Sharia Spoken Here

From the Dearborn Press & Guide:

Four Christian missionaries trying to convert Muslims were arrested Friday evening for alleged disorderly conduct at the festival.

Authorities said Nabeel Qureshi of Virginia and David Wood of New York, both with a Christian group called Acts 17 Apolegetics, were arrested with two others after they were said to be causing disruptive behavior.

“They did cause a stir,” Haddad said.

The four were later released on bail and described the arrest on the Acts 17 blog at www.answeringmuslims.com.

“It cannot be said that we were arrested for causing a disturbance, because we did not approach anyone, rather everyone with whom we spoke first approached us,” Wood said in the online blog. “It cannot be said that we were harassing anyone, because the moment anyone said ‘stop talking to me’, we would stop talking to them. And it cannot be said that we were spreading hate speech, because we said virtually nothing about Islam at all.”Haddad said that he’s not taking sides in any dispute, but added that police have to keep the peace at the festival. (“Arab Fest draws more than 200,000”).

Sharia is already in Dearborn. This just means it’s spread further.

One sign that there’s just too much going on for me to keep up is that we haven’t posted on the arrest of the 4 evangelists IN DEARBORN for talking to people about Jesus.

Fortunately, others are all over it, not least The Thomas More Law Center.

This is not a controversial story, in the sense that there’s any serious dispute about what happened. These four men were arrested to stop them from talking to Arabs about Jesus at the festival. As the footage of the arrests make clear, Dearborn police officers were not arresting disorderly, struggling troublemakers, but persons behaving peacefully. The arrests were made, apparently, in obedience to orders from higher up. And those orders, it is all but impossible to doubt, originated somehow with Muslims who wanted to exercise control over free speech at the festival.




As was reported in the Press & Guide, “authorities” said the four were arrested “after they were said to be causing disruptive behavior.” Said to be by whom? My understanding of police practice, subject to correction from anyone out there who knows different, is that police have to witness certain kinds of wrongdoing before they have sufficient probable cause to make an arrest. They don’t just arrest people on someone’s say-so. At least, they aren’t supposed to.

Chief Haddad said after the arrests that the four missionaries “did cause a stir.” So far no one has described any stir. What’s Haddad’s basis for that statement? It’s been more than a week and no one has offered any factual basis for it. As seen in this tedious video by an Arabic critic of David Wood posted at HotAir, instead of an offer of details or witnesses of disorderly conduct, he merely repeats several times that the police said the arrests were for disorderly conduct, so who are you going to believe, the police or your own lying eyes?

Meanwhile, I’ve defended the DPD and Chief Haddad when they, frankly, took way too long to complete their investigation of Imam Abdullah’s death, enabling CAIR to stoke its cynical use of that event as a political assassination.

If the Dearborn Police Department has such corrupt or incompetent leadership that Muslim leaders can dictate who does and doesn’t have free speech ANYWHERE in Dearborn, than things are worse here than even I thought.

A year ago I gave DPD Chief Haddad the benefit of the doubt, ascribing the DPD’s wooly-headed deference to Muslim demands to ban Christian evangelizing from East Warren as one-dimensional police thinking. Last year Haddad laid it off on “crowd control.”

This year, the arrests are being blamed on “disorderly conduct,” though no disorderly conduct is in evidence. I have been too nice.