Philadelphia's MUSLIM DAY, from Frontpage Magazine

One of the most beautiful structures in Philadelphia is 30th Street Station, a 1934 building with soaring Corinthian columns and a 95-foot-high coffered ceiling. Now called William H. Gray III 30th Street Station (Gray was a black U.S. Congressman from the Philadelphia area), the station’s renaming was signed into law by President Obama in 2014. Of course, nobody but Amtrak and city officials call the station by its Obama-given name. For most Philadelphians it’s simply 30th Street Station.

Around the time of the station’s name change, there was a shady feeling that the city was looking for any excuse to put a black Democrat activist stamp on one of the city’s grandest structures. In fact, when I interviewed former Mayor Frank Rizzo before his death in the 1990s, he told me he was astonished that Gray, who went to Princeton Theological School, was able to maintain a lucrative political career while balancing a personal life that included “a string of mistresses.” But that’s another story. Walk from 30th Street Station into central Philadelphia and the real city comes into focus. You will notice empty and abandoned stores, a pronounced lack of causal eateries, the empty Wanamaker building that used to house Macy’s, the go-to department store with the Eagle sculpture that defined Center City for decades. Macy’s demise (closure was March 25) has rendered Center City a virtual desert. In another commercial assault, Center City’s Brooks Brothers store left town about two months ago after thirty-some years on Walnut Street. On Arch Street, the famed AIA architecture center recently announced its closing. The excuse given for the closure was low attendance at events since the lockdown. (Philadelphia took the lockdown to Democrat Orwellian proportions, even establishing a snitch telephone hotline where neighbors could report on neighbors hosting large private gatherings). Throughout the city you’ll see boarded up stores and businesses, closed Asian buffet eateries that once hosted scores of city office workers at lunchtime. Center City is now home to drug-addicted homeless people and people who bought condos there years ago when the city was good but who are now stuck in a declining metropolis. South Street, where all the hippies used to meet, is now home to rowdy crowds, namely the black hooligan version of West Side Story. Once a year or so somebody shoots a gun into the crowds there; it’s really the DEI version of Woodstock. Sadly, everywhere you go in the city there are signs of decay and decline. Hop the Market Street El or the Broad Street subway, and you’ll see hundreds of drug-addicted homeless in various comatose states. In 2020, Forbes named Philadelphia the dirtiest city in America. In 2024, the city was ranked among the top 10 cities with the rudest residents. The poverty rate at 23.3% in 2019 ranked the city as the nation’s poorest city. In 2025, the city ranked as the 5th worst-run city in the U.S. A city in decline, however, is the perfect place for an Islamic revolution. To that effect, in 2024 Mayor Cherelle Parker, created the position of Director of Muslim Engagement. Mayor Parker, who is not Muslim, stated on X: “We stand with the Muslim community, and vow to work together to restore balance and light to our communities.”

Parker appointed Quaiser D. Abdullah as Director of the new department. Abdullah, who has been called an Islamosupremacist by the Israel Resource Review, is a Temple University faculty member. He’s also an advisor to the Muslim Student Association (MSA). Temple University’s MSA members are also part of the Students for Justice in Palestine, a Hamas-funded campus jihad group. Given these facts, it appears that Mayor Parker appointed a pro-jihad Muslim to a major City Hall post. But it gets worse. In 2024, to celebrate the election of Parker as the city’s first black woman mayor, an Interfaith Inaugural Prayer Gathering was held at the Catholic cathedral basilica of Saints Peter and Paul. Archbishop Nelson Perez hosted the large ecumenical gathering which included “sacred scripture” readings from Jewish, Muslim and Christian faith leaders. But can the Qur’an really be called “sacred scripture”? It can, but only in the world of politicians out to get votes, or in the mind of a Catholic archbishop trying to play nicey-nice with the powers-that-be in a city as woke as Portland, Oregon. I don’t know what “sacred” Qur’an quotes were read aloud at the basilica that day, but I can assure you they did not include the following: “The Jews are those who Allah is wrath with, and the Christians have strayed.” “O ye who believe! Take not the Jews and the Christians for your friends and protectors: They are but friends and protectors to each other.” “And kill them (non-Muslims) wherever you find them … kill them. Such is the recompense of the disbelievers (non-Muslims).” The Qur’an is really a flowery terrorist manifesto: it sizzles with violence and verses about battles, blood and swords. The Muslim clergyman for the basilica event was Imam Anwar Muhaimin, who was born in Philadelphia but who left the city at age 11 with his family to study Islam in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is a place where non-Muslims are forced to practice their religion in private and are subject to discrimination and arrest. Under Saudi law, any Muslim who converts to another religion commits a crime punishable by death. Mayor Parker’s fascination with Islam seems to be an outgrowth of the city’s growing black Muslim population as well as the Left’s alliance with Islam. It’s been said the Left is generally clueless when it comes to religion. That’s why Queers for Palestine and half-naked woke feminists in tattoos who march for Palestine can’t get it through their heads they’d be the first to be executed if sharia law were instituted in the United States. In the meantime, politicians like Parker tap into the world of make-believe when they insist all spiritual paths are equal because they all deliver the same messages of peace and love. The basilica, and not a mosque, was used for the 2024 prayer meeting because of its iconic status as a landmark structure and the importance the Archdiocese plays in the city. The selection of a mosque would have been more appropriate but it would have garnered much less publicity and legitimacy. No Catholic church should ever be used for an ecumenical prayer service involving readings from the Qur’an. The mayor’s obsession with Islam went even further when she instituted Muslim Day in the city shortly after her inauguration in 2024. In the 1970s, missionaries from the Nation of Islam filled City Hall courtyard handing out a newspaper called Muhammad Speaks. The newspaper was noted for its black nationalist views and its chronic condemnation of the white man and the white race. Every day black men in meticulously tailored suits, sunglasses and short military haircuts distributed these broadsides of hate. Apathetic liberal white Philadelphians looked the other way, never dreaming that within fifty years you would have news outlets like the Israel Resource Review calling Philadelphia City Hall, “Caliphate Hall.”

