Muslim Group Supports Lawsuit Against Dearborn, Mich. For Discriminating Against Christians And Jews

“Although you live here, I want you to know as mayor, you are not welcome here.”

Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud said that to a Christian pastor at a city council meeting last year. The pastor’s offense was objecting to the renaming of a street in Dearborn for Osama Siblani, a local publisher with a long public record of support for Hezbollah and Hamas. The mayor added that the day the pastor moved out, he would “launch a parade.”

That was not a mayor losing his temper. It was a mayor revealing a worldview.

Now a Dearborn resident has taken that worldview to federal court. Margot Cleveland, senior legal correspondent for The Federalist, is suing the city and its mayor with the American Freedom Law Center (AFLC). Her complaint lays out a pattern: $1,500 in public funds for “Ramadan Kareem” banners, $5,000 for a lighted crescent in Peace Park, police department T-shirts pairing the department’s seal with a crescent moon, and, this year, crescent-and-star lights on municipal streetlights across the city.

When Cleveland asked whether Easter and Passover would receive equal recognition, the city did not answer. She never asked Dearborn to take down a single Ramadan banner. She asked only that Christians and Jews be treated as equals. The city’s answer was silence and, she alleges, retaliation.

The CLARITy Coalition — Muslims, former Muslims, Christians, Jews, Hindus, and others united “against the rise of Islamist tyranny” — supports this challenge. Not simply because Cleveland is right, but because her case is a leading example of how Islamist movements can be defeated in a free society. Not with “the proverbial sword.” Not with bigotry against Muslims. With the quintessentially American instrument — our Constitution.

Islamism’s Kryptonite

Muslims like me believe the way we practice our faith is different from what we call Islamism: A “Muslim” is any self-described practitioner or follower of the faith of Islam. “Islamists” are, however, self-described supporters of theo-political movements or parties (in Arabic — Islamiyeen) with specific, typically very theocratic, platforms for the governmental implementation of their interpretations of sharia law (Islamic jurisprudence).

Islamists of every stripe around the world —from the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood, Shia Khomeinists, Saudi Wahhabis, to the Indo-Pakistani Jama’at Islamiya — disagree on much, but they share one premise: that legitimate law flows only from their reading of sharia (Islamic jurisprudence), interpreted by their clerics and enforced by the state. While certainly better studies need to be done, clearly a plurality of Muslim faithful support various forms of Islamist movements and their party constructs. One study that included “Arab Barometer” data noted that 48 percent of Arab Muslims supported Islamist parties. The massive nature of this movement underscores the dire need for reform within Islam against the ideas that entrench Islamists.

The American founding rests on a premise that is the polar opposite of that held by Islamists. Our inalienable rights come from God, not from government, and certainly not from any cleric or any sect’s reading of sharia. Because those rights belong to each person directly, government may not establish a religion to stand between a citizen and his Creator.

That is why the establishment clause is the Islamists’ kryptonite. When government enacts what it claims are the literal laws of God, government becomes God — and faith becomes coercion. As a devout Muslim whose family fled Syria, I can love God more freely in America than my parents ever could back home. The first victims of Islamist tyranny are Muslim dissenters, dissidents, modernists, and reformists.

The separation of mosque and state is not a threat to Islam. It is the condition under which Muslims can practice their religion freely. It is the ultimate definition of a non-coerced faith — the premise that you can decide on your own what interpretations to practice and which ones to ignore.

Majoritocracy

Dearborn’s leaders seem to believe they are immune from that principle because they are now a majority. To Islamists, democracy is not the protection of individual rights; it is majoritocracy — a tribal mobocracy where 50 percent, plus one, are deciding what to do with everyone else.

The cyclical pattern of populist Islamism is familiar. Islamist organizations spend decades crying victimhood as a religious minority. Once in power, they extend “tolerance” to others on their own terms — the terms of the mob, the tribe, they now control. But tolerance implies superiority; pluralism implies equality.

The traditional sharia model in application to non-Muslims is not about equal citizenship but second-class status — traditionally known as “dhimmi” (a person “protected” by the theocratic Islamist state). Christians, Jews, Yazidis, Baha’is and dissenting Muslims across Syria, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan live with its consequences today.

