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“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
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