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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.