Can We Stand Up to Islam?

Yvonne van Dongen
Veteran NZ journo incredulous gender ideology escaped the lab. Won’t rest until reality makes a comeback.

Mostly I write about sex and gender, due to the real and significant threat gender ideology presents to women and girls.

But the trans issue is not an isolated intellectual oddity, despite critics decrying our concern as trifling since it’s ‘just a few men.’

The thought-stopping mantra ‘transwomen are women’ and attendant ideological shibboleths are just one of a suite of views on a variety of topics currently deemed offensive and subject to the ‘no debate’ rule. Whether people are aware of it or not, an authoritarian elite is policing the thoughts and language of ordinary people.

Next week I will interview the author of Authoritarians in the Academy: How the Internationalization of Higher Education and Borderless Censorship Threaten Free Speech, American free speech scholar Sarah McLaughlin about this very topic when she visits New Zealand as part of a tour organised by the Free Speech Union. Hopefully talking to her will enlighten me as to who and/or what and why, is fuelling the censoring impulse across the Western world.

In the meantime I have found the easiest way of detecting views regarded as illicit is to observe people’s behaviour when faced with anything they fear might contradict the elite consensus.

For instance, last week I was sent a document by someone who wishes to remain anonymous. That’s one Big Fat Red Flag right there that we are dealing with a culturally sensitive issue. This is despite the fact that the document is a public consultation notice from the Ministry of Education.

What could the Ministry of Education be announcing that could be so inflammatory? Well, the ministry is letting people know that they have received an application for a roll increase at Al-Madinah School, a state-integrated, co-ed Islamic school for years one to 13 in Mangere. The school is seeking approval to establish a second campus in Blockhouse Bay.

The proposed second campus would operate similarly to the current Al-Madinah School and have a maximum roll of 350 children in 2027, 400 the following year and 550 in 2029. It would begin as a year one to eight school and increase annually until it became a year one to 13 school.

Al-Madinah currently has a roll of just under 600 students of whom 72 per cent are Indian, 21 per cent Asian and seven per cent from other ethnicities. This exceeds the maximum authorised roll of about 550 (agreed with the ministry). The school reports there is strong demand, with a reported waitlist of over 1,500 students as of mid-2025. Al-Madinah wishes to become a charter school since it believes this will enable it to expand more easily.

Al-Madinah School is one of three Islamic schools in New Zealand, all in Auckland. The other two are Zayed College for Girls in Mangere and Iqra school, for years one to eight in New Lynn.

Al-Madinah’s plans are not secret. The story of their planned expansion was actually covered by the media. Yet my informant still felt nervous about sharing this document, which begs the question – why? Why would anyone regard this public information as sensitive or even contentious?

You already know the answer. Because we are talking about Islam and Islam is no ordinary religion. It’s the only religion that has birthed a word intended to shut down debate – Islamophobia. The word describes an irrational fear of Islam. Even though fear of Islam is anything but irrational. It is a rational response to a thought system that has led to Islamic over-representation in global statistics on terrorism, violence, especially violence against women, and, in countries like the United Kingdom, welfare dependency.

It is not irrational to fear a religion known for beheading, bombing, hanging, shooting and stabbing non-Muslims all over the world. It is not irrational to fear a religion that punishes apostasy with death, that is inherently patriarchal and treats women like chattels, and that is inherently supremacist and would tax non-Muslims if they could, since they believe such tax, known as jizyah, is their rightful due.

Before anyone comes with the ‘I have Muslim friends, know nice Muslims, not all Muslims’ argument, let me just say – of course. I have no doubt that is true. But what I know about Islam from studying it at university (majoring in religious studies of all things), travelling in Islamic countries and digesting the work of scholars and critics such as Prof Gad Saad, Raymond Ibrahim and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, is that the best way to describe moderate Muslims is non-practising. The practices listed above are implicit in the doctrine of Islam since the Quran and the Hadith (sayings of Muhammad) codify and deify everything the West rejects.

Saad, Ibrahim and Hirsi Ali all warn that Islam is incompatible with the values and culture of the West.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali has been doing this for the last 20 years, ever since she had to leave the Netherlands when a fatwa was placed on her life. Raised in a strict Muslim family that fled political turmoil, Hirsi Ali endured female genital mutilation as a child, received a traditional Islamic education across Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, and Kenya, and was forced into an arranged marriage in 1992.

