The Wall Street Journal opinion section drew a pile of angry tweets when it ran an article by Steven Stalinsky, executive director of the Middle East Media Research Institute. They fixated on the headline and didn’t seem to read the article below.
The headline was “Welcome to Dearborn, America’s Jihad Capital: Imams and politicians in the Michigan city side with Hamas against Israel and Iran against the U.S.” The subhead here merely described the article’s contents, that the city’s Muslim leaders and political leaders sided against Israel and America.
The angry response has to be the words “jihad capital.” Somehow, you can’t equate Hamas and jihad? You can’t equate the slaughter on Oct. 7 with jihad?
On Oct. 10, Imam Imran Salha of Dearborn’s Islamic Center of Detroit told a rally crowd that Israel’s past actions have put “fire in our hearts that will burn that state” — Israel — “until its demise.”
On Oct. 14, Imam Usama Abdulghani called Oct. 7 “one of the days of God” and a “miracle come true.” He described the attackers as “honorable” and called them “lions” defending “the entire nation of Muhammad the messenger.”
The Islamic Center of America, a leading Dearborn mosque, held a memorial service on Dec. 30 for a Hezbollah operative killed in an Israeli airstrike, where Imam Abdulghani expressed his “warmest congratulations” to “our very special leader, Imam Khamenei,” the leader of Iran, the backer of Hamas and Hezbollah.
But don’t call Dearborn a “jihad capital.”
No one has challenged these facts. But ex-MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan tweeted, “The same rightwing outlets who warn of rising antisemitism (and, yes, antisemitism is on the rise) have no problem pushing horrendous Islamophobia & anti-Arab bigotry.”
NPR media reporter David Folkenflik, the taxpayer-funded Murdoch basher, retweeted Joseph Azam, who was an executive at News Corp for two whole years. Azam ranted: “Years ago, after I left News Corp and spoke to @NPR @davidfolkenflik re: the racism, Islamophobia and xenophobia running rampant across Murdoch assets I described the @WSJ opinion pages as the ignorant hatemongering you see in the @nypost but dressed in a tuxedo. I stand by that.”
You won’t be surprised that Azam donated $250 to Kamala Harris while he worked for Murdoch, and has since donated thousands to Joe Biden, the Democratic National Committee and Aisha Wahab, a California Democrat state senator hailed as the local Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
President Biden tweeted indirectly: “Americans know that blaming a group of people based on the words of a small few is wrong. That’s exactly what can lead to Islamophobia and anti-Arab hate, and it shouldn’t happen to the residents of Dearborn — or any American town. We must continue to condemn hate in all forms.”
This from the guy who called the Republicans “Jim Crow 2.0.”
In the Feb. 6 White House press briefing, ABC’s Selina Wang tossed a Wiffle ball to press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre: “What’s the White House’s reaction to that controversial Wall Street Journal op-ed?” Jean-Pierre called the article “dangerous” and “unacceptable” and stated, “We will stand with the people of Dearborn on this issue.”
The comedy in that is that many Muslims in Dearborn call the president “Genocide Joe,” but ABC won’t ask about that. The mayor of Dearborn and the imams of Dearborn are supported by the people of Dearborn. The term “jihad capital” doesn’t imply that every resident of Dearborn is a jihadi. It implies it’s a hot spot for jihadism.
Abdullah Hammoud, the Democrat mayor of Dearborn, attended a Nov. 29 pro-Palestinian rally and proclaimed Dearborn “the city of resistance.” So, isn’t that blurring all the city’s people into one geopolitical or religious camp?
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Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Tim Graham and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
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Islam, a political organization disguised as a religion, whom from its inception was a life strangling octopus whose tentacles could be found sucking the life out of every previously health organ of the body politics of whatever country it was allowed to enter. The very word ISALM means submission, not enlightenment, nor freedom to speak, think or grow rich. Poverty, failure and diminished human conditions always have followed wherever it rules a nation, that has not the oil wealth to hide the reality of a failed ideology, which always demands political monopoly over the minds and property of its people. No wonder Joe and the democrats snuggle up to them to feel all warm and fuzzy,,,a phenomena that has arisen only since their illegal USA entered Islamic voting numbers have exceeded that of the Jews now being abandoned by his party, with their minds on the future reigns of sustaining an oppressive American power OVER THE PEOPLE that resembles that of the Mullahs in Iran. Once the Islamic camel got its’ toe inside the tent of our once great Production CIty of Dearborn, real American concepts of freedom and fair play soon got crowded out from the River to the Great Lake Erie.
“We’re so self-important. Everybody’s going to save something now. “Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save those snails.” And the greatest arrogance of all: save the planet. Save the planet, we don’t even know how to take care of ourselves yet. I’m tired of this ****. I’m tired of f-ing Earth Day. I’m tired of these self-righteous environmentalists, these white, bourgeois liberals who think the only thing wrong with this country is that there aren’t enough bicycle paths. People trying to make the world safe for Volvos. Besides, environmentalists don’t give a **** about the planet. Not in the abstract they don’t. You know what they’re interested in? A clean place to live. Their own habitat. They’re worried that some day in the future they might be personally inconvenienced. Narrow, unenlightened self-interest doesn’t impress me.
The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles … hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages … And we think some plastic bags and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet isn’t going anywhere. WE are!
― George Carlin
The beginning of all knowledge begins with “There is a God,,,,,and It’s not me”.
Liberal Democrats extremists are children of the lessor god who only see god in the mirror. Their pathological passion to control the lives of others and insinuate themselves into the lives of others is just the main part of the pathology which in its meanest form can even mean murder, or in politics, death by a thousand cuts. Give them the power over how your money is spent and you end up with taxpayer paid bike paths with people taking those paths in constant fear guys like his highness Joe Biden will blindly come around the corner and run you over. When I was a kid, we could ride our bikes all over our town of 30,000 and nobody got run over, and we saved tons of money that is now used to drive cars, because it’s too unsafe to even walk in the park without getting mugged, molested, or hair sniffed.
Those that can’t do, teach, those that can’t teach, go into politics and try to control the lives of others by any environMENTAL means necessary, yet think nothing of illegally importing tens of millions of foreigners who soon overwhelm our sewage systems, roads, hospitals, streets, to litter our cities with drug needles, used rubbers and cardboard tent cities and defecate at will on our very front lawns. This is not progressive but REGRESSIVE.
The democrat ( Climite czar, (Flew Around the world in his Private Jet.) ( Former ,democrat Climate Czar.)
When will America say what Russia said to the Muslims, ” Muslims need Russia, Russia, doesn’t need Musslims.”
Author unknown.
NO WHERE but the arab world, “NEEDS” Islam!!
If you mention a person or group’s race, religion, country of origin, sex, clothes, hairstyle, tattoos (or lack thereof,) criminality, history of violence, or any other identifying trait, you are a racist bigot intent on terrorism. Unless, of course, you are a Liberal, in which case you are a hero defending the “victim.” Twenty years ago, it would have been a highly funny SNL skit. Today, it’s destroying our country, and the world.
IT IS NOT islamophobic, TO CORRECTLY SAY That Dearborn is a HOTBED OF jihadism..
Iran, maybe is a ” Hot Bed for Muslims.?
In the past you had to learn our Language and assimilate into our culture . But now they don’t do that. They keep the parts that they hated and feared in their own country.