The city was sued Tuesday in federal court in a lawsuit that contends city policies are enforced and interpreted to favor Muslims over Christians.
The 96-page, 12-count complaint lists more than 15 city officials and police officers as well as Arab International Festival organizers as defendants in a lawsuit originating from the arrests of four Evangelists during the June Arab Festival. The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court for Eastern District of Michigan.
The suit claims the city and festival organizers conspired to restrict the free speech rights of Acts 17 Apologetics and retaliate against the group for an incident at the 2009 Arab Fest.
The plaintiffs are Nabeel Qureshi, David Wood, Paul Rezkalla, Negeen Mayel and Joshua Hogg. All but Hogg were arrested in June for creating a disturbance at last year’s festival, but they were eventually acquitted by a 19th District Court jury. Mayel, though, was convicted of one count of disobeying a police officer.
Representing the plaintiffs is the Christian-interest law firm The Thomas More Law Center, which was founded by former Domino’s Pizza CEO Tom Monaghan. Co-counsel for the plaintiffs is Arizona-based attorney David Yerushalmi.
The roots of the complaint go back to the 2009 Arab Fest, when Acts 17 members were physically removed from the Warren Avenue street fair supposedly for harassing people and passing out religious literature, which is against festival regulations.
The missionaries captured the incident on camera and put it on YouTube under the title “Special Report: Sharia in the United States.” Sharia is Islamic holy law.
The video showed festival security workers pushing down the missionaries’ video cameras and forcibly removing the group from the festival grounds. The video eventually drew more than 2 million views and resulted in several complaints to the city about what the video made out to be the persecution of Christians.
Because of the complaints and the high-level of negative publicity, the suit contends, city officials and festival organizers conspired to retaliate against the missionaries at the 2010 festival. That conspiracy, said the suit, led to their arrests for breaching the peace. Videos of their arrests last year also went viral on YouTube, and sparked more than 6,000 complaint calls and letters to the city.
The lawsuit seeks nominal, compensatory, and punitive damages, but does not specify how much in the complaint. It also asks for a court order to prevent the city and festival from enforcing certain policies that were used as rationale for the missionaries’ arrests.
In a press statement, Thomas More President and Chief Counsel Robert Thompson said the incident is “a classic example of stealth jihad right here in America.”
“Muslims dominate the political and law enforcement process in Dearborn,” the statement said. “It seems that police were more interested in placating the mayor and Muslims than obeying our Constitution…And it should be a wake-up call for all patriotic Americans.”
City attorneys said as of Thursday the city had not yet been served with the suit and declined comment.
Dearborn Mayor Jack O’Reilly, who is one of the defendants, said the evidence cited in the complaint actually proves the city is not at fault.
“This is all preposterous, an outright distortion of the truth,” he said. “This will all come to light in court.”