Abdullah Hammoud, the mayor of Dearborn, Michigan, owes anti-Muslim agitator Jake Lang a huge debt of gratitude for the chaos he caused in the city on November 18, 2025. Lang’s actions, rooted in a nativist desire to incite violence from Muslims and in turn justify an Antifa-style insurrection from the far right, gave the Dearborn mayor exactly the distraction he needed to avoid the consequences of his own irresponsible and oppressive behavior over the past few months.
The police were not proactive at all.
In a reasonable world, Hammoud would face challenge for joking about being a jihadi days before the FBI arrested young Muslims in Dearborn who were reportedly planning to kill gays and lesbians in the nearby city of Ferndale. Hammoud would also have faced further challenge for bullying local pastor Ted Barham who criticized the mayor’s refusal to distance himself from newspaper publisher Osama Siblani, who had a street corner named after him despite his previous support for Hezbollah. Instead of facing criticism for these actions at Dearborn’s city council meeting on November 18, 2025, Hammoud was able to portray himself and his Muslim constituents—some of whom have openly chanted “Death To America” in the city—as victims facing abuse and hostility.
“They took all the oxygen out of the room,” said Anthony Deegan, a Christian resident of Dearborn who has worked to document and counter anti-American and anti-Israel propaganda put forth by Islamists and their leftist allies in the city.
Lang’s Nativist Agenda
Lang, who was pardoned by U.S. President Donald Trump after spending four years in jail awaiting charges for, among other things, attacking police with a baseball bat during the January 6 protests in Washington, D.C., made his intentions clear in a November 12 post on Instagram.
In the post, Lang displays himself burning a copy of the Qur’an, the Talmud, and a copy of Standing With Israel by David Brog, while declaring “Jesus is King! No Talmud! No Qur’an! America is a Christian country!”
The rest of his rant, which includes a reference to white genocide, is drowned out by Pine Tree Riots, an acoustic punk band from Maine, performing “We’ll Have Our Home.” The song, an anthem for the far right, declares “In our own towns, we’re foreigners now/Our names are spat and cursed/The headlines smack/Of another attack/Not the last, and not the worst.”
The post ends with a graphic announcing that Lang would be in Dearborn on November 18 to march alongside Anthony Hudson, a candidate for governor in Michigan who previously expressed outrage over Hammoud’s treatment of Ted Barham and had planned a protest against Sharia in the city. Soon after Lang posted about the march, Hudson distanced himself from the provocateur’s antics, going so far as to make peace with the city’s Muslims during a tour of the city’s mosques during which he declared that Sharia does not exist in the city of Dearborn.
In a brief interview with Focus on Western Islamism (FWI), Hudson declared that Lang is a Jew, and is using the controversy in Dearborn to make trouble for Muslims, whom he described as the historical enemies of the Jewish people. (“NOW DOES IT MAKE SENSE WHY HE WAS CAUSING TROUBLE IN DEARBORN?,” Hudson proclaimed on X.)
Hudson stuck to his guns after FWI sent a follow up email asking if Lang who, during his protest, paraded through the streets of Dearborn carrying a wooden cross and chanting “Christ is King!” was a Jew. “He’s a Jew,” Hudson wrote back in an email that included images purportedly showing Lang wrapping tefillin and kissing the Western Wall in the Old City of Jerusalem. (For his part, Lang, who has acknowledged the video is real, has threatened to sue his detractors for defamation.)
Police Inaction
Lang’s conduct during his march to Dearborn City Hall made clear that he had not come to challenge Islamism but to provoke chaos in the city and generate views on social media. Dearborn residents, to their discredit, helped him succeed by assaulting him and his supporters while the Dearborn Police Department did little to intervene. Marching behind banners warning of “Islamification,” Lang taunted local Muslims by slapping a Qur’an with bacon and then attempting to set it on fire before a counter-protester knocked it from his hand. As he approached City Hall, Lang claimed the meeting would be cancelled because locals were “chimping out.”
