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The summer of 2025 has seen militant Islam make two large advances on the world stage.
The first advance was the Egyptian state’s takeover of a 1500-year-old Orthodox Christian monastery at the foot of Mt. Sinai where Moses received the Ten Commandments, followed by the election of 33-year-old anti-Semitic militant Islamist and failed rapper, Zohran Mamdani, as the Democrat candidate for mayor of New York City.
Militant Islam in the desert of Egypt is one thing, but when it threatens to turn the world’s greatest city into a super-magnified Dearborn, Michigan, it’s time to sound the alarm bells.
Barring an act of God, Mamdani will become that city’s 111th mayor in the fall.
Mamdani campaigned on multiple kitchen-table issues like free transportation, affordable housing, government-run grocery stores, the right of illegal aliens to defy ICE, and the promotion of the transitioning of children. Mamdani’s father is a Marxist scholar at Columbia University; his mother an Indian filmmaker.
Mamdani’s victory can be traced to support from white progressives, not people of color or even Jews, who make up 11% of the city’s population.
Rod Dreher, in a piece entitled “Big Apple Intifada,” had this to say about Mamdani’s victory:
If you look at the NYT map, you’ll see that the parts of the city that voted Mamdani are the whitest, those that voted Cuomo are, for the most part, the most non-white-except Long Island, which is suburban white (and went Cuomo), and the parts of Staten Island that are closest to Manhattan. Note too that the Upper East Side and the Upper West Side — the wealthiest and, in the case of the West Side, the most Jewish, neighborhoods — also went Cuomo.
The New York leftists who supported Mamdani were undoubtedly like most progressive revolutionaries: non-religious.
They view Islam through a non-theological lens as if it were on a par with Unitarianism. The left’s predominate agnosticism or atheism prevents its adherents from understanding the differences between Islam, Christianity or Judaism as anything but a superficial element of style.
As one young white female New Yorker responded when asked why she voted for Mamdani, “He was the only candidate completely clean of sexual abuse scandals.”
The complexities — and dangers — of militant Islam apparently never occurred to her as a possible reason not to vote for Mamdani. Like many of her twenty-something peers, she’s obviously clueless when it comes to elementary differences between Islam and Christianity, especially as noted by French Scholar Sylvain Gougueheim when he wrote, “From Christ, who refuses to punish the adulteress woman by stoning, one turns to see Mohammed ordering, in the same circumstances, the putting to death of the unfaithful woman. One cannot follow Jesus and Mohammed.”
‘If Islam is not political, it is nothing,” said the Ayatollah Khomeini.
This is certainly true of Islam throughout the Middle East where radical Islamist tendencies may lie dormant for a while before resurfacing as a violent reminder that Islamists do not call themselves “terrorists” but rather true believers in what Islam formally teaches.
As James V. Schall, S.J. noted in his book, On Islam:
They can point to chapter and verse, amidst conflicting chapters and verses. They laugh at us and are delighted that we do not take them seriously. They know the advantage that our ignorance and inability to say what they are gives them… They reject any notion that they are killing just for the sake of killing. No, they are carrying out a ‘mission’ assigned by Allah to all of Islam, backed, in their minds, by Qur’anic passages and a historical tradition of conquest.
The Egyptian State’s seizure of St. Catherine’s Monastery at Mount Sinai is a good example of Islamists carrying out a mission.
The monastery previously enjoyed broad autonomy within the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem. Its roots can be traced to 330 AD when the Byzantine empress Helena had a small chapel and a living space built for hermits beside what was thought to be the burning bush from which God spoke to Moses.
In the sixth century, the site was converted to a monastery by Emperor Justinian. The monastery was even visited by Mohammed and over the centuries had the protection of Arab and Turkish leaders. A small mosque was built inside the monastery walls-the Fatimid mosque-for use by Muslim guards as a protection against early jihadist factions who threatened the monastery with armed attacks.
Managed by some twenty monks at the time of its capture, St. Catherine’s is home to priceless manuscripts, icons, relics, and libraries. Although the Egyptian state still permits the monks to live at the monastery, their tenure is questionable and the Muslim Brotherhood-led government of Egypt could announce further changes at any time.
Archbishop Damianos of Sinai, the Abbot of the Monastery of Saint Catherine, stated that the Egyptian court ruling considers him and the entire Sinai Brotherhood as “squatters,” disregarding their fifteen-century-long presence there.
“The authorities, particularly the Antiquities Service, tell us that yes, you may use them, but they belong to us. And only belatedly did they realize that it is we who have safeguarded these treasures—by our own labor, our own efforts, and our own resources—from the sixth century to the present. Now they say we have no right to manage them.”
Egypt, it must be remembered, is under Sharia law and regards Christians as second-class citizens.
In Egypt, if you have a Christian-sounding name, you are not likely going to get into the best universities. Even simple job postings in Egyptian newspapers often state that Christians need not apply.
While there have been no beheadings of Coptic Christians in Egypt in recent years, in neighboring Libya in 2015 there was the infamous martyrdom of 21 Christian contractors who were murdered because they refused to convert to Islam.
During the Obama presidency when those 21 Martyrs were ordered to kneel on an obscure stretch of beach along the Mediterranean coast so their blood would easily flow into the sea, the news media reported the victims as Egyptian citizens, not Coptic Christians.
Also at this time Obama was using ‘ISIL’ (The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) for ‘ISIS’ (Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham.)
Obama’s word games seemed to downplay Islam’s connection to terrorism. “ISIL is not ‘Islamic’ … and ISIL is certainly not a state,” Obama said in a September 2014 speech about the terrorist organization.
Syria, before the civil war in 2011, had a 10% Christian population. Today that number is about 500,000, which can be attributed to continued persecution of Syrian Christians by ISIS.
Recall the June 2025 suicide bombing of a Greek Orthodox Church in Damascus during Sunday services, killing 25 people.
Anywhere you look in the Middle East — except Israel — it’s the same story: persecution of Christians.
Iran provides formal protection to Christians in its Constitution but often what exists on paper in Islamic countries rarely translates to everyday life. Christian churches are regularly raided in Iran and those Christians who have converted from Islam are put into prison.
From Mt. Sinai to New York City, “Islam will and must always seek to expand, to submit everyone to its law,” as James V. Schall notes.