Wall Street Journal Helpfully Calls Dearborn, Michigan, 'America's Jihad Capital,' So Good Luck, People Of Dearborn

It's not like anyone might consider that a call for violence. Christians are a loving and peaceful people.

Panic Propaganda collage generated in multiple runs of DreamStudio AI, combined in Photoshop.

The Wall Street Journal published a “Please Panic About Muslims Now” op-ed Friday, calling the city of Dearborn, Michigan, “America’s Jihad Capital” and suggesting that, because a number of Muslim clerics have said inflammatory things about Israel’s war in Gaza, the entire city is probably full of terrorists. Not that the op-ed called for violence against people in Dearborn; it simply quoted some of the most horrible things some clerics said about Israel and left it to readers to assume that everyone in Dearborn agrees and is preparing to come and cut off your head as you sleep.

The op-ed pointed out that Dearborn has the nation’s largest Muslim population per capita, that one “jihadi sheikh” in Dearborn “promotes holy war to his tens of thousands of followers on Twitter and Telegram,” and that a mosque in Dearborn held a memorial “for a Hezbollah operative killed in an Israeli airstrike,” leaving the impression that surely the entire city attended.

For good measure, the piece also pointed out that right after 9/11, the Michigan State Police told the FBI about concerns that Dearborn was a “major financial support center” and a “recruiting area and potential support base” for international terrorism. Hey, if post-9/11 panic by police isn’t proof of something nasty going on nearly 23 years later, what is?

In response, Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud tweeted that he had ordered city police to increase security at houses of worship and to keep an eye on major infrastructure in the city, saying that the Journal piece (here’s an un-paywalled MSN version for you to ignore) “led to an alarming increase in bigoted and Islamophobic rhetoric online targeting the city of Dearborn.”

The op-ed was written by Steven Stalinsky, executive directory of the “Middle East Media Research Institute,” a propaganda outfit which has been in the Muslims Hate You And Want To Kill You business for at least as long as the post-9/11 panic; its fans have included noted Islamophobes like Robert Spencer of “Jihad Watch” and Frank Gaffney, who saw Muslim terrorists everywhere in the Obama administration. The group is notorious for cherry-picking the most inflammatory stories from Muslim media in the Mideast and presenting them as if they were typical of all Muslims. Gosh, that sounds like an op-ed the Wall Street Journal just ran Friday.

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer condemned the op-ed Monday, calling it a "total misrepresentation of an important city." Whitmer told reporters in Grand Rapids that the piece was unfair and was likely to stir up hatred:

"I thought that that opinion article was incredibly cruel and ignorant, and a total misrepresentation of an important city full of a lot of beautiful people who are Michiganders, and are our neighbors and our extended family," Whitmer said.

"I recognize that there are a lot of people hurting because of the war that is raging in Israel and Gaza. (There are) people with Jewish relatives who are hurting, people with Palestinian or Muslim relatives that are hurting, and that's why my job as governor has been to try to keep the heat down here at home. Make sure people are safe whether they worship in a mosque, or synagogue, or a church or anywhere else for that matter. I thought that that opinion article was really abhorrent."

Well sure, but what about the important job of promoting panic about Islam, which has really fallen off since Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential bid and needs to be ramped up again to help him this fall?

Following the publication of the op-ed, President Joe Biden tweeted that hate is bad, in case we needed a reminder:

Americans know that blaming a group of people based on the words of a small few is wrong.

That’s exactly what can lead to Islamophobia and anti-Arab hate, and it shouldn’t happen to the residents of Dearborn – or any American town.

We must continue to condemn hate in all forms.

Then all the blue checkmarks accused him of inciting violence against Trump supporters, and also for blaming innocent guns for what bad people do with them, and how is that even fair? Plus, several pointed out, Dearborn really is full of terrorists, don’t be ridiculous.

This is the point in the story in which your Editrix, who can see Dearborn from her house, explains that you can go to Dearborn every day for a week to see every one of your mom’s (or your own middle aged self’s) specialists, grab a baklava, buy a chicken from the Halal butcher, get your beard shaped by a barber who understands Jewish beard fros if you are her son, say hello to some folks, many or even most of them in hijab if they are lady folks, and not once get terroristed or even an Evil Eye.

That op-ed was lunatic shit.

As of yet, there are no reports of physical attacks on anyone in Dearborn, although the Center for American-Islamic Relations called attention on Twitter yesterday to a Sunday-night assault in Austin, Texas, in which a Palestinian-American was stabbed in the chest by a man who attacked a group of Arab-Americans as they drove back from a pro-Palestinian protest. Police are investigating the attack as a possible “bias-motivated incident.” You don’t say.

CAIR tweeted that the alleged attacker

approached their vehicle at a stop sign, started screaming the n-word and other obscenities, attempted to rip their Free Palestine flag off their car, yanked one of them out of the vehicle, started a fight, and ultimately stabbed a 23-year-old Palestinian-American in the chest.

But then, how can we possibly know whether he was stirred up by a hateful op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, or by some other hate-filled rhetoric in rightwing media? That’s the beauty of stochastic terrorism, isn’t it? Just wind up the creeps and turn them loose, and for all anyone knows they’re just “lone wolf” attackers who for some reason went “out of control.”

[AP / Detroit Free Press / WSJ at MSN / CNN]

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