Unpacking the Mess Behind That Horribly Racist Wall Street Journal Op-Ed on Arab Americans in Dearborn

Abdullah H. Hammoud, the mayor of Dearborn, Michigan, recently announced that he had called for an immediate increase in police presence at the city’s major infrastructure points and places of worship. This decision, he revealed in an X/Twitter post, was in response to “an alarming increase in bigoted and Islamophobic rhetoric online targeting the city of Dearborn.” He attributes the cause of this concerning escalation to an opinion article recently published by the Wall Street Journal.

Hammoud, Dearborn’s inaugural Arab American mayor, who was elected in 2021, unequivocally denounced the opinion piece as “Islamophobic, Anti-Arab, and blatantly racist.” In a statement to CNN, he said: “This is more than irresponsible journalism. Publishing such inflammatory writing puts our residents at increased risk for harm.” Hammoud added that the Dearborn police are monitoring social media for any potential threats.

The article was written by Steven Stalinsky, the director of the Middle East Media Research Institute. What is MEMRI? It’s a nonprofit media watchdog organization co-founded by an Israeli ex-intelligence officer and an Israeli American political scientist, and it also has strong ties to the Israeli military.

MEMRI claims to be neutral, but it has long weathered claims of maliciously cherry-picking and curating the most offensive video clips in the Middle East, and even mistranslating them, before presenting them to a Western audience. As Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA counterintelligence official, argued, “[MEMRI] are selective and act as propagandists for their political point of view, which is the extreme-right of Likud. … They simply don’t present the whole picture.”

Stalinsky, responding to the mayor’s criticism, challenged him to identify inaccuracies in the piece. In order to support his conclusion that Dearborn, home to one of the largest Arab American communities in the U.S., is “America’s Jihad Capital,” Stalinsky points to rallies, marches, and statements made by residents, including religious leaders. The article suggests that residents regularly express support for militant groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, and implies a long-standing concern about terrorism support in southern Michigan.

All of this sounds damning. People who are actively celebrating the brutal massacre of innocent people? And in huge numbers? That’s clearly dangerous. If it were true, I too would agree that it is a serious national security risk.

But let’s first examine his evidence to support his piece.

Set aside the obviously malicious deployment of the word Jihad, a term Muslims have a wildly different understanding of than the Islamophobes in Stalinsky’s audience. (Muslims define the “greater Jihad” as a spiritual struggle within oneself.) The first claim made in the article still relies on similar indolent pejoratives: To characterize the entire town as irrevocably evil, the author accuses a pro-Palestine rally of “celebrating” the events of Oct. 7. To back up this claim, the author cites the headline from an unnamed outlet: “Michigan rally cheers Hamas attack.”

An internet search produces an article with that headline in the Midwesterner, a blog owned and operated by a former Breitbart writer. Unsurprisingly, the post does not get anywhere near supporting the celebration claim. Instead, like every other rally for Palestine in every other city mentioned on the blog, the writer blankly characterizes it as “pro-Hamas” without actually presenting anything to prove it. All this despite the fact that there are plenty of instances in which protesters (many of them Jewish) have themselves explained why they are marching. It’s not a mystery.

As the videos embedded in the blog post make clear, the rally in Dearborn is not exceptional. The videos show a large mass of people waving Palestinian flags and wearing the signature black-and-white Palestinian kaffiyeh, both symbols of Palestinian identity—not Hamas. It is unclear why the original conflation came about, but to state the obvious, it is possible to support Palestine without supporting Hamas.

Still, the Wall Street Journal article implies that this rally was a call to violence. Stalinsky supports this by quoting a speaker who said Israel’s past actions have put “fire in our hearts that will burn that state.” Those “past actions,” as Stalinsky put it, are crucial for understanding why the speaker used the word fire. In the video, the speaker invokes the murder of a family, including Ali Dawabsheh, an 18-month-old baby who was burned alive, after settler terrorists set fire to their home in the West Bank in a signature “price tag” attack. Yes, he passionately spoke on the podium at that rally about the fire that burns in his heart—but it was hardly a call to violence.

The article also points to a memorial service for “a Hezbollah operative” at a local mosque in Dearborn. Without context, Stalinsky hopes you infer that the service was political and a show of support for Hezbollah. It was not a political event; it was a memorial, hosted for a family of three killed in an Israeli strike in Southern Lebanon (Ali Bazzi, his brother Ibrahim, and his brother’s wife). It’s suspected and likely true that Ali Bazzi was connected to Hezbollah—but the memorial service flyer didn’t mention the Iran-linked militant group. In fact, the flyer is identical to any other posted on its bulletin for any other memorial of funeral services the mosque provides. By including this event in his compilation of terrorism support, Stalinsky is disingenuously implying that the service itself was sympathetic toward Hezbollah, and that any attendees who came to the mosque to pray during the service did so in support of the group, which he did not prove.

