Do Muslim Communities Assimilate? Look at U.S. History First

Added: 2026-06-05

[00:00:00][music] [music] >> Can I give you an example of an Islamic community that is peacefully assimilated?

[00:00:13]I am so tired of seeing the exact same question repeated by a bunch of conservative content creators who have been given the same script and share the same single neuron. First of all, you can look anywhere in the US from Chicago to New York to Dearborn, Michigan to find how Islamic communities coexist peacefully with everyone else. But since you pretend to be asking the hard questions down here, let me turn this question around and ask you, has the United States historically proven to accept and assimilate itself into the culture it expands into or does it force its rules and social norms onto the people that already existed in those places? And I'm sure that most of you already know the answer, but let me give you some hints in case you're wondering.

[00:00:51]Think for example what the United States did when they annexed Hawaii. Did they assimilate? Or what Americans did when they took over the land occupied by the many Indian tribes that lived here millennia before the American government took over. Did the settlers assimilate?

[00:01:06]No, they called themselves conquerors and imposed their ways onto others.

[00:01:09]Sometimes, like in the case of the expansion into Mexican territories, they even called themselves liberators and under the banner of manifest destiny, they imposed their ways politically and culturally. In other instances, like in the case of the forcible removal of the Native American tribes, they couldn't force that reverse assimilation and so they used the might of the military to forcibly remove the people and the culture that existed there before. Does that answer your question? If it's true that Islam wants to maintain its traditions in Brooklyn or in St. Louis, it still allows the Catholics to celebrate the feast of San Gennaro, for example. So, next time you ask this question, do me a favor and take a long look in the mirror first. You'll save us a lot of time and you a whole lot of embarrassment.

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