Michigan mayor ramps up police force near places of worship, citing ‘inflammatory’ WSJ op-ed

The mayor Dearborn, Mich., announced Saturday the city, just outside of Detroit, will ramp up price presence around places of worship and city infrastructure in the wake of an op-ed from the The Wall Street Journal that he labeled “inflammatory.”

“Effective immediately — Dearborn police will ramp up its presence across all places of worship and major infrastructure points,” Mayor Abdullah Hammoud (D) said in a post on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter Saturday,

“This is a direct result of the inflammatory @WSJ opinion piece that has led to an alarming increase in bigoted and Islamophobic rhetoric online targeting the city of Dearborn,” Hammoud continued. “Stay vigilant.”

The WSJ released an op-ed Friday entitled “Welcome to Dearborn, America’s Jihad Capital,” which claims that there is “[l]ocal enthusiasm for jihad against Israel and the West” in the city, which has a majority Arab American population.

President Biden made a trip to Michigan Thursday, even with frustrations he is facing from the population in the Wolverine State about how he is handling the current conditions in Gaza, amid the war between Israel and Palestinian militant group Hamas.

On Wednesday, community members came together to protest Biden’s visit in Dearborn. The White House schedule for the president’s Thursday trip to the Midwestern state was vague and when White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was confronted about it, she told reporters that she did not know of any specific concerns.

“I do want to say, more broadly, that the president has met with Americans with varying opinions about the conflict between Israel and Hamas,” she said during a gaggle on Air Force One. “Officials at the White House are also in regular contact with Muslim and Arab American leaders in Michigan and across the country.”

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Muslim advocacy group, has recently said it received an “unprecedented” amount of complaints of Islamophobia and anti-Arab bias in the month after Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel last October, and sparked the ongoing war.

The organization claimed it had received 1,283 complaints of bias, a 216 percent increase in comparison to the year before.

“The Islamophobic and anti-Palestinian rhetoric that have been used to both justify violence against Palestinians in Gaza and silence supporters of Palestinian human rights here in America has contributed to this unprecedented surge in bigotry,” CAIR Research and Advocacy Director Corey Saylor said in a statement at the time.