The Middle East Forum has uncovered over 400 examples of violent or extremist rhetoric at the Islamic Center of Detroit, including praise for jihadist fighters and repeated, frantic calls for the killing of Israelis.
Forty-four clips, published as a compilation by the Middle East Forum above, represent some of the most egregious examples. All are drawn from video published by mosque officials on its social media pages, and recorded over just the past three years.
In sermons, lectures and prayers, mostly in Arabic, imams and prayer leaders have repeatedly made the following appeals:
- “O Allah, count them, kill them one by one, and leave none of them.”
- “Eradicate them from existence. Say amen. May Allah annihilate every single soldier that harmed our brothers and sisters.”
- “O Allah, orphan their children as they orphaned ours, and demolish their homes as they demolished ours.”
- “O Allah, curse them, tear them apart, and burn them, Lord of the worlds.”
- “O Allah, deal with the aggressor Zionists. O Allah, curse them, burn them, and seize them… shake the earth beneath their feet… count them, kill them one by one, and leave none of them, and show us a black day among them.”
- “O Allah, grant victory to our brothers in Gaza, make their footing firm and make their aim accurate… O Allah, destroy the state of the Zionists, O Allah, destroy them utterly.”
- “O Allah, grant victory to our mujahideen brothers stationed in Gaza, Lord of the worlds.”
- “We ask God, Lord of the Mighty Throne, to make firm our brothers, the steadfast ones, there on the fields of jihad. … make firm our brothers in Gaza. O God, make their shots accurate, make their aim accurate…”
Among the hundreds of other examples collected by the Middle East Forum, mosque speakers also express support for convicted terrorists, praise the practice of jihad, and mourn the loss of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and its leaders.
Such hatred and terror support is underwritten by the taxpayer.
Since 2017, the federal government has handed the Islamic Center of Detroit over $45 million, mostly provided through the Department of Agriculture (USDA), with smaller amounts provided to this extremism institution by the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Health and Human Services.
The largest grant, made by the Biden administration in late 2021, featured an enormous single $31 million transaction, provided “to support various USDA programs in Michigan.”
This Department of Agriculture grant offering, listed under the federal government’s “National School Lunch Program,” was coordinated through the Michigan Department of Education and provided some 1,492 grants to Michigan beneficiaries, of which the financing for the Islamic Center of Detroit became the single largest grant by a considerable margin.
In fact, the Middle East Forum’s own compiled dataset, parsed from government records, of almost 4,000 federal grants to American Muslim nonprofits, reveals that the $31 million grant to the Islamic Center of Detroit is the single largest grant ever made to an American Muslim nonprofit.
Under the second Trump administration, the Department of Health and Human Services has given the extremist mosque an additional $500,000.
An unknown amount of additional local and state funding further subsidizes this Islamist institution. In 2026, one Michigan state representative submitted funding requests for some $7.6 million of state monies to the mosque.
Federal nonprofit tax returns include a revenue field in which the filing organization is supposed to record the total amounts of received government monies. However, the Islamic Center of Detroit has apparently not filed a tax return since 2003, seemingly taking advantage of a dangerous and absurd IRS rule exempting “churches” from filing a return at all.
That the federal government chose one of the most radical mosques in the country to receive such a large amount of taxpayers’ money is now under investigation, with multiple Freedom of Information Requests pending. Congress too, we hope, will want answers.
