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A year and a half ago I moved my family from California, where I had spent my entire adult life, to Texas. We left for the same reason as hundreds of thousands of other people in recent years: the state that should be paradise on earth had become, thanks to Democrat mismanagement – intentional, some might say – a Third World cesspit where a middle-class lifestyle was affordable only for the wealthy. My wife and I chose Texas for a variety of reasons; we knew it wasn’t paradise either, but it was definitely higher ground. Now I’m beginning to wonder if we were wrong about that.

Earlier this month I, along with something like a thousand others, had been registered to attend a three-day event just outside Dallas called the Israel Summit, featuring a full lineup of notable Jewish and Christian advocates for Israel and organized by a media initiative called the Israel Guys. The venue for the event was a public space but armed security was in place and the location was kept under wraps as long as possible.

Nonetheless, a mere few days before the summit, the organizers announced that a change of venue had been forced by current events:

After the devastating attack that left two Jewish-Israelis dead in Washington D.C. two weeks ago, the security establishment in Texas began analyzing the Israel Summit…

After several days of working with law enforcement, intelligence, the governor’s office, and other political and local leaders in Texas, it became clear that we would not be able to have the Israel Summit at the original venue.

Pastor George and Terri Pearsons from Eagle Mountain International Church, a much more private location about 35 miles farther away, offered their state-of-the-art facility instead, so the event was back on. Organizers assured event-goers that they were “working with some of the best private security in America, as well as local law enforcement to ensure that this event will be completely safe.”

Shortly thereafter, however, the event was postponed indefinitely altogether due to “jihadist threats.” They must have been serious and credible enough to shut things down despite the topnotch security and more isolated venue. The fact that a gathering as innocuous as a networking event of Jews and Christian Zionists in rural Texas could draw credible, violent, Islamist threats is eyebrow-raising – until you realize just how widespread the Islamist infiltration of the Lone Star State has been.

You may recall that it was in Garland, Texas – only about a 20-minute drive northeast of Dallas – that my Freedom Center colleague Robert Spencer and frequent Center cartoonist Bosch Fawstin were among the targets of a jihadist attack, almost exactly ten years ago, at an event awarding Fawstin first prize in a free speech contest. Fawstin had dared draw Muhammad in defiance of the fundamentalist injunction against representations of the Muslim prophet, a “blasphemy” for which the entire office of the satirical Charlie Hebdo magazine was slaughtered four months earlier in Paris. Two heavily armed jihadists were taken out by Garland law enforcement before that massacre could be reenacted on Texas soil.

Texans, or at least Texas legislators, apparently didn’t take that lesson seriously enough, because in the intervening decade Islam has accelerated making inroads into the state Americans associate with a red-blooded, all-American, gun-slingin’, freedom-loving, cowboy attitude. “Don’t Mess With Texas,” as the slogan goes. But the times they are a-changin’.

Earlier this year, for example, Texas lawmakers oddly adopted a resolution, authored by Muslim Democrat Rep. Suleman Lalani, to establish March 23 as “Pakistan Day” honoring the state’s estimated 80,000 Pakistani inhabitants and “promoting diversity, inclusion, education, and the appreciation of Pakistani culture.” That day was chosen to commemorate the 1940 Lahore Resolution calling for independent Muslim states in British India. As FrontPage Mag’s Daniel Greenfield notes, in the aftermath of that resolution came

massacres of Hindus and other non-Muslims to ensure that as many areas as possible could be incorporated into the new Islamist entity.

This was followed by the Muslim League’s Direct Action Day or the Week of the Long Knives in which Muslims declared a Jihad and killed tens of thousands of people. In Calcutta, 4,000 Hindus fell to brutal Muslim violence.

Not what I would call a stellar example of diversity and inclusion. The resolution was down-voted by only a handful of Texas representatives, one of whom stated for the record that she stood with “the persecuted Christians of Pakistan” and another who rightly noted that it did not reflect the priorities of his constituents; the majority of Texas legislators, however, apparently were eager to court Muslim votes.

As for educating Texans to appreciate Pakistani culture, maybe what they really need to appreciate is the lesson Western Europeans are learning the hard way: that Islamic imperialism is “fundamentally transforming,” as Barack Obama might put it, the continent through demographic change and the gradual aggrandizement of political power.

Texans may wake up one day to find that merely telling oneself “it can’t happen here” isn’t enough. Planned Islamic communities are sprouting up all over the state – most notoriously one called EPIC City (after the East Plano Islamic Center), a $100 million, 402-acre, “Sharia-centric complex boasting 1,000 homes, a 3,200-capacity mosque, Islamic schools, clinics, and senior living, all revolving around the teachings of one of the most radical Islamic preachers in North America: Dr. Yasir Qadhi,” as FrontPage Mag’s Aynaz Anni Cyrus wrote.

That project has been stalled by Texas governor Greg Abbott, who launched investigations into EPIC City and declared that the state will allow no “sharia cities” or no-go zones, referring to reasonable concerns that such communities are future enclaves of parallel governance similar to those which are corroding major Western European cities from Paris to Stockholm.

Writers here at FrontPage Mag – Aynaz Anni Cyrus, Bruce Bawer, Clare Lopez, Robert Spencer, and Daniel Greenfield – have been reporting on such concerns for months, but are enough Texans listening? As Jihad Watch Director Spencer told anti-Islam activist Amy Mek in an interview, “Islam is political as well as religious… Texas is going to find out about it eventually, if they don’t stop these communities from growing now.”

Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior