Rep. Randy Fine (R-FL) threw a social media hand grenade on Sunday, tweeting, “If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one.”
He did not mention race but his words echoed old segregationist rhetoric that lumped minorities and dogs together as though they were two types of lesser creatures. The congressman’s phrasing was provocative and it drew the sort of righteous disapproval you’d expect.
“Disgusting bigotry,” Jake Tapper, of CNN, wrote on X.
“Absolutely evil,” David French, of the New York Times, wrote.
“You disgusting pr*ck,” Piers Morgan wrote.
Rep. Fine’s ugly wording gave the commentariat permission to dismiss him as a bigot and a jerk. But he was responding to something real.
Dogs are a beloved feature of American life, cossetted and petted and treated like honored family members. Dogs live in 87 million U.S. homes. Some have their own beds; some share their owners’ beds. They are in favorite photos on shelves and in bookcases. Some owners call themselves “pet parents” of “fur babies.” This goes too far for some of us, but it indicates how dear dogs are to traditional U.S. life.
But in Islam, dogs are considered foul and unclean.
There is genuine tension here.
Rep. Fine was also not tweeting in a vacuum. He was responding to an activist colleague of New York City’s Muslim mayor Zohran Mandami.
“Finally, NYC is coming to Islam,” wrote Nerdeen Kiswani last week. “Dogs definitely have a place in society, just not as indoor pets. As we’ve said all along, they are unclean.”
Having stoked the controversy, Kiswani then ran away from it. She claimed her tweet was “obviously a joke.” This is disingenuous. Her comments were not “obviously” in jest, and there is good reason why they were taken in earnest. Islam reviles dogs. And those who advocate political Islam increasingly demand that the West sacrifice its own ways and adopt theirs.
This arrogant demand is not confined to Muslims in the United States. Over in Britain, Prime Minister Keir Starmer is toying with the idea of curtailing the ancient freedom of the British people to take their dogs on long rambles in the countryside. His stated interest is to make country life “less white,” making it more attractive to Muslims from Pakistan and Bangladesh who don’t like dogs.
Westerners have gotten used to accommodating vocal minorities, but this is not a small ask. It is a huge one. The leader of the British government contemplates interfering in a pleasure long enjoyed by the people of the land he temporarily governs to appease the sensitivities of immigrants from foreign cultures.
Think it can’t happen here?
Read Kiswani’s tweet again: “Finally, NYC is coming to Islam.”
This isn’t just about dogs.
The public has long had reservations about Islam, seeing its culture and beliefs as antithetical to U.S. values. This is not just about disliking the amplified Muslim call to prayer five times a day, although that’s important because it makes our own cities feel foreign.
It is also about fundamental differences between what is acceptable in the West and what is practiced in the Muslim world. People look abroad and see the death penalty for adultery, execution for gays, and the “honor killings” of rape victims. Then the people of the West look at their own cities and see women shrouded in burqas, fighting-aged men massed defiantly in streets praying like an army before battle, the creeping advance of Sharia law, the spread of Islamic schools, and violent protests in support of Islamist terrorism.
In the West, we are comfortable with the idea of the separation of church and state. In the U.S., indeed, we insist upon it. In Islam, there is no such separation in theory and often none or little in practice. Many Muslims say plainly — preaching it every Friday — that public policy should be based on the Koran. For centuries, they believed, and many again believe, that the peoples of Islam, the ummah, should be dedicated to conquest and the subjugation of infidels. That’s us.
Conquest is not always carried out at the point of a sword. All over the West, it’s being achieved by horrifyingly rapid immigration, invited by subsidies offered by welfare states. The scale of this problem is increasingly apparent. Japan and Italy are taking action. Both have lately acknowledged the danger and are acting to protect their cultures and traditional ways.
DEMOCRATS ARE OVERREACHING ON IMMIGRATION
It is harder for an assimilationist country such as the U.S. to recognize the danger, but as long as Islamists see our society gripped by suicidal tolerance, they will know that we lack the will to resist.
A high-placed Islamist in New York City advanced the idea that it is gross to keep a dog as an indoor pet. Whatever you think of a U.S. congressman allowing himself to be baited and clumsily trolling her for what she wrote, it is she who put the idea out there in the first place. It was she, in the triumph of Mamdani’s unprecedented election victory, who decided it was a good moment for an activist Muslim to poke Americans in the eye once again.