By Becket Adams
Sunday, February 11, 2024
Democrats and journalists are upset at the Wall Street Journal.
They can’t explain why, exactly. They only know the paper did a terrible thing.
“27,000 people dead in Gaza,” Washington Post Baghdad bureau chief Louisa Loveluck, currently reporting on the war in Gaza, wrote last week on social media, “most of them civilians, as the world’s most powerful newspapers publish stories likening Arabs to insects, aid operations to terrorist outfits, and an entire Muslim community in Michigan to jihadists. The world is upside down.”
The part regarding jihadists in Michigan is a reference to a February 2 Wall Street Journal opinion article titled “Welcome to Dearborn, America’s Jihad Capital.”
Like Loveluck’s peers and the Democrats who are worried that the White House’s support for Israel may complicate the president’s reelection chances in Michigan, the Washington Post journalist is disgusted by the Wall Street Journal opinion article. She is disgusted that its author, Steven Stalinsky, the executive director of the Middle East Media Research Institute, would say such a thing.
And like others who’ve condemned the piece, Loveluck has neglected to outline what, exactly, the author got wrong.
The Wall Street Journal piece is chockablock with factual examples of radical, anti-American, and outright antisemitic rhetoric drawn directly from the denizens of the Detroit suburb that is home to the largest Muslim population per capita in the United States. Stalinsky also references certain residents’ ties to actual Islamic terrorism.
After describing some of the recent sights and sounds of Dearborn — “protesters, many with kaffiyehs covering their faces, shout ‘Intifada, intifada,’ ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,’ and ‘America is a terrorist state’” while “local imams give fiery antisemitic sermons” — Stalinsky gets into the details:
Almost immediately after Oct. 7, and long before Israel began its ground offensive in Gaza, people were celebrating the horrific events of that day in pro-Hamas rallies and marches throughout Dearborn. A local headline describing an Oct. 10 event at the Ford Performing Arts Center read “Michigan rally cheers Hamas attack.” Imam Imran Salha of Dearborn’s Islamic Center of Detroit told the crowd that Israel’s past actions have put “fire in our hearts that will burn that state”—Israel— “until its demise.” In May 2023, Mr. Salha had urged his congregation to say “amen” in agreement with his prayer that Allah “eradicate from existence” the “sick, disgusting Zionist regime.” In October 2022, according to the Washington Free Beacon, his organization received $150,000 in funding from the Homeland Security Department’s nonprofit security grants program.
Stalinsky recounts a rally wherein American-born Imam Usama Abdulghani referred to the October 7 slaughter of Israelis as “one of the days of God” and a “miracle come true.” Abdulghani also referred to the Hamas terrorists behind the attack as honorable “lions” who defended “the entire nation of Muhammad the messenger.”
In Dearborn, public memorial services have been held in honor of Hezbollah terrorists. The city witnessed a “Commemoration of the Martyrs” held in honor of two terror leaders taken out by the Trump administration, Qasem Soleimani, the Iranian Quds Force commander, and Abu Mahdi Al-Muhandis, one of the men behind the 2019 attack on the United States embassy in Baghdad. Dearborn resident and Islamist preacher Ahmad Musa Jibril released a video recently exhorting Muslims in the West to embrace the word “jihad” and to use it often “on your social media, and in the mosques.”
And for good measure, it’s worth remembering Dearborn mayor Abdullah H. Hammoud’s first reaction to the October 7 attack, which was to tweet, among other things, the following: “Israel’s decades of illegal military occupation and imprisonment of Gaza make peace impossible and tragic violence inevitable. Israel has trapped millions of Palestinians in Gaza in what is recognized by the international community as the world’s largest open-air prison. Failure to recognize this context is the inability to comprehend what is unfolding overseas.”
When the WSJ published the piece, Democrats and journalists let out a collective gasp — not at anything documented in the column, but at the idea that anyone would dare to write such things about the Michigan city.
Representative Elissa Slotkin (D., Mich.) called the opinion article “anti-Arab and anti-Muslim.”
“This is horrendously irresponsible and [the Wall Street Journal] should have to explain this decision,” complained Sarah Rahal of the Detroit News, characterizing the column as “Islamophobic.”
