From Hitler to Hamas: Dearborn’s Journalistic Legacy Continues

The back issues of The Dearborn Independent reveal who Henry Ford held responsible for the world’s ills. In a series of articles published between 1920 and 1922, Ford’s paper portrayed Jews as enemies of humanity itself. The articles, which were subsequently compiled in a multi-volume series titled The International Jew, accused Jews of undermining the world economy, controlling the world press, ruining American baseball, and using motion pictures to promote Jewish supremacism in the United States.

One article portrayed Jews as singularly responsible for the suffering of Germans after World War I, arguing that “The sole winners of the war were Jews” and that the collapse of the country after the conflict was the result of “Jewish intrigue.” The same article declared that the Jews controlled all the major industries in Germany and dominated the Bolshevist movement, insisting that the “so-called ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ is really and practically the dictatorship of Jews.”

In Ford’s telling, Jews bore responsibility for the decision of Germany’s elites to go to war and torpedo American shipping—an act that helped ensure the country’s defeat once the United States entered the war. In other words, The Dearborn Independent offered a variation of the “stab in the back” narrative that Germans had embraced after their defeat, and which helped fuel the Holocaust.

Ford eventually told his editors to stop attacking the Jews, apologized for his misdeeds, and shut down the paper in 1927. This didn’t stop him from accepting the Order of the Grand Cross of the German Eagle bestowed upon him in 1938 by Adolf Hitler, who according to Henry Ford biographer Vincent Curcio “was said to have a full-length portrait of Ford in the headquarters of the National Socialist Party.”

A century later, Dearborn, Michigan, an Arab-majority city of 100,000 residents, serves as home to another newspaper that holds the Jewish state and its supporters responsible for the ills of the world. Instead of attacking Jews by name, The Arab American News (AAN) condemns Zionists, whom it blames for the catastrophe brought upon Arabs and Muslims in the Middle East by feckless leaders who keep starting wars they can’t win with a country that can’t afford to lose. If Ayatollah Khamenei, the late supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, had reserved a place of honor in his now-destroyed office for an American’s portrait, it likely would have gone to the paper’s publisher, Osama Siblani, a man who once expressed a willingness to be arrested for his support for Hezbollah and joked about sending Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “back to Poland.”

Clearly, Siblani, who was inducted into the Michigan Journalism Hall of Fame in 2013, has friends in high places. When a local pastor condemned officials for naming a busy intersection after Siblani in September 2025, Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud called the pastor “an Islamophobe,” declaring: “I want you to know as mayor, you are not welcome here. And the day you move out of the city will be the day that I launch a parade celebrating the fact that you moved out of the city because you are not somebody who believes in coexistence.”

To casual observers, Siblani might appear worthy of the mayor’s defense. For example, Siblani expressed opposition to Islamist gangsterism and the threat it presents to coexistence in 2011 by welcoming the news of Osama bin Laden’s death. Arabs and Muslims, he said, felt relieved and excited because they “understand more than anyone else how much damage that this man has done to the Muslim world and to the Arab world.” After warning that there are still “extremists out there that want to do us harm,” Siblani promised that he and his fellow Muslims “are going to be vigilant and … report anything that is suspicious.”

The reality, though, is that Siblani’s opposition to Islamist gangsterism only applies when perpetrated by Sunni—not Shia—Muslims. In 1993, Siblani appeared on Larry King’s CNN show and condemned President Bill Clinton for meeting with Salman Rushdie, whose novel The Satanic Verses had prompted Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to issue a 1989 fatwa calling for the author’s murder. Although Rushdie was then living in hiding under a death sentence from the Iranian regime, what bothered Siblani was Clinton supposedly “sending a message to the Islamic world that he condoned the insult of Islam, and that is something that should not have been done.” In other words, he sided with a Shia regime that had called for the death of a writer.

A decade later, Siblani came to the defense of Al-Manar, the satellite television channel operated, owned, and funded by Iranian proxy Hezbollah, which the U.S. government has designated a terrorist organization. When the State Department moved against the channel for inciting violence, Siblani took issue, telling the Washington Post, “By that standard, they should shut Fox News for inciting against Muslims.”

