals only like when it goes against Trump on Greenland, has announced that it will limit the number of “non-Western” residents in neighbourhoods with high immigrant densities. Too many non-Western foreigners “increase the risk of parallel religious and cultural communities”. The Danish government has classified 30 suburbs as predominantly inhabited by foreigners of the Muslim faith.
Minneapolis came to the attention of US intelligence because of the first wave of Americans who joined al-Shabab, al-Qaeda’s Somali franchise. This is where the first American suicide bomber, Shirwa Ahmed, came from. Douglas McCain, the first American to be killed while fighting for the Islamic State (IS), had studied in New Hope, not far from Minneapolis. There were also three terrorists from Minnesota in the commando group that in 2013 laid siege to the Westgate Mall in Nairobi, killing 67 people. The largest contingent of American volunteers to ISIS departed from Minneapolis.
Meanwhile, the St. John’s Catholic Church in Minneapolis is now a mosque.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who is of Somali origin, recently explained that clan cultures do not merge in the American melting pot. They replicate, lock themselves in, suck up resources and wait for the host to weaken so they can take over. She writes:
What’s happening in Minnesota can’t be understood without recognising a hard truth: Some cultures arrive intact, they don’t dissolve upon contact with modern society, and they don’t gently adapt. They replicate themselves.
Somali society is organised around the clan. Loyalty is not abstract or civic. It is biological and binding. The individual exists only to the extent that it serves the group. Protection, marriage, honour, silence and punishment are regulated by this code. Obligations flow inwards, sanctions downwards. The clan comes before the individual and outlives it.
This structure is pre-modern, but also anti-modern. It resists the same conditions that make liberal societies work: individual responsibility, transparency, impersonal law and trust that goes beyond kinship. Ernest Gellner warned that a modern nation-state cannot be built on tribal loyalty. Tribalism fragments authority and dissolves shared obligations. Where it persists, institutions decay.
These dynamics are not unique to Minnesota. The same patterns are found wherever clan-based cultures are transplanted into advanced welfare states: Sweden, the Netherlands, the UK … The logic is consistent. Take what you can get and move on when the host is bankrupt. This is adaptation in its purest form. But it is fundamentally incompatible with modern civilised life, which is based on social trust rather than blood ties.
Irish, Italians, Jews and others did not give in to their differences. They slowly, painfully and unevenly, but successfully, adapted to the American way of life. Their Old World identities were not erased overnight, but subordinated to a common social philosophy that required them to speak English, work hard and be loyal to our country’s social institutions. America was not built by preserving all foreign cultures, but by insisting that no foreign culture could remain sovereign.
Pre-modern cultures were then reframed as pure, enriching and victimised – a modern rebirth of the myth of the noble savage. Internal defects were overlooked, and illiberal practices were justified. To criticise meant to betray. Tolerance slipped into acquiescence, and acquiescence into surrender.
This leads us to the convergence we are now seeing: Somali clan structures, institutions linked to the Muslim Brotherhood and the Democratic Party. Multiculturalism has made this alliance possible.
This is where the Muslim Brotherhood comes in. [It focuses first on taking over the institutions, then the language and finally the law. The goal is not immediate domination, but normalisation, demographic influence and ultimately conquest.
Minnesota has a dense network of Islamic councils and pressure groups dominated by Somali leadership. At the national level, this pattern is spreading.
Ayaan’s essay is one of the few that attempts to bring out truths forbidden by media doctrine.
The recent actions of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are not in line with the American dream. But if Minneapolis is where they want to realise a new version of the American dream, I don’t think it will end well. Here, Islam is not imposed by force, it creeps in through rights, adaptations and demographics. “Minnesota Nice” tolerates, welcomes, modifies norms so as not to offend, perseveres – but at what cost?
Minneapolis has become the trophy of an ideological capitulation: the most “inclusive” city in the US is the most segregated, the most infiltrated by Islamist networks and the most riddled by welfare fraud.
But the liberals complaining about ICE won’t talk about this.
If Minneapolis represents the avant-garde of anything, the rest of the US and the West must choose between adapting and resisting – not Trump this time, but the destruction of ourselves.
Although I’m beginning to think that those who believe fascism is back in the West will end their days in a horrible Somali slum with full-face veils, gender segregation, prayer calls from loudspeakers mounted on old churches converted into mosques, halal slaughterhouses and NGOs with a slick facade that sucks money from taxpayers, that’s basically fine.
But when they wake up at 5am to the cries of the muezzin and Islamised schools, they need to remember that it wasn’t Trump who imposed this on them. They did that themselves. With their fake “tolerance” they handed over the keys to the city.