opinion The open door and the Trojan Horse

Liberal democracy has a blind spot, and it is being exploited. The freedoms that define open societies — speech, assembly, religious accommodation — are extended to everyone, including those who do not reciprocate them. Some Islamist actors have learned to use those freedoms to build parallel institutions inside the societies that host them. This is not imagination. It is documented.

The organizations are not hidden. In Britain, the Muslim Arbitration Tribunal, founded in 2007, and the Islamic Sharia Council issue rulings on marriage, divorce, and financial disputes under the cover of the 1996 Arbitration Act — voluntary in law, but in practice binding on women who face community pressure to accept them. Hizb ut-Tahrir, which campaigns for a caliphate and the replacement of democratic government, was only proscribed in Britain in 2024 — after decades of open operation. On campuses, gender-segregated events organized by Islamic societies have been documented by students and by the Equality and Human Rights Commission. Blasphemy pressure is not theoretical: the Rushdie affair, and the Batley Grammar School protests in 2021 over a teacher showing a cartoon of Muhammad, show how quickly a minority can impose its norms on a public institution. These are not secret cells. They are organizations using the freedoms a liberal society grants them to build institutions that do not share its values.

The results are visible in Sweden and France, and they are not encouraging.

Sweden took in roughly 163,000 asylum-seekers in 2015, the highest per capita in the European Union. A decade later it has severe segregation in Malmö and Stockholm's suburbs, gang violence with one of the highest per-capita gun homicide rates in Western Europe, honor-based violence, and low employment among some migrant groups. France's banlieues produced the 2015–16 attacks, chronic antisemitism, and a laïcité conflict it has never resolved. These are failures of the integration model, not of the migrants alone — but they are failures nonetheless.

The response came late. Sweden reversed from the EU's most open immigration policy to among its strictest, and the Sweden Democrats are now the second-largest party. France has tightened its immigration law repeatedly, expelled radicals, closed mosques, and banned the abaya. Both are responding now. The question is whether the response is sufficient, and whether it arrived soon enough.

External actors amplify the problem. Qatar funds and hosts Hamas and the Taliban. Iran funds Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis, and pushes state-sanctioned antisemitism. This is not speculation; it is the documented record.

The Gulf monarchies offer a useful contrast, and it exposes a confusion on both left and right. In Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE, tribal monarchy and oil rents have produced a system that provides welfare without citizenship, stability without accountability, and religious legitimacy without democratic consent. No one would call that democratic socialism — and yet it shares one surface feature with it: the state directs a large share of the economy and provides for its citizens. The difference is everything that matters. Democratic socialists like Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani seek to change the economic constitution through elections, within the constitutional order, and answerable to voters. Islamist actors who build parallel arbitration tribunals, segregated campuses, and blasphemy pressure seek to change the social order outside the constitutional order, and not answerable to voters. These are not the same project, and the fact that both contest the status quo does not make them allies. The danger is not that democratic socialism will deliver a hybrid legal system — it won't, and neither Sanders nor Mamdani has proposed one. The danger is that conflating the two gives the Islamist project a respectability it has not earned and gives its critics a target they can knock down. A serious argument about liberal democracy's blind spot must keep the two apart.

American universities deserve the same scrutiny. Many humanities and social science departments teach Marxist and postcolonial theory not as one perspective among many but as the governing lens — and that lens shapes how faculty and students approach Israel and Palestine. Alongside it has grown a cluster of commitments — DEI bureaucracy, ideological hiring and training statements, speech codes, and a moral framework that sorts people into oppressor and oppressed — that functions as an informal orthodoxy in those departments. That framework is not neutral: it makes Palestinian advocacy the default position and casts Israel as the oppressor by definition, which is why criticism of Israel so often slides into antisemitism on campus. The results are documented: antisemitic incidents tracked by the ADL and Jewish student groups; federal civil rights complaints; and encampments and protests that, in 2024, led to the resignations of presidents at Harvard, Penn, and Columbia. These institutions admit large numbers of students from Muslim-majority countries and have become the most reliable institutional base for Palestinian advocacy in the United States. And they are insulated from consequences in ways that would be unthinkable for other institutions: accreditation is slow, boards are self-selecting, and federal funding conditions are fought in court rather than accepted. When the president of the United States pressures a university and the university's response is to hire lawyers rather than change course, that is not accountability — it is autonomy without responsibility. The blind spot is not only at the border. It is in the classroom.

The lesson is not that migration is bad, or that all immigrants are the enemy. It is that liberal democracy cannot be naive about the difference between those who want to join a society and those who want to change it from within. The open door is a strength. It is also a vulnerability. Sweden and France are learning that the hard way.