Four Missionaries Acquitted in Dearborn

The four missionaries charged with “inciting a crowd” while evangelizing at the Dearborn Arab International Festival last June were acquitted on Friday. One of the four, Negeen Mayel, was found guilty of failing to follow a police officer’s order. (“4 missionaries acquitted of inciting crowd”).

I’m glad the four were acquitted of the incitement charge, which was pure nonsense from the get-go. I’m also glad Ms. Mayel was convicted of disobeying a police officer. When I listened to Negeen on the tape of her arrest using what I have to describe as an unbearable girl-victim stage voice (“Don’t touch me! Don’t touch me!”) I simply couldn’t find it in me to resent that poor cop for doing whatever it took to shut her up.

Don’t get me wrong. That kind of passive-aggressive wheedling, while clearly meant to be provocative, was hardly an incitement of a crowd, which is what the four were charged with. I support the cause of this acquittal because I support our cause of pushing back Shariah in Dearborn. I also support the First and Fourth Amendments, which tooka pretty bad beating with these arrests.

When this first happened, I was supportive of the missionaries. As things progressed, and I spent many tedious hours trying to make certain that these folks weren’t all the horrible things Jack O’Reilly said they were, I found myself liking the Acts 17 individuals less and less -- but not because I think they ever did anything that is against the law in Dearborn.

No matter: whether I find David Wood puffed up, or disapprove of the way Ms. Mayel exploits being itty-bitty enough for toting around in Paris Hilton’s handbag, the big facts about all this are impossible to miss.

First, these charges should have never been brought. This was a clear instance of the Dearborn executive authority being abused, (and the taxpayer’s money wasted on this hopeless trial), to prove to Dearborn’s Muslim leaders that in any public rumble that has gives an appearance of “Muslims against non-Muslims,” Dearborn government intends to outdo itself proving its prior commitment to take the Muslim side.

Second, Dearborn government, the mayor’s office and the police department, are badly compromised for the diligence at placating Muslim feelings -- real or imagine -- about all this. As Andrew McCarthy describes it, “Camouflaged as a crackdown on ‘disturbing the peace,’ [this] was transparently the enforcement of sharia’s prohibition against preaching religions other than Islam.”

O’Reilly was all in on the malicious prosecution of these four, including publishing a letter in which he pre-judged the criminal case and materially misrepresented what he had to know of the facts. O’Reilly had to know, and the police certainly did, that there was no “large crowd” gathered around the missionaries, or any “public danger.” While many may have reservations about the motives of Acts 17, there’s no doubt that both Chief Haddad and the mayor -- remember they are government officials, not private citizens -- falsely characterized events around the arrests as “incitement,” just so they could support the baseless charges they’d already laid against the four.

Even after the city lost this unnecessary trial on Friday, O’Reilly was still hurling unsupported claims against the acquitted defendants:

“It's really about a hatred of Muslims,” O’Reilly said. “That is what the whole heart of this is. ... Their idea is that there is no place for Muslims in America. They fail to understand the Constitution.”

I’ve got no idea what O’Reilly has in mind with that remark about the Constitution, because no one has suggested that any constitutional rights of Muslims were violated in this whole episode.

Unless, of course, it’s the constitutional right of hundreds of thousands of Muslims not to have to hear about Jesus Christ from four infidels.