Salt Lake City’s Woke Mayor Praises Ramadan as If It Has Brought Us Everything That Is Good

What a mean, merciless place Salt Lake City must have been.

To hear the city’s Mayor Erin Mendenhall tell it, there was apparently neither faith nor kindness there until Muslims started arriving there in large numbers beginning in the mid-1960s, and in even greater numbers after the Sept. 11, 2001 jihad attacks. This is clear in light of the fact that Mendenhall, at a recent Ramadan iftar she hosted for area Muslims in city hall, praised the Muslim month of alternate fasting and gorging for the “values of faith and kindness that Ramadan brings to our community.”

This is standard politicians’ boilerplate, translating in plain English to “Please vote for me,” but that doesn’t really make it any more excusable. If anyone pressed her on this quote, and no one will, Mendenhall would certainly explain that she didn’t mean that Islam originated faith and kindness, or that Muslims were the only people who ever manifested those qualities. Nevertheless, she said what she said, and it’s certain that neither she nor her team would ever have let a statement go public that gave the impression that Jews or Christians had a monopoly on faith and kindness. These errors and failures of clarity and precision always seem to go only one way.

Demonstrating her respect for those who gave us the values of faith and kindness, Mendenhall donned a hijab at the iftar. This was particularly unfortunate during the present conflict with a regime that has killed people for not wearing it. On Sept. 16, 2022, Iranian morality police in Tehran arrested Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman, for not wearing her hijab properly. Amini later died in a hospital in Tehran, and numerous Iranians insisted that she had been tortured to death while in custody.

Countless other women around the world have suffered for not wearing the hijab. In Mississauga, Ontario, a few years back, Aqsa Parvez’s Muslim father choked her to death with her hijab after she refused to wear it. Amina Muse Ali was a Christian woman in Somalia whom Muslims murdered because she wasn’t wearing a hijab. Forty women were murdered in Iraq in 2007 for not wearing the hijab.

The cousin of another Muslim woman, Alya Al-Safar, threatened her with death and even said he would harm her family because she stopped wearing the hijab in Britain. Amira Osman Hamid faced whipping in Sudan for refusing to wear the hijab. An Egyptian girl, also named Amira, committed suicide after being brutalized by her family for refusing to wear the hijab. Muslim and non-Muslim teachers at the Islamic College of South Australia were told they had to wear the hijab or be fired. Women in Chechnya were shot with paintballs by police because they weren’t wearing hijab. Other women in Chechnya were threatened by men with automatic rifles for not wearing hijab.

Then there was the question of whether it was prudent of Mendenhall to praise Ramadan, much less observe it, at all. The jihad death toll worldwide for Ramadan 2026 was 524 infidels murdered in 139 jihad attacks. Those who are confused as to how all this killing could take place during what is supposed to be a holy month should remember a key fact that the political and media establishment routinely ignores: because Ramadan is the month in which Muslims redouble their efforts to obey Allah, Ramadan is also quintessentially the month of jihad. That doesn’t just mean the month in which Muslims engage in a spiritual struggle to improve their fidelity to Allah’s commands. It means jihad violence.

This is because fighting against and killing infidels is commanded in the Qur’an (cf. 2:191. 4:89, 9:5, 9:29, 47:4, etc.). As a result, killing infidels during Ramadan is, for the killers, a holy and sacred act. A jihad group explained it back in 2012: “The month of Ramadan is a month of holy war and death for Allah. It is a month for fighting the enemies of Allah and Allah’s messenger, the Jews and their American facilitators.”

As she complacently praised Ramadan, hoping for short-term electoral gain, the hijab-clad Erin Mendenhall was the very model of the modern useful idiot. Yet one thing is certain: there will be much, much more Islamopandering in this country before there is any general awakening to the religion’s aggressive, violent, supremacist and expansionist aspects. If that awakening ever comes.

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