Shabbat shalom.
In his latest dispatch, the usually calm and grounded analyst, Andrew Fox, recounts being shocked by a WhatsApp message from a friend: Jewish Israelis had been banned from attending a soccer match in Britain. One minute they were heading to the stadium, the next they were told no entry “for safety reasons.” The official line: public order. The subtext: Jewish fans weren’t protected; they were excluded.
For Fox, it wasn’t just a sports story. It was a turning point. That WhatsApp exchange forced a deeper reckoning: how did Britain, cradle of fair play and free expression, reach a point where Jews are told to stay home, and the system shrugs? He puts it bluntly:
“How the hell did we get here? How did the country of Wellington, Nelson and Churchill reach the point where Islamist gangs dictate who goes where? How did the nation, whose under-siege hearts rose to the roar of a Spitfire’s Merlin engine, reach the point where British men and women of Jewish faith debate how best to attend a sporting event in safety?”
His conclusion was stark. This wasn’t an accident or an isolated act of cowardice. It was the end stage of something long in motion: the infiltration of Islamism into the civic bloodstream of Western democracies. Not the violent strain that detonates bombs, but the bureaucratic strain that files motions, drafts bylaws, and claims “equity” as it erodes equality.
I think he’s right. We are watching a slow-motion coup play out in the open. Not with bombs, but bylaws. Not with jihadists, but joiners. Islamism has learned what the Soviets never could: that the fastest way to destroy a liberal democracy isn’t to attack it from without, but to burrow in, speak its language, file its paperwork, and sue it for “discrimination” when anyone notices. And the West, self-congratulatory, guilt-ridden, and addicted to the narcotic of tolerance, keeps holding the door open.
We built the perfect system for the patient subversive: a society that elevates process over prudence, speech over judgment, compassion over courage. That’s what made it great, and now unfortunately, what now makes it defenseless. The modern Islamist doesn’t need to hijack planes; he hijacks institutions. He joins the school board, opens a “human-rights” NGO, and learns to weaponize the West’s allergy to offense.
Britain’s security services now call this the “lawful but corrosive” threat: activism that stays inside the legal lines but eats away at liberal foundations like rust under paint. After decades of denial, the UK finally faced reality in 2024 when it rewrote its definition of extremism. No longer limited to violence, it now includes movements that “undermine, overturn, or replace the UK’s system of liberal parliamentary democracy.” Translation: you don’t have to blow up Parliament to destroy it. You just have to make it irrelevant.
Groups like Hizb ut-Tahrir, banned across much of the Middle East, operated legally in Britain for years, holding rallies, publishing manifestos, training activists to argue that democracy itself was haram. They did it all under the banner of free speech, and only this year were they finally proscribed, after radicalizing a generation under the radar. For decades, Western governments treated such movements as fringe sideshows. But as Britain’s Prevent program now reports record levels of radicalization, it’s clear: the playbook was hiding in plain sight.
Sweden, once the global symbol of humanitarian virtue, is learning the same hard lesson. A 2025 French government report revealed how the Muslim Brotherhood built networks across Swedish schools, mosques, and charities, turning the country’s tolerance into a vulnerability. Sweden’s prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, put it bluntly: “We’ve allowed actors to use our freedoms to spread hatred.” The government has now launched an inquiry into Islamist infiltration and is moving to ban foreign extremist funding. It’s the right move, decades late.
Across the globe, Australia’s intelligence chief Mike Burgess is saying out loud what most Western leaders won’t: groups like Hizb ut-Tahrir and neo-Nazis are “two sides of the same extremist coin.” Both exploit democracy’s open spaces to erode it from within. Both rely on intimidation masked as activism. And both count on liberal societies to be too polite, too guilt-ridden, or too distracted to call them out. “Open societies,” Burgess warned in his 2025 security address, “are being used by those who would close them.” Australia is now considering listing Hizb ut-Tahrir as a terrorist organization, finally acknowledging that the absence of violence does not mean the absence of threat.
And then there’s the United States, still convinced it’s immune to the maladies that have already infected its allies. We tell ourselves that the First Amendment is a shield strong enough to protect us from ideologues who see “rights” as blasphemy. But look around. The ADL reports the highest number of antisemitic incidents in American history. On campuses, Jewish faculty and students are boycotted, hounded, and doxxed under the guise of “activism.” Muslim Brotherhood-linked organizations, some cloaked as civil-rights groups or humanitarian charities, use America’s nonprofit system to fundraise, recruit, and mainstream Islamist narratives.
This isn’t paranoia; it’s pattern recognition. The Brotherhood’s strategy, refined over decades, is simple: build a web of legitimate-looking civic and educational institutions, use them to shape public opinion, and gradually shift the moral vocabulary of the country toward sharia-based norms. Germany’s domestic intelligence service calls Islamism “an essential ideological current aimed at abolishing the free democratic basic order.” In America, we call it “community engagement.”