Of course, the constitutionality of a city-sponsored Muslim Day has never been addressed by the courts. Since the 1970s, Muslim activists have been given free reign in City Hall. Imagine the uproar from the Left if a city-sponsored Russian Orthodox Day had incense-swaying robed priests carrying icons in the same courtyard. Why does Islam get a special city-sanctioned day? Perhaps it was part of a deal Parker made to get the endorsement of the city’s Muslim community in 2023 during the mayoral campaign. At that time there mysteriously appeared a large group calling itself “Muslims for Cherelle Parker.” Philadelphia’s Muslim Day includes advocacy meetings with City Council members and other elected and appointed offices. One of the issues on the table was “sanctuary and safety for immigrant families.” Philadelphia is already a sanctuary city, but Muslim Day advocates for extra special protection for “immigrants” (they mean migrants) who happen to be Muslim. The more Muslims you have, the more Islamic a city becomes. Mayor Parker may well be the Trojan horse that helps Philadelphia become another version of Dearborn, Michigan. THOM NICKELS

New Neighbors on Mercer Street

Let’s consider the empty house on the street where I live. This house sat empty for months before a new owner purchased it. The former owner, Sammy (not his real name), about 30 years-old, moved out after living in the place for a good 3 years. I remember the day he moved in. He came with cars and bikes after his suburban parents bought the house for him. During his first weeks here some of the neighbors went out of their way to say hello but Sammy was aloof. He obviously didn’t want to be bothered to get to know the people on the block. What Sammy did for a living was a mystery, but his pattern was to leave the house everyday around noon and return in the early evening.

Sammy could have been living on a mountain top because he never made eye contact with neighbors. You could pass Sammy in the street and he’d have one of those Village of the Damned ‘straight on’ stares like he was sleepwalking. Sammy’s house was a large space with interesting room patterns. I know because I used to be friends with the couple, Walter and Betty (not their real names), who lived there before their move to Washington State. Walter, Betty and I didn’t become friends until their last two years on the street. Who knows why it took us so long to strike up a friendship. One day they invited me to dinner so I got to sample Walter’s gourmet cooking. On warm summer days, Walter would invite me over for a swim in his pool. The pool was a fairly deep above ground monstrosity with a sturdy wooden deck, set among very large trees. After a swim, we’d catch an iced tea during which Walter would talk about his favorite poet, Gary Snyder. I wasn’t happy when Walter and Betty announced they were moving west. I was getting used to going over there for dinner and swimming in their pool, and then inviting them over to my place for patio parties. Friendships like this don’t come easily. You can say hello to neighbors, even chat with them on the street for years and still never be invited over to their place. When Walter and Betty moved out, the house wasn’t empty for long. One day I spotted a suburban looking couple talking with the realtor. The couple had driven up in a Lexis, which spelled m-o-n-e-y. A week or two after that a big moving truck appeared, and Sammy appeared with his bushy black hair and an army of friends. The friends, all men, were scruffy in a hip way although they all had the same type of manufactured beard. They moved in quickly and within days held a massive outdoor party around Walter’s old pool. Sammy’s friends built a large bonfire and started a barbecue. The party lasted until the wee hours. Then at 4 or 5 AM I was awakened by a suburban girl, one of Sammy’s party guests, crying under my bedroom window. She was so drunk she found it hard to make sense of her sentences however I tried my best to make out what she was saying. In the end, I couldn’t decipher her drunken valley girl ‘up talk’ although it seemed some boy had dumped her. I was curious about Sammy for a short time but after a while I stopped caring. There was no reason to say hello, especially if his response was going to be something like a smug nod. Sammy’s outdoor parties were becoming more and more frequent. Party guests, driving in from the western Main Line were double parking on our tiny street. Sammy acquired strings of Japanese party lights and strung them along the tree branches so that from my house his yard looked like a massive house boat in New Orleans. The parties got progressively louder and wilder yet it was fascinating to see how every party began as low key events but as the night wore on, and as more alcohol was consumed, the voices got louder and louder. Eventually the voices became so pitched it sounded like twenty men screaming at one another.