Again, Siblani shielded Khomeini’s Iran and its Hezbollah proxy from criticism. Again, while Sunni gangsterism elicits principled condemnation from Siblani, Shia-backed threats, fatwas, and propaganda elicit an energetic defense. About the only Sunni organization that prompts much support from Siblani is Hamas—an Iranian-backed proxy that attacked Israel on October 7 in an attempt to derail the Abraham Accords.

Siblani’s support for Shia gangsterism is particularly evident in the pages of his newspaper, from which he defames the Jewish state in the Middle East in much the same way Henry Ford used The Dearborn Independent to defame Jews.

Under Siblani’s leadership, The Arab American News has effectively supported Iran’s efforts to derail the Abraham Accords process advanced by the United Arab Emirates, which, if successful, would have normalized relations between Arabs, Jews, and Muslims and promised an era of peace in the Middle East. The publication did this by portraying Israel as a singularly and uniquely evil country in the Middle East. And appropriately enough for a publication whose name in Arabic translates to “Echo of the Homeland,” the paper seems intent on importing the hostility directed toward Israel in the Middle East into the United States.

The Arab American News’ opposition to peace between Israel and its neighbors regularly manifests itself in articles written by Ramzy Baroud. In the pages of Siblani’s paper, Baroud defends the efforts of Palestinian leaders to veto the larger peace process between Israel and Arab countries in the region.

In 2017, for example, he criticized renewed interest in a Saudi peace proposal as an attempt “to achieve normalization with the Arabs without peace with the Palestinians first.”

In 2019, he covered expressed support for eliminating the Jewish state while praising the view that “normalization must be shunned.”

The following year, he slammed a Palestinian leader for speaking about a peace process with Israel.

Along these lines, AAN published an unsigned article in August 2020 highlighting angry responses from Palestinian leaders to the Abraham Accords. Hamas, the publication reported, called the accords “a stabbing in the back of our people.” AAN also quoted Palestinian Authority spokesperson Nabil Abu Rdeneh describing the Accords as amounting to “treason” and normalization as a “betrayal of Jerusalem, Al Aqsa and the Palestinian cause.”

In early 2021, Baroud condemned Pakistan for considering joining the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain in the normalization process, declaring that the country’s leaders “should never, under any circumstances and no matter the pressure, normalize with Israel” because to do so would “embolden an already vile, racist, violent apartheid Israel.” Baroud echoed these arguments a few months later in another article that again accused Israel of “genocide” while declaring that “The ‘peace process’ introduced more than death, mayhem and normalization of land theft in Palestine.”

In February 2022, Baroud condemned the willingness of a growing number of African countries to maintain diplomatic ties with Israel and objected to the prospect of the African Union granting observer status to Israel. Baroud called on activists to “move quickly” to oppose the recognition and “send a strong collective message to Israel that it is not welcome in Africa,” adding that “A region that has paid, and continues to pay, a heavy price for colonialism, neo-colonialism and apartheid has no need to ‘do businesses’ with another colonial apartheid regime.”

As can be seen from the articles above, AAN fails to address the refusal of Arab leaders to accept numerous peace offers, including the Clinton Parameters which, if enacted, would have accorded the Palestinians a state. Moreover, the paper legitimizes its anti-peace agenda with false accusations of “apartheid” and “genocide” that ultimately legitimize violence against Israelis and Jews living in the diaspora.

AAN’s opposition to peace between Israel and its neighbors in the Middle East exploded into view in the aftermath of the October 7 massacre. In a piece published just four days after the massacre, Ramzy Baroud framed the massacre — or rather, the “daring military campaign” — not as a consequence of Hamas extremism but Israeli oppression, declaring that the attack “was only possible because Palestinians are simply fed up.”

Amazingly enough, Baroud portrayed the massacre as a restrained act of violence, describing Hamas’s alleged “insistence on not killing the elderly and children” as a “message for an international audience, that Palestinian Resistance will play by the accepted universal rules.” (About 125 of the dead were aged 65 and over and 39 were aged 18 and younger.)

