In cities across the West, the pavement has become a stage for a specific, assertive religious claim.
On Feb. 20, Times Square was filled with men kneeling shoulder to shoulder on prayer rugs for Ramadan’s nightly Taraweeh prayers. New York City’s most famous intersection, a place meant for commerce and tourism, had become a place for religious ritual, as it has since 2022.
So the race everyone said was too close to call wasn’t so close after all. The Green Party’s Hannah Spencer has won the Gorton and Denton by-election with 14,980 votes, nearly 41 per cent of all those cast in the Greater Manchester seat. Meanwhile, Reform UK has pushed a flailing Labour Party into third place, taking 10,578 votes to Labour’s 9,364. That noise you can hear in the background is blood vessels bursting in Downing Street.
The 2025 Veiligheidsmonitor survey of the Dutch central statistical office (CBS) reveals a troubling shift in the Netherlands as 37% of respondents now report feeling unsafe at least occasionally, a rise from 33% in 2019. This increase marks the end of a 20-year downward trend in perceived unsafety. Young women aged 15 to 25 are disproportionately affected, with 60% reporting feeling unsafe at times—more than double the 27% seen in their male peers.
The murderous gunman who shot up a Texas bar in a possible terrorist attack had an Iranian flag and photos of Islamic Republic leaders in his home, according to a report.
Senegalese national Ndiaga Diagne, 53, may have been motivated by the joint attack by Israel and the US when he pulled up to Buford’s Backyard Beer Garden in Austin on Sunday wearing a “Property of Allah” shirt and started shooting, killing two people and wounding 14 others, officials have said.
“Europe will only be able to manage its relationship with Muslim communities more effectively if it honestly acknowledges its own Christian identity.”
Sohrab Ahmari, editor of UnHerd U.S. and one of the most influential conservative essayists in the Anglo-American debate today, spoke to europeanconservative.com during the Budapest Global Dialogue, addressing a vital question for the West: Which values can sustain its future at a time of cultural fragmentation, demographic crisis, and transatlantic tensions?
In The Triumph of the Normal, Ahmari argues that, despite decades of cultural engineering and social experimentation, there is a “deep normality” that reappears time and again: religion, family, domestic life, meaningful work, and political belonging.
The woman who was jailed and threatened with stoning for wearing a T-shirt saying ‘Allah is a lesbian’ now faces having her arm amputated as her health continues to deteriorate in Moroccan prison.
Ibtissame ‘Betty’ Lachgar, a feminist activist, was jailed last September and sentenced to two and a half years in prison for a Facebook post in which she wore the garment, on the grounds that it was ‘offensive to Islam’.
The 50-year-old campaigner is a bone cancer survivor with a prothesis between her left shoulder and elbow, and has sustained a fractured elbow during her time so far in Salé prison, located on the outskirts of Rabat.
What started as a debate over dogs begs a vital question.
Florida Congressman Randy Fine got into a fight with New York Palestinian activist and Mamdami advisor Nerdeen Kiswani over dog poop in the NYC snow emergency. This culminated in Fine saying words to the effect that, given the choice between Muslims and dogs, he’d choose dogs, igniting a political firestorm that has some in Congress calling for Fine’s resignation or expulsion. This is one of those seemingly frivolous things that seem to break out in the slow news days of August and February, when weather extremes make tempers short. However, it brings to the surface once again the clash of cultures between the Muslim world and the West, and raises the specific question of how much loyalty devout Muslims can give to the U.S. Constitution when they are seeking citizenship.
Gone are the days when the Green Party’s main concern was the Ozone layer. Ahead of today’s Gorton and Denton by-election, the Greens distributed leaflets and videos in Urdu urging voters to “punish Labour for Gaza”. Their keffiyeh-wearing candidate, Hannah Spencer, also says that a vote for her will “stop Islamophobia”.
It is shameless pandering to the Pakistani community, which is approximately 20 per cent of the population of Gorton and Denton. The strategy may be a shock for some but it shouldn’t be a surprise. In the 2024 local elections, a Green councillor celebrated his victory in the Gipton and Harehills ward in Leeds with a cry of “Allahu Akbar”, adding: “We will not be silenced. We will raise the voice of Gaza. We will raise the voice of Palestine.”
