Police in Michigan city put on alert after WSJ opinion piece

The mayor of Dearborn, Michigan, says the city’s police officers are ramping up their presence across places of worship and major infrastructure points following an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal that he called “bigoted” and “Islamophobic.”

The WSJ published the piece on Friday headlined as “Welcome to Dearborn, America’s Jihad Capital.” The city’s mayor and rights advocates from the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee condemned the piece as anti-Arab and racist for suggesting the city’s residents, including religious leaders and politicians, supported Palestinian Islamist group Hamas and extremism.

“Reckless. Bigoted. Islamophobic,” Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud said about the WSJ piece written by Steven Stalinsky, executive director of the Middle East Media Research Institute.

After the October 7 attacks, the founder and executive director of the Council on American–Islamic Relations, Nihad Awad, said he was “happy” to see Gazans “break the siege” when thousands of Hamas-led terrorists burst through the enclave’s border with Israel, massacred 1,200 people, and took some 250 hostage.

“Yes, I was happy to see people breaking the siege and throwing down the shackles of their own land, and walk free into their land, which they were not allowed to walk in,” Awad said.