Rahal alleges that at least one of Stalinsky’s examples is incorrect, claiming that the October 10 rally at the Ford Performing Arts Center, which she covered, was in no way celebratory. It’s worth noting that the rally, which she claims was merely to support an “end to Palestinian occupation,” took place before the blood from the slaughter was even dry. Israeli officials were still collecting and identifying their dead while Dearborn rally attendees chanted, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” and “No justice, no peace!”
“We stand today, shoulder to shoulder with our people in Gaza and their resistance to the apartheid, colonial Israel,” the Palestine Aid Society’s Mohammed Abdul Salam said at the October 10 rally.
He added later (emphasis my own), “Hamas still [lives] because it is not a group of aliens from space. They are part of the Palestinian fabric and won the election in 2006.”
It’s worth noting here that Rahal’s write-up also refers to Hamas, a terrorist organization, as a “militia.”
Even President Joe Biden, whose time in the White House has been dedicated largely to demonizing the half of the country that doesn’t support him, remarked that drawing conclusions “based on the words of a small few is wrong.” His comments came shortly after the WSJ article was published, and they are seen widely as a direct rebuke.
The “words of a small few,” as Biden said, is an interesting way to characterize the Wall Street Journal op-ed’s criticisms. Because, as it turns out, there is more than just rhetoric in Dearborn.
As briefly mentioned by Stalinsky, the city has been on the Justice Department’s radar for quite some time now.
In July 2018, for example, the U.S. repatriated Dearborn resident Ibraheem Musaibli after he was arrested in Syria on charges he joined the Islamic State. He was sentenced to 14 years in federal prison in 2023. In 2017, Dearborn resident Samer el Debek was arrested for allegedly spying on behalf of the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah. Debek was tasked with scouting the U.S. and Israeli embassies in Panama for vulnerabilities, according to the Justice Department. He was even trained in bomb-making. His case has yet to go to trial. In 2014, Dearborn resident Mohammad Hassan Hamdan was charged with attempting to provide material support to Hezbollah. He pleaded guilty two years later. Much earlier, in 2007, former Dearborn resident Fawzi Assi pleaded guilty to providing material support to Hezbollah. In 2005, former Dearborn restaurateur Talal Chahine, who operated La Shish, a restaurant chain in the Detroit metro area, fled the country after he was charged with using a double set of books to funnel nearly $20 million to Hezbollah. Chahine has since been arrested and is awaiting trial on charges he conspired to provide material support to a designated terrorist organization.
What is one supposed to make of the fact that the Islamic Institute of Knowledge in Dearborn held a commemoration service in 2009 for Ayatollah Khomeini? What is one to make of a Dearborn faith leader, Imam Sayed Hassan Qazwini, who once remarked of Senator Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) that he is an honorable man “even though he is a Jew”? (That same imam, by the way, also claims ISIS is an invention of the Jews — er, sorry, Zionists.) What of the Dearborn-based front groups, among them the Goodwill Charitable Organization, which was targeted in 2007 by the Treasury Department, and also raided by the FBI, for funneling cash directly to Hezbollah as well as the Martyr’s Foundation in Lebanon?
Dearborn has a population of roughly 109,000, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. At what point is it appropriate to ask questions about radical rhetoric and terrorism-related activities in one American city? I’m not saying Dearborn is, in fact, the jihad capital of the United States. I’m simply trying to figure out the baseline number for when we’re allowed to notice things.
Also, while we’re on the topic of confusion, it’s baffling that few of the critics of the opinion article, including WaPo’s Loveluck (whose post, it’s worth noting, blindly accepts Hamas death-toll numbers and whose incredulity at “aid organizations” being likened to “terrorist outfits” makes one wonder if she’s heard the news that UNRWA employees participated in the October 7 attacks), have tried to dispute its contents. Nor have such critics expressed any amount of outrage over some of the blatantly antisemitic remarks pushed by Dearborn community leaders. The antisemitism, which is out in the open, hasn’t drawn even a fraction of the condemnation called down upon a single Wall Street Journal opinion article.
Now ask yourself this: Why are these people angrier that someone noticed radical rhetoric in Dearborn than they are about the radical rhetoric?
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