9/11's Worst Victims: Muslims Who Don't Get Enough Love

Detroit News writer Gregg Krupa took some time off from reporting last week to practice his shorthand while under dictation from the usual talky activists, and the results of his notes were mistakenly printed as a news story on the front page of last Friday’s Detroit News.

This kind of thing is precisely the reason we at Dearborn Underground are here.

Responding to stories like these can be tough, since they tend to be grocery-lists of unsupported charges, with no logic to make it easy to determine which is the most important to contradict. Falsehoods swarm off the page like the mosquitos that attacked Bogart and Hepburn on the African Queen, until they just had to escape the area or be driven mad. I just can’t fathom a reporter asking professional Islamist advocates what their grievances are, and then simply printing them, unchallenged, as if they were demonstrated facts. Krupa’s article is meant to make nonMuslims feel guilty for having such a low opinion of our Islamic neighbors. It turns out that after America witnessed Muslim murderers attacking New York on 9/11, plunging the country into—so far---five years of war on Islamic terrorism—with no end in sight, and throughout which our Islamist enemies—in the name of Islam and the most prominent leaders of which are invariably egged on by Islamic “spiritual advisors”-- have engaged in beheadings, kidnappings, suicide bombings, forced conversions, threats of annihilation, and an endless litany of lies—anyway, it turns out that after all this, American feelings towards Muslims have inexplicably turned negative. It can only be explained by Islamophobia.

Local activist Abed Hammoud is truly puzzled by widespread mistrust of Muslims. Hammoud bragged in the Arab American News recently about his support for the “resistance in Southern Lebanon,” a/k/a Hezbollah, a/k/a the same guys who murdered our Marines in 1983, and are dedicated to the genocide of our ally, Israel. But now Hammoud feels just a little bit hurt, and can’t figure out why Americans look at him and say “'You know, that is a nice guy, but I am surprised that he can support terrorism.'" Yeah, isn’t that weird? I mean, what’s the big deal? Then there’s Ronald Stockton, a professor at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, quoted by Kruppa saying that if Muslims "don't constantly go around and say they love America and hate Osama bin laden, then people are suspecting them." Believe me, the American standard has never been anything like that high. At this point most Americans would be thrilled with any expression from the Muslim community of opposition to bin Laden and the rest of these savages, an expression that wasn’t promptly neutered in the very next clause by the disclaimer, “but.”

And this account of a rally, reported by NPR during the recent war in Lebanon, doesn’t exactly build trust on my side of town, either:

"Daily protests occur in Dearborn. At one recent demonstration, organized by the Congress of Arab-Americans, about 1,000 people attended. College-age men asked, in call and response fashion, "Who is your army?" Protestors responded: "Hezbollah." "Who is your leader?" they were asked. "Nasrallah," the chanters responded. Many carried placards of the Hezbollah leader. A few days earlier at an even larger demonstration, more than 15,000 turned out, about half of Dearborn's Arab community."

So Stockton can’t figure out why Americans keep asking, “’Why aren't the Muslims denouncing these things?’” Here’s a suggestion: because the Muslims are too busy supporting these things? 15,000 of my fellow townsmen chanting that Nasrallah is their leader gives an old Jew-lover like me misgivings. Then you can try comparing the description of the Nasrallahfest rally with what Tarek Baydoun, president of the student government at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, says about how Muslim leaders are finally grabbing media exposure in order to “reiterate that Muslims and Arabs in America and around the world don't support terrorism.” I’ll admit that on a rare occasion I do hear the reiterations that Muslims don’t support terrorism. But I just don’t quite believe them since, all things considered, they are simply unbelievable.

To listen to the guys helping Krupa write his article, the daily lives of Muslims in Dearborn are an endless round of persecution, harassment, abuse, and that greatest of American atrocities, not being “tolerated.” The article's mentions of harassment, as is too typical, lack detail and always happens to some unidentified third parties, like cabbies who get yelled at by fares , or young Muslim men who get hassled at the airport. (As if there is any class of persons who don’t get hassled at airports, or for that matter a class of cabbies who don’t get abused by fares!).

And the term “toleration” is being used, or misused, in the very special way it is by the gay-rights activisits, so it doesn’t mean “tolerance” at all—that is, putting up with something we don’t like for the sake of peace and social harmony—instead, it means, absolute and unquestioning acceptance.

The choicest complaint of the piece comes from Imam Sayed Hassan Al-Qazwini, who says the area’s Muslims are worried when they hear “calls for the wholesale deportation of Muslims when surveys suggest that more than 50 percent of them were born in the United States.” Al-Qazwini doesn’t say where these poor folks are hearing these “calls,” or who's making them, which would be helpful things to know for someone like me, who hasn’t heard, even once, any calls for wholesale deportation: not by the President, nor Congress, nor the ICE, nor the Justice Department, nor the State Department or any other government source actually affecting deportation policy.

But it certainly sounds terrible, doesn’t it? Wouldn’t it be awful indeed if the President were traveling around giving talks calling for the illegal mass deportation of American citizens of Arabic descent. That's if he were, which he's not, and if the suggestion weren't pure fantasy, which it is. I don't know enough to say Al-Qazwini just made the whole thing up, but he seems to know a lot of Muslims who are worried about these "calls for the wholesale deportation of Muslims.” One has to wonder from whom these poor worried folks keep hearing it. I do know Al-Qazwini's wild charge about calls for deportation didn’t seem to phase Krupa, though, who gives no indication he followed up, just being careful he spelled “deportation” right. Would it be too far-fetched to conlcude that whatever Al-Qazwini tells Krupa goes directly into the paper as if it’s true?