She fled to the Netherlands, earned a master’s degree in political science and served in the Dutch Parliament (2003–2006). After collaborating on the controversial short film Submission with Theo van Gogh (who was murdered by Islamists in 2004), she faced death threats and relocated to the United States, becoming a citizen in 2013.

Since that time she has had to live with security protection 24/7.

Prof Gad Saad fled Lebanon for Canada with his Jewish family in 1975. The evolutionary behavioural scientist, professor of marketing and prominent public intellectual is perhaps best known for his work The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense. His next book called Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind is due out in May and describes a form of maladaptive, irrational altruism that has gripped Western culture, particularly on the political left.

Raymond Ibrahim, an American historian fluent in Arabic, specialises in Islam’s long conflicts with the West. He is the author of many books on the topic.

Ibrahim is the most pessimistic of the three Islamocritics, describing Islam’s presence in Europe as a parasite willingly introduced into the host society. Based on fertility rates and migration, he argues that major demographic shifts are already locked in. Muslims are outbreeding the host population and will dominate many European nations in the next 25 years. By 2050 Islam will be the largest religion in the world.

Ibrahim says proposed solutions such as halting migration, remigration and integration will never work without a major paradigm shift. The problem lies not with the Muslim migrants, nor with our policies and politicians, but in our thought processes, our epistemology. For instance, the reason why people do not see or comment on demographic change is because they have been taught not to discriminate.

Ibrahim points to moral relativism (‘all cultures are equal’, ‘all religions promote peace’), the refusal to discriminate between ideas, and the victim-oppressor lens of intersectionality. These same habits protect both gender ideology and Islam from scrutiny. Groups framed as ‘marginalised’ (Muslims as non-Western, or transvestites claiming to be the opposite sex) gain immunity from criticism.

The West is materially stronger than the Islamic world, but he fears we lack the spirit and moral fibre to resist such a confident, unyielding ideology. It took generations to degrade our thought systems. He says it will take generations to fix them.

Although New Zealand is a long way from major global population centres, it is not immune to overseas trends. The country currently has a population of over 75,000 Muslims as at the 2023 Census or 1.5 per cent of the population. Pipifucks I hear you say. True. But Muslims are only seven per cent of the population of the United Kingdom and the impact of this small percentage (google Pakistani Muslim rape gangs) means we cannot be complacent.

As the request for a new school shows, their numbers are growing fast. Recent trends show ~24–31 per cent growth per five-year census period (2013–2018 and 2018–2023), largely migration-driven.

In fact, New Zealand is especially vulnerable to the growing influence of Islam. First, because of the terrible events of 2019 when 51 Muslims were shot dead at two Christchurch mosques by an Australian. This has understandably fostered a climate of extreme sensitivity to criticism of Islam.

Second, because, in many respects, New Zealand is a moral project as much as a sovereign nation. New Zealand’s heritage of progressive triumphs, such as becoming the first country in the world to give women the vote and our anti-nuclear stance, means we are allergic to setting boundaries and overly fond of our hipster do-good outlier status.

Nor is the quest for truth aided by the media, academic or professional elites, all of whom are committed to the multi-cult, pro-immigration narrative.

And finally, because we are, on the whole, an easy-going bunch. Living in this secular, liberal democracy so far away from the madding crowd, we enjoy freedom of religion and freedom of speech. To a large extent, we take these rights for granted. But they can be hi-jacked by those with bad intent.

Christians are not exempt. Ibrahim has a term for Christians who advocate unconditional tolerance and refuse to defend themselves against aggression. He calls them “doormat Christians” practising “doormat Christianity”. He insists this version of Christianity is not biblical. It is a manufactured or engineered heresy – promoted by Christianity’s enemies.

Ibrahim would like Christians to reclaim a balanced, courageous faith that includes moral judgement, truth-speaking, and self-defence when justified – rather than self-destructive passivity.

I wish that for all of us, with or without Christianity.

Part of shifting the paradigm is speaking up. At the gym cafe the other day someone asked me what I was working on so I sketched out some of the key points of this Substack. A woman at the counter, who I vaguely knew, overheard, threw me a dark look and said loudly, “That’s so racist.”

Right. So this is what shifting the paradigm will entail. A willingness to be called names. At the very least. The wokescold woman was wrong, of course. Me? Racist? How unfair. I’m a proud disagreeable bigot.