Dearborn: Still Home of the Brave

But how much longer Dearborn qualifies for membership in the Land of the Free is anybody’s guess.

How much guts should it need to fly an Israeli flag in Dearborn? I know I haven’t been willing to do it, though it’s occurred to me from time to time; I can’t guarantee the safety of my household.

But at least one Dearborn family, in which the husband is Lebanese-born, no less, has been willing to take the chance. With predictable results.

What the WDIV story doesn’t report is that the Dakhlallahs’ home is directly adjacent to Ford Road, where their Israeli flag was plainly visible to traffic passing through majority-Arab east Dearborn.  I pass that way myself on the way home from work, and was astounded to see that flag. 

And even more significant than its proximity to Ford Road, the Dakhlallahs’ home is directly across the street from Fordson High School, the first majority-Muslim high school in the country, and known in these parts, with good reason, as “Hezbollah High.” There couldn’t be a more provocative location from which to tempt Dearborn’s vindictive Jew-haters.

But I’m sure the Dakhlallahs had no intention of tempting anyone: they only wanted to show support for Israel, an expression they’re entitled to according to all that’s holy in America.

Unfortunately, most of what’s holy in America is being replaced with what’s holy in the Umma.  In Dearborn we’re expected to think twice about showing support for anything that might offend Muslims.

But speaking of flags, a few miles up the road from the Dakhlallahs’ house the Islamic Center of America has the past couple of weeks sprouted an impressively imposing black flag. Because I don’t read Arabic I won’t venture to translate the legend. (If you can, please let us know). In all likelihood, it says “Welcome to Dearborn!,” the city the mosque’s Iman Qazwini has described as the “Muslim capital of the West.”  Or perhaps it was raised for the significant commemoration of Ashura that took place on November 14; but I’m not sure it was flying then, nor why it would still be flying now.

Since 2001 Americans have come to associate the black flags of Islam with jihadi enthusiasm to make the rest of us slaves: we saw it at the beheading of Nicholas Berg, as a backdrop to the sermons of bin Laden, and when Muslim terrorists ripped down the American flag at the Cairo embassy last 9/11 and replaced it with a black Islamic flag.

Even other Muslims dread the sight of it at times. Sunnis in Afghanistan, where Shias were persecuted under the Taliban, worry about increasing power of Shias thanks to ever-interfering Iran. The appearance of Shias’ black Ashura banners weeks before the anniversary – when Ashura previously was banned under the Taliban – makes Sunnis nervous about the growing clout of the Shia minority. One Sunni spokesman says that “each black flag is reflective of Iran's evil intentions in Afghanistan.”

Which hardly says that the Islamic Center of America’s black flag reflects an evil intention. Nor justifies the stretch required to declare that Qazwini only shinnied up his flagstaff from sheer enthusiasm over Iran’s recent Munich-style triumph over America’s hapless president.  But the timing is a bit of a coincidence. The timing, and Hezbollah’s hailing of the agreement as “a major victory for Iran and to all the people of the region and it is a defeat for the enemies of these people.”

But, to quote Freud, (or was it Bill  Clinton?): “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” And I suppose sometimes a black flag is just a black flag.

###