Twenty days after the attack, AAN published another article that accused Israel of falsely claiming the attack “targeted women, children and elders who cannot defend themselves in civilian towns and kubutzes [sic] near the Gaza strip.” To buttress the point, the paper reported that the “great majority of the victims were between the ages of 18 and 70, which make[s] them by definition a part of the reserve forces.” In other words, less than two weeks after AAN whitewashed the Hamas as having conducted a restrained attack against Israel on October 7, the same publication suggested Hamas was entitled to kill (and indeed freely killed) any Israeli, male or female, in uniform or not, between the ages of 18 and 70.

The article then went on to ask, “How can the Netanyahu government face its people or the world with this scandalous failure after taking such pride in being the best guarantor of the Jewish people’s safety and security?” It is another example of editorial schizophrenia on the part of AAN. Soon after the attack, the publication lauded Hamas leaders for showing restraint by playing by the “universal rules” of war, but then two weeks later it gloated that the attack killed so many Jews that the Israeli government should be ashamed.

In a January 5, 2024, article titled “We Will Come to You in a Roaring Flood: The Untold Story of the October 7 Attacks,” Baroud openly celebrated Hamas’s massacre as a heroic and inevitable act of “resistance.” His AAN piece sets the stage as follows:

This is, simply put, a celebration of what even Human Rights Watch—no friend of Israel—described as “crimes against humanity.” Nowhere does the article offer even a hint of condemnation for the documented atrocities—the murder of infants, children, elderly civilians, and the systematic sexual violence that independent investigations have confirmed.

Baroud portrays these atrocities as “defensive strategies” against, among other things, the Israeli refusal to accord the Palestinians a state—despite the previously mentioned peace offers which would have resulted in Palestinian statehood. To further legitimize these atrocities, Baroud invokes the false allegation of genocide against Israel, declaring that the post-October 7 fighting “has resulted in unprecedented casualties compared to all Israeli wars on Gaza, in fact, on Palestinians during any time in modern history.” These casualties, Baroud reports, prompted intellectuals, activists, and international law experts to accuse Israel of “genocide.”

AAN has published hundreds of articles that level the charge of genocide against the Jewish state since October 7. Sometimes the allegation is leveled in passing, other times it is put forth in hateful rhetoric with one writer declaring in August 2025 that “The most evil thing the world has witnessed since the Holocaust is being carried out by the state of Israel, and it tells me that Hitler in the end won.” The same writer asserts that “in Israel’s actions we see the same cold calculus that once defined Nazi policy, the belief that the survival and expansion of one group justifies the annihilation of another.”

The notion that Israel seeks the annihilation of the Palestinian people is, of course, false. Israel has sent millions of text messages to Palestinians in Gaza warning them of impending strikes in an effort to reduce civilian casualties and in so doing has forfeited the element of surprise. It has sent food and medicine into Gaza to maintain the lives of the people it was accused of annihilating. All of this prompted West Point scholar John Spencer to declare that “Israel has implemented more precautions to prevent civilian harm than any military in history—above and beyond what international law requires and more than the U.S. did in its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

By consistently amplifying voices like Ramzy Baroud’s and framing Israel as the singular obstacle to peace and author of Palestinian suffering, Siblani’s Arab American News has undermined the process of modernization and normalization that the United Arab Emirates has championed through the Abraham Accords. Siblani and his paper have sided firmly with the Iranian-led rejectionist axis. They portray normalization efforts as “treason,” “a stabbing in the back,” and a betrayal of the Palestinian cause, while celebrating or excusing the violence intended to kill those efforts.

In doing so, the newspaper imports the Middle East’s most retrograde, anti-modern forces into Dearborn’s Arab-American community—fomenting resentment and hostility toward peace, prosperity, and coexistence with Jews and the West.

We’ve seen this before. In the 1920s, Henry Ford used a newspaper headquartered in Dearborn to promote to an American audience the narrative the Nazi regime used to justify its violence against Jews in Europe. A century later, Osama Siblani has done something parallel: he has used The Arab American News to legitimize the violence of Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas against the Jewish state and to sabotage the modernizing, peace-seeking vision advanced by the United Arab Emirates. Where Ford amplified a politics of ethnic grievance and conspiracy that helped pave the way for the Holocaust, Siblani amplifies a politics of Islamist rejectionism that seeks to keep Arabs and Muslims locked in cycles of resentment, violence, and failure—both in the Middle East and here in the United States.

And so, Dearborn’s legacy of hateful journalism continues.

Published originally on May 27, 2026.