To further back up the article’s thesis that Dearborn is a hotbed of support for terrorism, Stalinsky highlights a 2001 Michigan State Police assessment produced just after 9/11. That report found that “most of the 28 State Department-identified terror groups were represented in Michigan” and identified Dearborn as being a “potential support base.” But the report quickly loses credibility as evidence when you discover the report was produced as a request for federal funding, as a compilation of hypothetical “potential threat-elements … as individuals or groups who could engage in acts of terror,” rather than as an evidence-based assessment.

Stalinsky’s article ends with a warning. “Open support for Hamas is spreading,” he says, before pointing to the massive explosion of support for Palestine in the wake of the war. Like many who are staunchly pro-Israel, painting the entire movement against the war as “pro-Hamas” is a blatant cheap shot to discredit the grassroots movement that is concerned that Israel is not doing enough to protect innocent and uninvolved people. Israel has targeted schools, hospitals, aid trucks, and civilians waving white flags, including one instance in which those civilians were Israeli hostages. To say that people who rally in opposition to that are doing so in support for Hamas is wild conjecture. He cites “pro-jihadist imagery, chants and slogans”—without being specific. It’s frankly offensive to imply that the death toll towering over 27,000, mostly women and children, is not enough on its own to mobilize activists, many of whom are Jewish themselves, to call for peace.

This gets to the heart of the matter—it is possible for some of the cherry-picked information in this article to technically be true. In it are real quotes that can on their own feel highly alarming. It’s correct that Imam Usama Abdulghani, like Stalinsky suggests, doesn’t hide his support for Hamas. But Abdulghani isn’t representative of Dearborn any more than any of the racist rabbis in Israel are representative of Tel Aviv.

To characterize approximately 50,000 American Arabs as fostering a hotbed of terrorism, one must intentionally overlook the hundreds of examples—the vast majority—of unwavering advocacy for peace. That is how this article veers into Islamophobia. It skews information to make it sound more real or credible than it actually is, which is a common characteristic of propaganda.

Stalinsky’s essay is clearly written for an audience that already believes that Dearborn is a hotbed of hate, that the existence of a large number of Arab Americans is on its own an issue of national security. For those people, this article will do what it is intended to do: reinforce what they already believe about the Arabs living among them. That is what makes this article Islamophobic. It wants you to ignore the reality—that Dearborn is an American success story, filled with a peaceful, law-abiding community, as well as great restaurants, museums, and even bars—in favor of the suspicion that this is a group merely biding its time, waiting for the right moment to hurt you or your family.

And articles like this do, regrettably, have predictable results. Along with an uptick in antisemitism since Oct. 7, America is also experiencing an uptick in Islamophobia. I myself met with the parents of Wadee Alfayoumi, a 6-year-old boy who was violently stabbed to death by an avid consumer of Islamophobic media. A Palestinian American man was stabbed just after attending a pro-Palestinian protest in Texas. The threat to destabilize Muslim and Arab life in America is just as real as the threat to our Jewish neighbors, and they should both be met with equal levels of disdain.

Wayne County Commissioner David Knezek expressed deep concern about Stalinsky’s characterization of Dearborn. On X/Twitter, he emphasized the city’s positive attributes and expressed gratitude for Hammoud’s leadership. President Joe Biden also weighed in, calling on Americans to “condemn hate in all forms” and cautioning that “blaming a group based on the actions of a few” is “exactly what can lead to Islamophobia and anti-Arab hate, and it shouldn’t happen to the residents of Dearborn.” Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, herself the target of a foiled white nationalist terrorism plot, called the article “abhorrent.” In a speech, she said, “I thought that opinion article was incredibly cruel and ignorant and a total misrepresentation of an important city full of a lot of beautiful people who are Michiganders and our neighbors and our extended family.”

It is commendable to witness Hammoud take a proactive and lateral approach to safeguard the Muslim community within his jurisdiction. Articles of this nature in the Wall Street Journal have historically been linked to inciting acts of violence. Rep. Ilhan Omar, the first and only hijab-wearing lawmaker in America, is unfortunately a prime target for Islamophobes. She has been compelled to heighten her security measures, confronting upticks in daily threats to her life because news cycles that unfairly focus on her are fueled by manufactured outrage. These articles have proved to instigate hatred against entire communities in the real world, with the potential for violence being well documented.

In the end, it is MEMRI’s prerogative to operate the way it wants to operate. (I personally enjoy it for its hilarious meme value.) But articles like this one become dangerous once elevated to prestigious and reputable outlets. People who read this don’t see Stalinsky or MEMRI—they see only the Wall Street Journal lending credibility to this blatant attempt at the wholesale dehumanization of an entire community. Considering the tangible threat of violence that has manifested before from similar punditry, it’s incumbent on newspaper and magazine editors to protect innocent people from the repercussions of such awful narratives. Dearborn doesn’t deserve this.