Shariahville, USA: Cities ‘surrender’ to Islam

By Leo Hohmann

Downtown Hamtramck, Michigan
Downtown Hamtramck, Michigan

A city on the outskirts of Detroit known since 1920 as a thriving Polish community has been fully transformed by globalism and the federal government’s Islamic immigration program.

The bulk of the change has occurred over the past 20 years, but it started in the 1970s with the globalization of the auto industry and mass immigration.

Hamtramck, known affectionately as “Poletown” by Detroiters and Michiganians for its bustling district of Polish restaurants, markets and beautiful Catholic churches, last week become the nation’s first city to elect a Muslim-majority city council – sending three Muslims to join one incumbent who was not up for re-election.

In butcher shops that once offered juicy Polish sausages in refrigerated display cases, female customers wearing hijabs now purchase halal meats blessed by an imam.

The sound of church bells has given way to the chant of a Muslim holy man giving the call to prayer in Arabic.

Many of the storefronts have been converted to mosques, and the call to prayer is blasted over loudspeakers five times a day. Poletown has been transformed. Some critics in neighboring communities call it Shariahville.

Within hours of the historic election, Muslim political organizer Ibrahim Algahim was caught on video giving a chilling warning: “Now we show the Polish and everybody else, that…” he said, as cheers drowned out the rest of his words. (See video below.)

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And now it’s spreading. The city of Sterling Heights, about 14 miles to the north, is on the front lines of a contentious battle between the Muslim community with its progressive backers, and those who would rather not see their city transformed in the image of Hamtramck.

The Sterling Heights planning board voted 9-0 to reject plans for a mega-mosque on Sept. 11 before a packed house. Hundreds of residents who could not fit into the meeting chambers stood outside and cheered wildly as the vote was announced showing the mosque had been defeated. The mosque was proposed to be built in the middle of a neighborhood heavily populated by Iraqi Chaldean Christians.

Watch video of residents cheering the news that a mosque had been rejected by Sterling Heights planning board.

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Chaldean Christians are all too familiar with persecution at the hands of Shariah-compliant Muslim communities back home in Iraq.

But the battle is not over in Sterling Heights. The city council still has the option of approving the mosque and the Obama administration will be watching closing, ready to file a federal discrimination lawsuit if it should follow the lead of the city planning board.

GOP Governor stands with Muslim community

Michigan’s Republican Gov. Rick Snyder has made it clear on which side he stands.

Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder
Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder

He’s with the Muslims, says Dick Manasseri, a resident of Rochester Hills and one of Michigan’s up and coming voices against the Islamization of the Great Lakes State.

He has started a group called Refugee Resettlement Monitor-Michigan that has several members out on the speaking circuit, educating Michigan Republicans with facts and the personal stories of Chaldean American Christians who have lived under Shariah in the Middle East.

“We’ve made 12 presentations since August, designed for Republican groups and they’re not just tea-party groups who are interested,” Manasseri said. “We’ve got a big problem in Michigan. The governor is the problem. We don’t go out of our way to trash the governor but he is doubling down on this.”

Synder has said he’d like to “rebuild” parts of Detroit by importing 5,000 Syrian refugees and has requested that the Obama administration assign those refugees to his state. Detroit Mayor Mike Dugan is on board with the plan.

On Friday, Nov. 6, just a few days after Hamtramck’s historic election, Snyder was on hand to celebrate the city’s Bangladeshi corridor. Bangladeshis, along with immigrants from Yemen, make up the majority of Hamtramck’s Muslim community. Others come from Bosnia and Iraq.

The corridor is being branded Banglatown, and Snyder sees it as a potential tourist destination.

“The branding of Banglatown as a cultural tourism destination is a priority for Global Detroit, (the Bangladeshi American Public Affairs Committee) and the Economic Development Committee of the Detroit City Council Immigration Task Force,” says a statement issued by Global Detroit.

Global Detroit is an organization that says its goal is to improve economies by “welcoming, retaining and empowering” immigrant communities. It is an affiliate of Welcoming America, a nationwide immigrant rights group started by a close Obama associate, David Lubell, with seed money from billionaire philanthropist and open-borders champion George Soros.

“Hamtramck contains one of the nation’s densest Bangladeshi populations and offers the only U.S. voting ballot in Bengali, the so-called ‘Bangla ballot,'” boasts the Global Detroit statement.

Governor ‘really twisted’ on this subject

“The governor was part of a celebration of that event, so it was duly recognized by the governor who is really twisted on this subject,” Manasseri said. “He somehow doesn’t make a distinction between economic development and the influx of people who practice Shariah. It seems he’s very much in favor of Shariahville, as I call it, and wants to see it spread all over Michigan. And so we’re working against that at the grassroots level for the whole state.”