A city hall that funds one faith’s holidays while ignoring others, and tells a Christian he is unwelcome in his own town, is importing that mindset into an American city. Why? Because it’s their Islamist worldview and they think they can get away with it. When he was mayor of Istanbul, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the head of the AKP Party in Turkey (the country’s equivalent of the Muslim Brotherhood), famously said, “Democracy is like a tram. You ride it until you arrive at your destination, and then you step off.”

The Conveyor Belt

Supremacism from city hall does not stay in city hall. It is the first stop on what we have long called the conveyor belt of radicalization: a grievance narrative, exaggerated and endlessly repeated, that teaches young Muslims America is their enemy and that their identity is political rather than spiritual.

Michigan has been a laboratory for America to see where insurgent Islamist movements can lead. In 2009, Detroit imam Luqman Ameen Abdullah — who, according to the FBI, preached a separate Islamic state within America — was killed in an FBI raid on the day he was charged in a federal weapons and stolen-goods sting. CAIR’s response was to demand an investigation of the FBI.

In 2017, Detroit-area doctors were charged with cutting the genitals of girls as young as seven. A federal judge threw out the core charges, ruling that the 1996 federal female genital mutilation ban (FGM) exceeded Congress’s authority. Congress fixed the law in 2020, but girls who have undergone FMG are scarred for life, and their abusers walked free. Each time, communal and religious identity was invoked, as was religious freedom, as a deceptive shield against equal protection of the law.

It was a similar error, in milder form, when the Obama Justice Department sued a suburban Chicago school district in 2010 to force a special leave above and beyond agreed-upon teachers union leave benefits for a teacher’s Hajj (pilgrimage). Americanism does not mean special carve-outs for one faith. It means equal law for all. Islamists demand exemptions when they are a minority and coercively assert their privileges when they are a majority. Dearborn is the second half of that equation.

The stakes reach well beyond one city. Michigan’s current Democrat Senate nominee, Abdulrahman El-Sayed, built his primary campaign alongside gaming streamer Hasan Piker. Piker is the nephew of Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks, a far-left streaming network whose worldview has fixated and obsessed for years with antisemitism and anti-Americanism. Uygur’s own pedigree may be Kemalist Turkish nationalism, not Erdogan’s Islamism — in Ankara the two are enemies. In America, however, they converge on the same global enemies anyway. That convergence is exactly what the red-green (Marxist Islamist) axis actually is, and its yield is a generation of young Americans radicalized against their own country and against Jews.

Piker’s radicalized statements to millions of impressionable youth about America on gaming platforms are sadly aplenty and range from asserting “Hamas is a thousand times better than a fascist settler colonial apartheid state” (referring to Israel) to saying America “deserved 9/11.” El-Sayed didn’t confront or provide a variant worldview. He just called the remark “dumb” — though he campaigned with him through the final day of the primary. When asked about his own fealty to the Muslim Brotherhood, El-Sayed dismissed it as bigotry. That is the Islamist-left alliance at work: careless anti-Americanism repackaged as youth politics, feeding the very grievance narrative and identity politics that radicalizes youth into the next Nidal Hasans.

America is the Frontline

This battle cannot be won in Tehran, Riyadh, Islamabad, Damascus, Cairo, or even Ankara. In those open-air prison societies, a Muslim who questions the clerics risks prison or worse. It can only be won in the laboratories of freedom in the West, where Muslims can debate openly and the law protects dissent. Many CLARITy members and our families came to America precisely for that freedom. Muslims and non-Muslims who remain silent in the face of theocratic, un-American Islamism are no different from the silent Germans who did little to stop the rise and spread of Nazism.

A victory for Margot Cleveland would accomplish what no counterterrorism program can. It would restore government neutrality without silencing anyone’s faith in a Muslim-majority, Islamist-run municipality. It would put every city council in America on notice that equal treatment is not optional, whoever holds the majority. And it would protect Dearborn’s own Muslims — especially reformers and those who fled theocracy — from a city hall that presumes to speak for their faith.

Christians and Jews and all people of conscience in Dearborn should not need a federal judge to be welcome in their own city. But if that is what it takes, then this lawsuit is not about banners. It is about whether the First Liberty belongs to everyone. We say it does. That is Americanism — and for those of us who are Muslim, it is the freest way to be faithful.

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