Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has temporarily blocked the construction of EPIC City, a Muslim planned community to be located about 40 miles northeast of Dallas.
This is a temporary setback for efforts to create Muslim enclaves in the American heartland.
At a cost of $100 million, the 402-acre site would have included 1,000 single and multifamily dwellings, a K-12 school, a community college, a sports facility, a shopping center and a mega mosque. The mosque already exists and was to be the nucleus of EPIC City.
Abbott didn’t mince words. There will be no “self-segregated” communities based on Shariah law in the Lone Star State, he declared. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Sen. John Cornyn concurred.
Residents of nearby Collins, Texas, said EPIC City would have strained the water supply and that calls to prayer and Arabic music broadcast over loudspeakers might have put residents on edge.
The Council on American Islamic Relations, which masquerades as a civil rights group, called Mr. Abbott’s move “bigoted and baseless.” CAIR said the same thing about opposition to in-your-face plans to build a mosque two blocks from the site of the World Trade Center attack.
The mosque’s “scholar in residence,” Yasir Qadhi, rejects any form of government that doesn’t adhere to the political principles of Islam: theocracy and contempt for civil liberties.
Mr. Qadhi praises the Taliban, calls democracy “illegitimate,” says Christians are “filthy polytheists” whose lives “hold no value” and that Muslims will kill Jews in the “end times.” Not that they’re doing a bad job of it right now; witness the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre in Israel.
According to promotional material, EPIC City was to be a “meticulously designed community that brings Islam to the forefront.”
Developers said homes will be sold only to those who “contribute to the overall makeup of the community.” In other words, infidels need not apply.
If you’re wondering what EPIC City would have looked like, there’s a model 1,200 miles to the north in Dearborn, Michigan, America’s first Muslim-majority city. The Wall Street Journal calls Dearborn the “Jihad Capital” of the United States.
In July, at a Shiite ceremony at the Islamic House of Worship in adjacent Dearborn Heights, another resident Islamic scholar, Hussain Al-Nashed, praised Hezbollah and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, founder of Iran’s Islamic republic.
Shouts of “Death to America” are frequently heard at pro-Palestinian protests in Dearborn. A video of an event hosted by the Palestinian Youth Movement showed participants pledging to sacrifice themselves “to end this American empire.”
EPIC City was to be another part of the same far-reaching scheme. Similar communities are planned for Aubrey, Texas, near Denton, and Blue Ridge, Texas.
The source of funding for these projects, hundreds of millions of dollars, is unclear. Perhaps the same oil-rich Gulf states that fund university Islamic Studies Departments, which help sow campus chaos.
Each community is to be a base of Islamic expansion in America.
If we’re not careful, our cities could end up looking like Malmo, Sweden, and the Paris suburbs with their no-go zones and grooming gangs.
On New Year’s Day, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, a Texan who was inspired by the Islamic State, drove a truck into a crowd on New Orleans’ Bourbon Street, killing 14 and wounding 57. It was the deadliest such attack since the 2016 Pulse nightclub shootings in Orlando, Florida (49 dead, 53 wounded).
The EPIC City site is less than 200 miles from Fort Hood, Texas, where Army psychiatrist Nidal Hasan, inspired by the tenets of radical Islam, killed 13 soldiers in 2009.
According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, there were 140 jihadi attacks and conspiracies from Jan. 1, 1994, and Jan. 1, 2025. All were carried out by adherents of the ideology behind EPIC City and similar planned communities. Instead of bombs and bullets, here the weapons of choice are homes, mosques and schools.
Except for the Russia-Ukraine war and the China-Taiwan struggle, every major conflict in the world involves Muslims and someone else: Jews, Druze, Christians, Hindus and Buddhists. In Nigeria, Christian villagers are being systematically slaughtered by the Islamist Boko Haram, a process repeated throughout sub-Saharan Africa.
This is an extension of a world war that has raged since the seventh century.
Colonization is as much a part of jihad as terrorist attacks. We could go to sleep in America one night and wake up as part of the Muslim Ummah.
This column was first published at the Washington Times.
