At an International Al-Quds Day rally held last Friday in Dearborn, Michigan, which was streamed live on Facebook, local assembled protesters chanted: “Death to America!” and “Death to Israel!” MEMRI reported last Friday.
According to the last US census finding, Dearborn, Michigan is 54% Arab.
Tarek Bazzi, a Michigan activist who works for the Hadi Institute in Dearborn, which “strives to create an Islamic atmosphere where students, parents, staff members, and stakeholders are learning to lead their lives according to the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad and his Pure Household,” declared that not only “Genocide Joe” has to go, but the entire US system “has to go.”
Bazzi Quoted Malcolm X, saying: “We live in one of the rottenest countries that has ever existed on this earth,” and noted that the slogan “death to Israel” is the “most logical chant shouted across the world today.”
Michigan Imam Usama Abdulghani, who is also connected to the Hadi Institute, said that the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini established International Al-Quds Day because Israel is a “cancer” and an “evil settler colonialist project.”
Abdulghani said that “Israel is ISIS, they are Nazis, they are fascists, they are racists,” and “The people of the world now know this.”
At the end of the rally, Tarek Bazzi told a child to lead the crowd with the chant: “Free Palestine! From the River to the Sea Palestine will be free!”
Here’s some more Tarek Bazzi, from may 2021:
MEMRI Executive Director Steven Stalinsky told Fox News Digital that Dearborn has been a “hotbed of hate for many years,” where local Arabs are holding numerous “rallies and sermons in support for Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran,” much more so since October 7, 2023.
On February 2, Stalinsky published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal titled, “Welcome to Dearborn, America’s Jihad Capital.”
“Almost immediately after Oct. 7, and long before Israel began its ground offensive in Gaza, people were celebrating the horrific events of that day in pro-Hamas rallies and marches throughout Dearborn,” Stalinsky wrote. “A local headline describing an Oct. 10 event at the Ford Performing Arts Center read ‘Michigan rally cheers Hamas attack.’
“Imam Imran Salha of Dearborn’s Islamic Center of Detroit told the crowd that Israel’s past actions have put ‘fire in our hearts that will burn that state’—Israel—‘until its demise.’ In May 2023, Mr. Salha had urged his congregation to say ‘amen’ in agreement with his prayer that Allah ‘eradicate from existence’ the ‘sick, disgusting Zionist regime.’ In October 2022, according to the Washington Free Beacon, his organization received $150,000 in funding from the Homeland Security Department’s nonprofit security grants program.”
Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud tweeted that the WSJ op-ed fanned the flames of Islamophobia in the US, and announced: “Effective immediately, Dearborn police will ramp up its presence across all places of worship and major infrastructure points. This is a direct result of the inflammatory WSJ opinion piece that has led to an alarming increase in bigoted and Islamophobic rhetoric online targeting the city of Dearborn. Stay vigilant.”
“This type of extremism, this type of rhetoric, this type of division … threats of violence was a Middle East thing, it seems like a lot of that was limited to the Middle East, and now it’s come to our doorstep,” Phil Green, a Republican member of Michigan House of Representatives from District 67, told Fox News Digital.
It used to be a Middle East thing, but now the Middle East has settled in the Midwest.
