The mayor of Dearborn ramped up security measures this weekend after The Wall Street Journal published an opinion article referring to the Michigan city as “America’s Jihad Capital” — a headline that drew sharp criticism from Muslim advocacy groups and elected officials.
The op-ed, published Friday afternoon, suggested that Dearborn’s residents — including Muslim faith leaders and politicians — support Hamas and the Iran-backed group Hezbollah. Dearborn is home to about 110,000 people, with a sizable population of Muslims and Arab Americans.
The article was “extremely inflammatory and, upon it being published, we received many calls from faith leaders across the community who no longer felt safe,” Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud said in an interview Sunday with MSNBC’s Ayman Mohyeldin.
Hammoud, who was elected Dearborn’s first Arab American mayor in 2021, confirmed that he increased the city’s police presence at houses of worship and other major public places after what he described on the social media platform X as an “alarming increase in bigoted and Islamophobic rhetoric online targeting the city of Dearborn.”
“Stay vigilant,” Hammoud wrote.
The opinion article was written by Steven Stalinsky, the executive director of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), a nonprofit monitoring group based in Washington. The Wall Street Journal did not immediately respond to requests for comment Monday morning.
In a statement, Stalinsky said in part that his “article is not political — it is about national security” and decried what he said are “anti-US and pro-jihad sermons and marches” in the city.
The article drew fierce outcry from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee and lawmakers. In a statement Saturday, the Michigan chapter of CAIR said it welcomed the boosted security precautions and denounced the “inflammatory anti-Muslim commentary.”
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