IF MEMORY serves it would have been the General Election campaign of 2005. I was sitting in the living room of Dewsbury businessman Iftikhar Azam, discussing serious allegations about the activities of Labour’s MP-in-waiting, Shahid Malik. I recall this not out of fondness for multi-cultural nostalgia, but in the context of Reform UK’s determination to ban the Muslim face covering – the niqab.
Malik – currently on trial for a £6.3million covid fraud which he denies – would go on to be a junior Labour minister before he was disgraced in the MPs’ expenses scandal. Defeated Tory candidate Sayeeda Hussain-Warsi would instead be fast-tracked to Westminster by Michael Howard as Baroness Warsi of Dewsbury and later elevated to the first Cabinet of David Cameron.
Normally local by-elections in Britain are nothing for non-British people to care about. But I want you readers, most of whom are not Britons, to understand what just happened in the UK. It signals nothing less than perhaps the beginning of the end of British democracy, and the germination of the seeds of civil war. This is a sign.
@fancypants_s https://t.co/lzmEJjo7m6
— Patti Jo (@TheSupeHero) February 27, 2026
@fancypants_s https://t.co/wh7ZS1YMjp
— Patti Jo (@TheSupeHero) February 27, 2026
I’ve woken to the news that the Muslim party has won the Gorton by election. Voted by block Muslim votes. That, my friends, is a taste of how the general election will be a landslide for Muslims and the final descent of this country into a third world disaster zone. I’ve got my… pic.twitter.com/oZtsYnAaMp
— Alastair Hilton (@London_W4) February 27, 2026
h/t Patti Jo
Actor James Woods took Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Democrats to the woodshed after they heckled and protested President Donald Trump’s first State of the Union address on Tuesday night.
An asylum seeker who sexually assaulted two women at their homes while delivering their takeaways has been jailed.
Shafiullah Rasooli, an Afghan national, was charged with three counts of sexual assault and was convicted following a trial at Sevenoaks Magistrates’ Court.
The 29-year-old, who is based in Maidstone, Kent, was sentenced to two-and-a-half years imprisonment for ‘wickedly and unfathomably’ molesting his victims while reportedly illegally working for Deliveroo.
And this number is greatly underreported. Actual numbers are much worse. https://t.co/odHatmIPfP
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 26, 2026
Appealing almost solely to Muslim voters might seem like a strange way for a major party to go about winning a by-election in Manchester. Producing adverts in Urdu, the native language of Pakistan, might be considered even odder. Yet, to prove that nothing is too strange for British politics in 2026, that is exactly what the Green Party has done in a recent campaign video.
Gorton & Denton's new Green Party video is entirely in Urdu and features some blatant visuals. pic.twitter.com/7QkslQEHL2
— Guido Fawkes (@GuidoFawkes) February 23, 2026
Five men have been convicted in connection with an attack that led to a serious house fire in which a woman and a girl were badly burned.
Five others had previously admitted offences relating to the incidents in Stoke-on-Trent in 2021.
Following an 11-week trial at Nottingham Crown Court, Det Con Howard Davies of Staffordshire Police said: “This was a horrific ordeal for a mother to be set on fire in her own home in front of her daughter by a number of men seeking revenge.”
The men have all been remanded in custody to await sentence at a date to be fixed.
Shortly after Nerdeen Kiswani, a pro-Hamas, pro-terrorist activist and organizer, said on X that pet dogs have no place in homes because “they are unclean,” several other videos surfaced reportedly demonstrating Muslim attitudes toward dogs.
There’s the video purportedly showing a Muslim threatening to behead a woman’s dog. And the video of “Sneako,” a Muslim streamer in Miami, telling Americans, “F-ck your dog. … Dogs are haram. … Dogs are gross.” And then the video allegedly capturing Muslim kids torturing a lone dog. Added to those were reports of Morocco engaging in a campaign to slaughter three million dogs ahead of the 2030 World Cup.
The obvious conclusion is that Muslim culture does not like dogs and has no qualms about being cruel toward them.