The visible part of this threat, the protests, the antisemitic slogans and violence, the occasional terror plot, is just the tip of the iceberg. Beneath the surface lies something far more sophisticated: organizational capture, where charities and civic groups become vehicles for illiberal activism; funding pipelines, where Western aid finds its way into Islamist coffers; narrative warfare, where “Islamophobia” becomes a bludgeon to silence dissent; and institutional paralysis, where universities, media, and governments freeze for fear of being labeled intolerant. This is how democracies die now, not with coups, but with compliance.
And if you wonder where the money comes from, follow the trail east to Doha. Qatar, that glittering hub of contradictions, isn’t just hosting World Cups and luxury real estate expos; it’s bankrolling Islamist-aligned networks across Europe and the West. Between 2004 and 2019, Qatar distributed over $1 billion to 288 organizations in Europe alone, many with links to the Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliates. Its state-backed Qatar Charity financed mosques, schools, and cultural centers later flagged by European intelligence agencies as hotbeds of Islamist separatism. According to research by ISGAP, “substantial Middle Eastern funding (primarily from Qatar)” has flowed into U.S. universities creating influence vectors. At nearly $6 billion into American higher education since 1981, with hundreds of millions more coursing through U.S. lobbying firms, the scale of Qatar’s investment in America’s civic infrastructure is now impossible to ignore.
This is not old-school covert terror-funding. It’s open, structural, formalized — another illustration of the “lawful but corrosive” threat. None of this is underground, it’s happening under the halo of philanthropy, precisely because the soft caliphate thrives on the plausible deniability of benevolence. Ignore the funding stream and you miss the method.
The examples we can see are fragments of a much larger structure. Underneath is a coordinated ideological movement with global funding, digital strategy, and a patience honed over centuries. We are not facing lone radicals but a multinational political theology with an MBA in Western governance. And if we don’t confront it now, our descendants won’t just inherit rising antisemitism, they’ll inherit a civilization that still calls itself “free,” but only in the nostalgic sense.
Substack writer RtS calls it a “global Caliphate.” I’d add the adjective soft—because this isn’t conquest by force, but by form. It’s a Caliphate not imposed by sword, but by structure. Not declared, but implied. Not the terroristic fantasy of ISIS, but the bureaucratic reality of institutional capture, from London borough councils to New York classrooms to Stockholm’s welfare programs. The genius of this strategy is that it uses our own moral vocabulary, “justice, equality, inclusion”, as camouflage. It teaches Western liberals to confuse tolerance with surrender.
The Western woke mind, conditioned to see oppression only through the lens of colonialism, can’t process the idea that anti-colonial movements can themselves become colonizers of the spirit. And so the soft Caliphate grows, unopposed, funded by our taxes and defended by our journalists.
We can still stop it, but only if we reclaim the moral confidence that built the West in the first place. We must end government partnerships with organizations that reject liberal democracy in their charters or leadership. Free speech is sacred, but it doesn’t entitle anyone to a taxpayer subsidy. We must cut off foreign funding for extremist-linked religious institutions. We must draw red lines between faith and theocratic activism, and defend those who stand on the front lines—Jews, women’s-rights advocates, ex-Muslims, reformist imams. They’re the canaries in this democratic coal mine, and when they fall silent, the air’s already gone bad.
And let’s address the obvious attack head-on: this isn’t Islamophobia. It’s evidence. To criticize an ideology is not to condemn a people. The Muslim world, in all its diversity, contains millions who reject this totalitarian strain, many of them its first victims. The problem isn’t faith, it’s the political weaponization of faith. Liberal societies survive only when they can tell the difference. To conflate legitimate scrutiny with bigotry is to abandon reason itself, and reason, not sentiment, is what separates civilization from chaos.
Moral clarity is not hate speech; it’s self-defense. To say that Islamism is not Islam, that it is a totalitarian political movement masquerading as faith, is not prejudice, it’s precision. If we can’t speak plainly about that distinction, then our silence is already surrender.
The petard we designed to hang tyranny has been turned against us. Our tolerance has become the weapon of our undoing. We have mistaken restraint for virtue and allowed fanaticism to hide behind its mask. The West was built on the courage to say no—to kings, to popes, to dogmas. If we’ve forgotten how, we’d better relearn fast. Because the soft Caliphate doesn’t need to conquer us; it just needs us to keep apologizing for existing.
And when that happens, when our rights become our ropes, it won’t matter whether we call it sharia or shame. Either way, we’ll have hung ourselves.
That’s all for the week. Stay healthy everyone, and be safe out there.
Brad out.
Jew News Review 