Gov. Snyder also addressed the Islamic Society of North America’s annual convention in August 2014, despite the fact that ISNA is a known front group for the Muslim Brotherhood, which was designated an extremist organization in the 2007 Holy Land Foundation terrorist financing trial. Snyder, ironically, did take the opportunity of his ISNA speech to mention Israel’s right to exist, a comment that infuriated ISNA leaders, causing them to put out an “action alert” for all Muslims to call the Governor’s office and complain.

A 1991 U.S. Muslim Brotherhood memo explicitly identifies ISNA among its fronts along with the Council for American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR. The memo states the Brotherhood’s “work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within.”

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, a candidate for the GOP nomination for president, has introduced legislation to get the Muslim Brotherhood designated as a terrorist organization. It has already been branded a terrorist organization in Egypt, Russia and the United Arab Emirates, among other countries.

Manasseri’s group has created a website and is collecting signatures for passage of a resolution that would halt refugee resettlement in Michigan. He said requests for presentations before clubs and groups is growing in light of the migrant crisis in Europe, where the number of rapes and assaults have exploded around the refugee camps and teachers in Germany are warning girls to dress modestly and not to engage young Muslim men in conversation. Those Americans who are paying attention to what’s happening on the ground in Germany, Sweden, Belgium, France and the U.K. are beginning to “wake up,” he said.

“At the grassroots level, it’s still a small minority but our presentation is resonating. I think we have a long way to go,” he said.

‘This is largely a women’s issue’

He said Western women hold the key to that wake-up call.

“I think, this is largely a women’s issue, and the women are either occupied or they’re not paying attention,” he said. “When women are challenged for their own safety, then maybe they’ll get it. There are certain communities up here where you can really get a feeling for what Shariah looks like. It looks like the Middle East, and I can’t believe that women won’t wake up at some point and fear for the safety of their children.”

Manasseri says the battle will be difficult as long as those on the other side include governors, mayors and the Chamber of Commerce.

“We have a really tough nut to crack. We basically have a game of chicken going on with the governor and the grassroots that are waking up,” he said.

The call to prayer

Hamtramck’s election of a Muslim-majority city council has prompted articles in USA Today, the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal.

This isn’t the first time Hamtramck, a city of 22,000, has drawn the attention of the national media. In 2004, when the city council allowed a mosque to broadcast its call to prayer from loudspeakers, they opened up a divide that some say never fully healed. Opponents claimed it was an intrusion of Islam into their lives. They lost that battle, and many of those who felt uncomfortable with the new Hamtramck headed for the exits.

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In 1990, the city was 45 percent Polish, down from 90 percent in the 1970s. Today that figure has dwindled to 15 percent as the Polish Catholics started having fewer children, and many of the younger Poles moved to the suburbs, at the same time the Muslims were moving in from Bangladesh, Yemen and Bosnia. They have large families and bring their extended families from abroad.

When the Muslim prayers were allowed to go public on loudspeaker in 2004, only one city council member was Muslim along with about 25 percent of the population.

Today it is estimated that half of Hamtramck is Muslim. According to University of Michigan-Dearborn professor Sally Howell, Hamtramck might have become the first American city to have a Muslim majority in 2013.

“The growth is taking place in these Muslim communities, and they are transforming the city scape,” Howell told Washington Post. “It’s become much more visible in the last 15 years.”

The Islamization of Poletown has been decades in the making, spilling over from Dearborn, a Muslim enclave to the south, and aided by Wayne State University, which like most universities has imported hundreds of Islamic students over the years, many of whom graduate and go on to get green cards and eventual citizenship in the United States.

The top three vote-getters in last week’s election were Muslim, two were incumbents – Anam Miah and Abu Musa – and the third, Saad Almasmari, is a 28-year-old college student who emigrated to the United States in 2009 and became a citizen two years later.

Obama Justice Department’s heavy hand

While Hamtramck lost its battle over the loudspeakers in 2004 and had its die cast with the new Muslim-majority local government, the fight rages on in neighboring Sterling Heights.

“The proposal in Sterling Heights was sloppy. It was very close to the residential area and the response was slow, almost like someone wanted it to be rejected and so the DOJ could come in and chill the whole community as far as any push back,” Manasseri said.

The DOJ is already sending signals to the city council that it better conform to the wishes of the local Muslim community and grant the mosque permission to build, sources say.

“It’s a well-known fact that CAIR has the DOJ on speed dial,” said an attorney who asked not to be identified. The attorney said the DOJ will often begin to intimidate by requesting that local government officials turn over all emails involving correspondence with Muslim groups seeking to build a mosque or school. Often, this is enough to scare them into submission, as they seek to avoid a lawsuit with the federal government.