If the screaming prevented me from falling asleep, I assumed many of my neighbors were experiencing the same thing. I’d turn on the AC or put fans in my bedroom window to muffle the noise but like the racket from a plague of locusts, the voices would always resurface. And among these voices there would always be the sound of a woman crying. “That makes 4 crying women in 30 days,” I’d tell friends. ‘What do they do to women over there?” Sammy acquired a succession of roommates to help pay the mortgage. Generally the roommates were in their twenties and never stayed long. At first the roommates were part of Sammy’s social circuit but then I noticed a change. They seemed to be living independently, especially the lost looking Irish guy who seemed to be terrified of strangers and whose large dog seemed to be his only friend. He would sit glum- faced on Sammy’s stoop staring into space. For a time I thought he was hearing impaired. Some of Sammy’s roommates moved out in the middle of the night although they were very quickly replaced with new roommates. At one of the parties, the invited guests double and triple parked on the sidewalk up and down the street, upsetting the neighbors. Somebody called the police, and ten of Sammy’s party guests got parking tickets. “These people have no idea how the city works,” I told a friend. Sammy acquired so many roommates I lost count of them. Prohibitive housing and rental costs were really impacting people in their twenties, and Sammy’s house was proof of this. Nobody could afford to live on their own. I called Walter and Betty and told them that their former home had become a gigantic hipster commune complete with dogs, motorcycles, bonfires, and beautiful white women in long dreadlocks. “It’s a sight to behold although nobody on the street has made friends with them because they don’t seem to want to get to know anybody.” I told Walter and Betty that Sammy had decided to get rid of the pool and chop down the oldest and grandest tree on the property. Walter and Betty were meticulous home owners, but very soon Sammy began to let things slip. After all, it really wasn’t his house. His parents found the house for him. They were the ones who appreciated the house but they probably had high hopes that Sammy would come to appreciate it himself one day. It wasn’t long before the house began to look shabby, although all the women who visited or lived there seemed to be the same type: tall and elegant looking with long beautiful hair. They also dressed like fashion models, mostly in long flowing dresses. Even if beautiful women are not your thing, no one could deny the astounding beauty of these creatures. They seemed to go in and out of Sammy’s house at all hours. The men, by contrast, were doughy looking with thick Clark Kent glasses and hairy necks. “This is proof,” a comedian friend of mine commented, “that many pretty women like money and power.” For a period of a year, especially in winter when there were no leaves on the trees, anyone walking on the sidewalk could look right into Sammy’s front window and see somebody watching Homer Simpson. The parties continued, the beer kept flowing, and the male chorus of voices kept getting louder and louder. Sometimes I could make out what was being said. There were stories about work but more often than not there was no smooth narrative at all, just discombobulated half sentences with long pauses as well as the overuse of the word ‘like’ and finally unexplained yells as if someone had inadvertently sat on a possum. “Like…I mean, but like….Yeah, you know. What the f-ck!” (Repeat 50 times and you have the party conservation).

A few neighbors, eager to build bridges, continued to attempt to make contact with Sammy, but to no avail. Two weeks ago in a bizarre replay of 3 years ago, the suburban parents returned in the same Lexis. Standing in front of the house they whispered to one another before knocking on Sammy’s door. The parents had to knock a long time before one of the roommates answered although he didn’t open the door but talked to them through an open slat. Some sort of negotiation seemed to be in progress, but what? The very next day at least two of the roommates moved out and six days after that it was Sammy’s turn. Sammy left on his bike, never to be seen again. Thom Nickels