Deegan, who observed the march, told FWI he saw angry Muslim protesters throwing water bottles and mulch at Lang’s followers as they advanced toward City Hall. At one point Deegan reports, police detained a Lang supporter after he was assualted by counter protesters. While police provided minimal protection, Deegan said he was at least able to persuade some youths to stop spitting Sour Patch Kids at Lang.
“The police were not proactive at all,” Deegan said.
City Council Meeting
Cam Higby, a journalist who traveled from Seattle to document Lang’s antics and the chaos it generated, also complained about police indifference to the violence directed at him and others during the march. Identifying himself as a member of the press, he told the council he was pepper-sprayed, had his phone smashed, lost his microphone and cash to his assailants, and received no meaningful assistance after reporting the attack to an officer.
“I shouldn’t feel like a dhimmi in my country. That’s what I feel like in Dearborn, Michigan. It doesn’t feel like home. I feel like a dhimmi, a second-class citizen, which is what Christians are in the majority of Muslim countries, dhimmis. Second class citizens. And the policing in this city, that’s exactly what happens,” Higby said before blaming the failure of Dearborn Police to act on his behalf on Hammoud. “Your orders.” (Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud has not responded to a request for comment on allegations of police inaction.)
While much of the invective was directed at Muslims, there was an undeniable whiff of antisemitism in the air at the council meeting. After obliquely calling out Hammoud for his abuse of Barham by telling the mayor to hold himself to “a higher decorum,” one attendee, who introduced himself as Jayden Scott from Bay City, Michigan, invoked the memory of the well-known antisemite Henry Ford. “This man put America on wheels and also wrote a famous book [The International Jew] that spoke about another takeover of our country,” he said before declaring, “We are all gentiles to these people. We are all goyim.”
Lang’s Testimony
During his testimony, which highlighted just how deeply his agenda rests on explicit racial and religious hatred—not any coherent critique of Islamism—Lang described “the Islamification of America” as a conspiracy “aimed at the destruction of white people.” After extolling the virtues of white, Western, Christian civilization he declared that “Muslims are looking to drag us back… oppress women, oppress homosexuals… [and] destroy everything that makes America great.”
Then after calling on President Trump to send ICE into Dearborn to apprehend “H1-B chain-migration invaders” who had “overstayed their visas,” he alleged that Muslims “lie to our faces,” practice polygamy to “outbreed us,” and are turning America into the “shithole” countries they came from.
“Respectfully, get the f—k out of my country,” he said.
In a subsequent conversation with FWI three days after the confrontation in Dearborn, Lang stated he does not agree with the assessment that “radical Islam is the problem; moderate Islam is the solution” offered by Middle East Forum’s founder Daniel Pipes, arguing that Islam is inherently incompatible with the West. He also accused Dearborn police of refusing to arrest or prosecute his alleged assailants because their “allegiance lies with Islam.” When FWI attempted to follow up with further questions, Lang said he was not offering further comment.
Lang’s over-the-top rhetoric aside, the irony is palpable. A few weeks after Hammoud told Dearborn resident Ted Barham that he was not welcome in the city he governed, an anti-Muslim bigot tells the mayor and his Muslim supporters they are not welcome in the United States. To his credit, Barham did not point this irony out but instead apologized for the hateful things said at the city council meeting.
“Just because I experienced abuse from the mayor doesn’t mean I want them to experience abuse from far-right racists,” Barham told FWI.
Mayor Gets the Last Word
Hammoud closed the meeting with an emotional appeal to Dearborn’s unity, painting the city as a place where small business owners thrive, immigrant families build new lives, and children sing their ABCs on the way to school. Ultimately, Hammoud’s attempt to reclaim moral authority at the end of the meeting rang hollow in light of his own conduct just weeks earlier. By invoking unity only after far-right agitators arrived to serve as convenient villains, Hammoud sought to cast himself as the guardian of Dearborn’s harmony while sidestepping his own role in undermining it.
