This evening, self-described “Crusaders” plan to descend on the Dearborn City Council, intent on disparaging, mocking and disenfranchising Dearborn families. Their ranks include a former Jan. 6 insurrectionist, and others who have turned the demonization of Muslim Americans into a cottage industry, trading vile insults for likes and shares on social media.
And while their bogeyman of choice is the phony threat of “Islamification,” what this small minority despises most are the American ideals that make a place like Dearborn possible in the first place.
Anyone who wishes to exercise their First Amendment rights should feel free to do so ‒ and they have done so for decades. But there’s a reason I’ve asked Dearborn families who don’t have business
before the City Council to stay home. Those who peddle hate for a living don’t need our business. And in our algorithmic age, attention is currency.
Like thousands of Dearborn parents, I fear having to explain to my children why the city they love is so often a target of hatred. It’s a reality I faced growing up in the shadow of 9/11, when a man aimed a gun at me while I was walking home from middle school at the age of 11 and demanded I go back to the country I was born in ‒ the United States.
Last week, federal agents charged an Alaska man living 4,000 miles from Dearborn who was so driven by anti-Muslim hate that he made threats on my life and my family’s lives.
We can’t afford to ignore the aim of these hate movements, which is incitement to violence.
Cynicism asks our great city to shrink
Dearborn is as American as any city. And yet in some ways it is exceptional. Our city helped put the world on wheels and birth the modern middle class. It opened its doors to immigrants from all faith traditions, granting refuge and opportunity to the world’s “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Countless life journeys that began oceans away ‒ in Italy, Poland, Ireland, Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen, Palestine, Syria ‒ converged on this great city and transformed it, not by replacing American values, but modeling them, with excellence and old-fashioned Michigan grit.
Dearborn is proof that our union can be perfected more each and every day. That immigrants do in fact enrich our nation’s civic and economic life. That coexistence is not only possible, but preferable. That you can produce the world’s greatest pick-up truck, the F-150, and the world’s greatest sandwich, the shawarma, within a few miles, showcasing American ingenuity big and small. But it’s Dearborn’s people that keep this glorious experiment alive, shielding it from the cynicism that asks our city to shrink so that it might fit into a smaller, more hostile vision of America.
A city where every faith is welcome
Just yesterday, I stood arm-in-arm with pastors and clergy from our city to declare that our unity will prevail. In Dearborn, you will find the congregations of more than 30 churches and a dozen mosques picking up each other’s kids from school, shoveling their neighbor’s driveway after a snowstorm, and yes, serving in our city government. On streets like Altar Road, church steeples and mosque minarets adorn the same skyline. Muslims, Christians, Jews and people of all faiths, or no faith at all, routinely show up for one another, because we understand that a city like this took generations to cultivate.
The political theatre planned for tonight is an attack on American Muslims, and on the very idea of America. The threat we collectively face is an America that gives up on its most noble ideals and traditions, that surrenders to fear, that shrinks when faced with the challenge of coexistence. An America that does not include Dearborn, and other communities like it.
Break bread with us
To those outside our city, I invite you to come see Dearborn for yourself. Come be in community with us, break bread with us, and help us build bridges of solidarity and understanding.
And to my residents, I ask you to keep being you. Pray how you’ve always prayed. Keep providing for your families and showing up for your neighbors. We won’t let hate unravel this beautiful tapestry forged throughout generations, with countless hands, in the most noble of American traditions.
Abdullah Hammoud is the mayor of Dearborn. Submit a letter to the editor at freep.com/letters, and we may publish it in print or online.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Dearborn mayor: Anti-Islam 'crusaders' are anti-America | Opinion
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