Filling in for Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer, Jeanne Ives and Jim Iuorio reacted to remarks from Texas Congressman Keith Self, who addressed a McKinney, Texas city council considering the construction of a fourth mosque in the area. Self, a co-founder along with Rep. Chip Roy of the Sharia Free America Caucus in Congress, argued that political Islam represents a legal and political order incompatible with the U.S. Constitution, citing cases of child grooming gangs in the United Kingdom, honor killings, and preachers he said have promoted sedition from pulpits in the United States. He urged the council to reject the mosque proposal, framing the moment as a test of the council members’ oaths to uphold the Constitution.
Ives and Iuorio said Self’s warnings track with writing from Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who has argued that political Islam functions not merely as a faith but as a legal order and ideology tied to the military campaigns of the Prophet Muhammad, and that it is fundamentally incompatible with the U.S. Constitution. Iuorio said he wanted to explore the topic further, framing his own understanding of religious evangelism, which he practices as a Christian, against what he described as a more coercive form of religious expansion associated with political Islam.
To discuss the topic, the hosts brought on Liel Leibovitz, editor at large for Tablet Magazine and host of the Rootless podcast, who recently wrote about security failures following an attack near a New York synagogue. Leibovitz, who described himself as an immigrant from Israel, said he came to the United States because he views it as the greatest country in the history of the world, and that he sees a sharp distinction between immigrants who assimilate into American culture and those who seek to import the laws and customs of the countries they left. He argued that when newcomers instead attempt to impose their own legal or cultural systems, that dynamic becomes a serious problem, one he said frequently traces back to Islamist ideology in particular.
Ives raised examples from Illinois, including halal meal requirements in schools and organizing by Muslim civic groups seeking majority-Muslim voting districts. Leibovitz responded by citing recent FBI data showing roughly 200 reported religiously motivated hate incidents against Muslims nationwide in 2025, including minor incidents such as harassing phone calls, a figure he contrasted with far higher numbers of reported antisemitic incidents over the same period. He offered what he called a simple framework for evaluating immigration: assimilation without adaptation to a host country’s laws and culture, paired with an effort to gain political and cultural power instead, amounts to invasion rather than immigration.
Asked who benefits from the spread of these ideas in the U.S., Leibovitz pointed first to foreign governments, citing Qatar’s funding of school curricula in American universities, high schools and elementary schools, including a Qatar-funded curriculum in New York City schools that he said shapes how students think about the country. He also pointed to the Democratic Party, which he argued has largely abandoned belief in American exceptionalism in favor of a grievance-based political message. He cited Illinois Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Juliana Stratton’s campaign messaging attacking Donald Trump as an example of a party running on opposition to Trump rather than a positive vision, and referenced Islamist activity ahead of the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, including a session in the basement of a Teamsters hall where he said attendees were taught to chant anti-American slogans in Arabic.
Leibovitz traced the roots of the current political moment back to Barack Obama, whom he credited with popularizing the idea that American exceptionalism should give way to a more universalist view of the country’s place in the world. He argued the best response is not to focus on culture-war fights but to tell a compelling, affirmative story about American achievement, which he said will outcompete what he characterized as an Islamist narrative built on grievance and hostility toward the West.
Asked whether recent political figures such as New York mayoral candidates Zohran Mamdani and Abdul El-Sayed have prompted more public scrutiny of these issues, Leibovitz said he believes Americans are increasingly recognizing what he described as a “red-green alignment” between far-left and Islamist ideology, one he said is ultimately directed not just at Israel or Jewish communities but at the American way of life itself. He closed by drawing a comparison to Jewish immigrants who arrived in the U.S. with socialist or communist sympathies in the early twentieth century and ultimately adapted to the country’s capitalist framework, arguing that the same expectation of adaptation should apply today, and that some ideologies, in his view, remain incompatible with American constitutional life.