Epoch Times Senior Editor Jan Jekielek recently interviewed Nissar Hussain at the International Religious Freedom Summit. Hussain has a great deal to tell the world about religious freedom, as he converted from Islam to Christianity and nearly lost his life for doing so, not in Iran, or Pakistan, or Afghanistan, but in the new, diverse, multicultural Britain that the left has bestowed upon a grateful world. Hussain told Jekielek that the situation in Britain is, in a word, dire, and it will be in the United States if we don’t wake up to reality regarding Islam and Sharia.
In a video that Jekielek posted on X Friday, Hussain recounts how Muslims reviled him and his family as “kafir,” “infidel,” “unbeliever,” and “Jew dogs.” Jekielek notes that this was not even close to all: “Men confronted him in the street, spat on him, and cursed him—in front of his young children.” Muslims also menaced Hussain’s life in various ways: “One night he woke up at 3am to see ‘seven foot flames shooting up’ from his car. His car was rammed and vandalized so often that insurance companies wrote him off as a walking liability and refused to insure him…. Young men hurled bricks and other missiles at his house at night repeatedly.” Hussain recounted that he felt as if “all hell broke loose…I was dead and buried.”
Then came the physical attacks. “In 2015, he was ambushed outside his home, suffering a fractured kneecap and a broken hand. He was hospitalized for 11 days and developed PTSD. It was ‘acts of terrorism on a daily basis,’ he says.” Finally, “after years of threats and attacks, he and his family were relocated with a large armed police escort. He has been living in hiding under police protection for almost a decade.”
But surely British authorities met all this with swift and decisive action in Hussain’s defense, no? No. “Authorities, he says, have been paralyzed by fear.” Hussain states that “the police, they are terrified of Muslim backlash or some kind of Islamic riot, because they are terrified of being labeled as Islamophobic.”
Hussain added a warning for the United States: “America, wake up—and don’t end up like England. Never, ever allow Sharia to enter mainstream politics like it has in the UK.”
Well, that’s a tall order, because many will regard it as “Islamophobic.” The Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) stated recently that “like canon law for Catholics and halacha for Orthodox Jews, sharia refers to the rules that Muslims follow, including praying five times a day, fasting in Ramadan, giving in charity, and following the laws of the land in which they live.”
If that were really all that Sharia was about, no reasonable person would have any problem with it. CAIR doesn’t mention, however, that Sharia is inherently political, supremacist, expansionist, and violent. What happened to Nissar Hussain was not an anomalous reaction from Muslim “extremists” who misunderstood the peaceful tenets of their religion. It was a case of Muslims attempting to enforce Islam’s death penalty for apostasy. That penalty is based on the Qur’an: “They wish you would disbelieve as they disbelieved so you would be alike. So do not take from among them allies until they emigrate for the cause of Allah. But if they turn away, then seize them and kill them wherever you find them and take not from among them any ally or helper.” (Qur’an 4:89)
A hadith depicts Muhammad saying: “Whoever changed his Islamic religion, then kill him” (Bukhari 9.84.57). The death penalty for apostasy is part of Islamic law according to all the schools of Islamic jurisprudence.
In Britain, however, to point out such facts would also be “Islamophobic.”
For years, I have written that the epitaph of Britain as a free society would be “At least we were never Islamophobic.” I meant it as sarcasm, a bit of savage Swiftian indignation at the manifest absurdity of our age. As it turns out, however, that is exactly what is happening.
As Britain extinguishes the freedoms its people have enjoyed for centuries, and turns over leadership of the country to the invading “refugees” and “asylum seekers,” it’s quite clear that fear of charges of “Islamophobia” have been the guiding principle in Britain’s decision to commit national suicide and voluntarily relinquish its place among the nations of the world that respect human rights and the dignity of the human person.
It is a shameful and pusillanimous end to the story of a nation that once bestrode this narrow world like a colossus, and that gave to us so much of our understanding of the human rights it is now working to extinguish so as to appease the adherents of Sharia.
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Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is author of 32 books, including many bestsellers, such as The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), The Truth About Muhammad, The History of Jihad, The Critical Qur’an, and Muhammad: A Critical Biography. His new books are Intifada on the Hudson: The Selling of Zohran Mamdani and Holy Hell: Islam's Abuse of Women and the Infidels Who Enable It. Coming in April 2026 is The Tragedy of Islam: Failure and Excuses.