Dexter Van Zile, the Middle East Forum’s Violin Family Research Fellow, serves as managing editor of the Middle East Forum’s Focus on Western Islamism. Van Zile spoke to a November 24 Middle East Forum podcast (video). The following summarizes his comments:
Hammoud had actually joked about “being a jihadi” a day or two before a number of Dearborn residents were arrested for planning a violent attack against members of the LGBTQ community in a nearby locale.
At a meeting of the Dearborn City Council in early September, local evangelical Protestant pastor Ted Barham complained about a street corner named for Osama Siblani, a Hezbollah supporter. The naming ceremony was held as a public event and celebrated by Dearborn public officials, many of whom are Arabs and Muslims. Attending the meeting was Dearborn’s mayor, Abdullah Hammoud, who reacted with hostility to Barham’s objection, telling the pastor that he “was no longer welcome in the city.”
At the next city council meeting in late September, Barham and other Christians in attendance pressured the mayor, in a “peaceful and responsible manner,” to address his overreaction, but Hammoud refused to apologize. Hammoud had actually joked about “being a jihadi” a day or two before a number of Dearborn residents were arrested for planning a violent attack against members of the LGBTQ community in a nearby locale. His tone-deaf joke ignored the fact that “there’s significant support for Hezbollah and anti-American sentiment in the city.”
Some two months later, a far-right protest march organized by Jake Lang, a white supremacist running for the Senate in Florida, “used this controversy to essentially whip up hostility towards Muslims in the city.” Lang, who was a January 6 protester caught on video assaulting police officers in the Capitol, spent four years in jail before being pardoned by President Trump before going to trial.
At the anti-Islam protest in Dearborn, which he promoted with a video on Instagram in which he burned both a Qur’an and a copy of the Talmud, Lang produced a Quran wrapped with bacon and attempted to burn it. After being punched in the face by an angry Dearborn Muslim, Lang succeeded in his goal of generating support by posting the assault on the internet. Barham, for his part, condemned all extremists ginned up by the mayor’s insult.
The reality in Dearborn is that “there are jihadis” in the city who serve as a “focal point for Arab and Muslim extremism against Israel and against the United States overall.” Mayor Hammoud has effectively engaged the cross-section of Dearborn’s voters by “keeping up the city’s more comfortable sections to placate the elites, while Muslim residents of the more depressed neighborhoods support him based on his Islamic identity.”
The spread of unchecked Islamist hostility is compounded by the anemic response of Dearborn’s interfaith community, whose leaders are mainly liberal Protestants. Their flaccid approach ignores the reality that every society requires “coercive power” to maintain order and keep people in line. While the far-right responds with provocative tactics, the fact that the left is in a Red-Green alliance with Islamists has obviated the need for Muslim leaders to moderate. By blaming all ills on the West’s “settler colonialism,” the left portrays Muslims, Arabs, and all people of color as victims, thereby perpetuating the nihilist ideology of the victimhood narrative. Handing over coercive power to those who hate the U.S. is a prescription for disaster. “If you do not enforce the law and insist that newcomers assimilate into Western democracies, this is what you’re going to have.”
By blaming all ills on the West’s “settler colonialism,” the left portrays Muslims, Arabs, and all people of color as victims, thereby perpetuating the nihilist ideology of the victimhood narrative.
Lang’s public encounter exposed a “legitimate grievance” in confronting the problem of Islamism. His anti-democratic, “divisionist” agenda enabled Dearborn’s mayor—the very person who set this controversy in motion—to “portray himself as a victim.” Hammoud’s hostile pronouncements against a Christian clergyman raise legitimate fears for the “rights of non-Muslims in the city of Dearborn” and spotlight the fault line of “Muslim male supremacism” in Western democracies.
The controversy makes one wonder whether Muslim politicians are serious in “abiding by the rules of American civil society.” It also “raises serious concerns about the rise of the far right in response to the challenge of Islamism in American democracy.” Lang, no believer in Islam’s ability to moderate, drew Jew-haters into his orbit in an effort to set up an alliance between Islamists and far-right Christians who shared animus toward Jews and targeted them as scapegoats. Reasonable people who want to “protect the West from any form of totalitarian or authoritarian movement need to be very careful about who their allies are.”
This unfolding crisis was primarily the result of “politicians and elites who have failed to exercise or maintain the monopoly on the legitimate use of force in Western democracies.” These politicians and elites have also neglected to “insist that new people or immigrants who come into the country assimilate to the rule of civil society.” If these problems are left to fester unresolved, they could eventually result in the “Lebanonization of American society and of the United States in general.” Imagine the chaos of neighborhoods devolving into enclaves of suspicion and polarization that ultimately “hinder the economy” in a “de-civilization” process.
Economics offers a potential method to challenge the Islamists in Dearborn. The simple pressure points of capitalism can rein in discriminatory practices. America’s elites need to get the message across to those Arabs and Muslims who unashamedly foment sectarian hatred that it is “not going to go well if you keep doing this.” Convincing Muslim business owners who want to sell their products to the broader community, or to market themselves to “the larger American body politic,” demands zero tolerance for hostility towards America and Christians, and towards Israel and Jews. Dearborn’s Ford Motor Company, with its founder Henry Ford’s shameful history of antisemitism, can make amends by pressuring Hammoud to change his rhetoric and behavior.
Modernizing Islam and integrating into Western society are the only constructive options for countering the scourge of Islamism.
A solution requires grappling with the political, ideological, and theological points of friction. The tension—not unique to Dearborn—is also being played out overseas in European capitals such as London, and domestically in U.S. cities like Paterson, New Jersey. More scenarios may arise like that in Brooklyn, New York, where Muslim patrols enforce security in Muslim neighborhoods, raising questions about their motives.
Muslim leaders would do well to look at the catastrophe that Islamist supremacism has wreaked on the world in the past century, and on Muslims in particular. Along these lines, responsible Muslim leaders should conclude that updating Islam in much the same way Christianity has changed is an imperative. Modernizing Islam and integrating into Western society are the only constructive options for countering the scourge of Islamism.
