American citizens are confronting the realities of mass immigration from people whose religions and cultures are at odds with this nation, highlighted by an almost unfathomable exchange between a city’s staunchly Muslim mayor and a long-time heritage American. A clip of their exchange went viral after the citizen objected to the Muslim-majority city’s renaming of a street for alleged terrorist sympathies and the mayor telling the man he doesn’t belong in the city anymore.
For context, mayor Abdullah Hammoud ordered a street renamed for Lebanese immigrant Osama Siblani, who has been living in the United States since the 1980s and founded The Arab American News in the same decade. Past objections to U.S. foreign policy and apparent support for groups like Hezbollah motivated concerned residents to speak out at a local meeting, only to be rebuffed by their arrogant Muslim mayor.
Posting the video on X, a user by the name of ‘captive dreamer’ captioned the short clip by writing, “Barely 24 years after 9/11, we have Muslim mayors berating Americans for “islamophobia” for not wanting streets in Michigan named after Jihadists. It’s like we lost a major war.”
In the video, the citizen, a man by the name of Ted Barham, bravely objected to his city’s project, calling out the deference for a man whose past vocalized support of Hezbollah could be seen as support for the infamous Beirut bombing in the early 1980s. “I mean, Hezbollah, you know, bombed the Embassy in Beirut, and including many Americans. So I just feel it’s quite inappropriate,” the man stated.
In response, the Muslim mayor Hammoud simply said the man was “not welcome” in the city any longer on the grounds he was an “Islamophobe.”
“You are an Islamophobe, and although you live here, I want you to know, as mayor, you are not welcome here. And the day you move out of the city will be the day that I launch a parade celebrating the fact that you moved out of the city because you are not somebody who believes in coexistence,” Hammoud declared.
Although the clip ends, reports go on to suggest that the mayor then threatened Barham. According to the account belonging to Mike Cernovich on X, he wrote that “[a]fter Hammoud attacked Barham during the meeting, Barham walked away from the podium and said to Hammoud: ‘God bless you, mayor.’”
At that instant, the radical “Hammoud then replied: ‘You also say that I’m an apostate. I’m going to hell. … If I were you, I would stay silent.’” It is impossible to imagine the reverse of this story playing out, both in terms of sheer brashness, ideology, or treatment in the media.
Indeed, coverage from the Detroit Free Press downplayed all of these tensions, suggesting in a headline that two people merely disagreed with one another. “Dearborn mayor tells resident he’s not welcome in city after opposing sign for Arab leader,” the Free Press headlined.
In the opening paragraph, the paper reported: “In his fiery remarks at Tuesday’s council meeting on Sept. 9, Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud also told the resident that if he moves out of Dearborn, he will have a parade celebrating it. Speaking during the public comments part of the meeting, a resident, Ted Barham, had objected to signs from Wayne County placed on Warren Avenue named after Osama Siblani, a longtime Arab American leader, because of Siblani’s past statements on some Middle Eastern groups.”
Watch the wild exchange below:
Featured image: Screen shot from embedded video