In Pittsfield Township, Michigan, a few miles outside of Ann Arbor, another controversy is festering over the township’s rejection of a large Islamic school, recreation center and prayer room proposed right next to a residential neighborhood. In that case, the U.S. Justice Department has already filed suit against the town. On Oct. 26, the suit was filed in federal court in Detroit alleging civil rights violations.

Michigan’s Chaldean Christians ‘nervous’

In Sterling Heights, the intrigue is magnified by the fact that this city is home to one of the country’s largest Chaldean Iraqi Christian communities. The Chaldean Christians have seen their priests and family members kidnapped, their churches firebombed, their husbands beheaded and their wives raped and sold into slavery by Muslims in Iraq since the 2003 U.S. invasion and overthrow of Saddam Hussein. They once made up nearly a third of the city of Mosul in northern Iraq but today live as refugees in Lebanon, Turkey and also in the Kurdish-controlled areas of Iraq.

Manasseri said the Chaldean community is nervous, having come to America to escape Muslim violence, only to find out their adopted country is now inviting their killers into the very same state, even the same communities where they live.

He said the Obama administration has secretly planted nearly 28,000 refugees in more than 100 Michigan towns since fiscal year 2008. Most of them have been placed in seven counties in southeastern Michigan with Oakland and Macomb counties getting the highest number – 9,173 and 5,852, respectively.

“They were picked by the United Nations and secretly resettled by U.S. State Department, the Catholic Bishops and Lutheran Social Services, moving bodies like FedEx and getting paid per head,” Manasseri said of the religious groups that help the government resettle refugees. “You have people from 31 different countries that must be dealt with in Lansing, for instance, and that means the local community picks up the cost, we have a massive growth of Medicaid in Michigan.”

Nahren Anweya, a Chaldean Christian who escaped Iraq, has joined Manasseri’s grassroots campaign and is addressing some of the audiences.

“She is not Pamela Geller, just a well-spoken person talking from her personal family experience, and that made a big impression on us, that we are walking around like zombies sending text messages on what we had for lunch, when the world is at war. The Chaldeans are aware of it,” he said. “The question is, when will people here wake up and realize it?”

3 states ‘surrendering to jihadists’

John Guandolo, a former FBI agent who specializes in Islamic terrorism, said in a  blog posted Tuesday that Michigan, Massachusetts and Minnesota are three states that appear to be putting up the least resistance to Islamization.

“The state of Massachusetts appears to have surrendered to Hamas; Hamtramck, Michigan now has a Muslim majority city council; and the U.S. Attorney in Minnesota is carrying the water for jihadis by putting the weight of the U.S. Attorney’s Office behind the terrorist’s information operation to silence those who speak truthfully about Islam,” Guandolo wrote.

On Nov. 12, the day after Veterans Day, CAIR will be flexing its muscles on the steps of the Massachusetts State House in Boston by hosting a first-ever “Muslim Day.”

Meanwhile in Minnesota, the U.S. Attorney for that state has joined forces with the Muslim Brotherhood to “silence the truth and suppress the God-given rights of American citizens,” Guandolo said.

Andrew Luger, in an open letter in the Minneapolis Star Tribune on Nov. 2, said, “The current wave of Islamophobia needs to be stopped in its tracks. Minnesota has a thriving, patriotic and entrepreneurial Muslim population. By collectively rejecting attacks on Muslim Minnesotans, we can set an example for the rest of the nation.”

Anyone who criticizes Islam is now guilty of “Islamaphobia,” according to Minnesota’s highest law enforcement official. This an only be interpreted as a veiled threat against activists in the St. Cloud area who have been asking questions and pushing back against the infusion of Somali Muslim refugees into their community without their permission over the past decade, to the point where they are being asked to build new schools and hire more teachers, which of course means higher taxes. More than 50 Somalis in Minnesota have also been caught leaving the country to join terrorist militias in the Middle East, prompting an admission from Luger himself in April that “we have a terror recruitment problem in Minnesota.”

His terse comment about a “wave of Islamophobia” follows on the heels of Gov. Mark Dayton’s comments a couple of weeks ago that anyone who is concerned about the growing Somali refugee community in Minnesota “should find another state” in which to live.

Manasseri said Anweya’s testimony is powerful and making it real for people in Michigan.

“What she speaks to is years and years of living with people in Shariah,” he said. “She talks of relative who were crucified. In Europe or the U.S., the concern is if Hamtramck has a majority-Muslim council or Sterling Heights has a left-wing council who is welcoming, and that means they want to take dollars from the federal government coffers and bring those dollars into their community.”

He said federal money in the form of food stamps, housing vouchers and even business grants follows refugees to a community.

“And this includes refugees who back home would have killed the very same people, the Chaldeans, who are here in Michigan,” he said. “They emphasize how important it is to welcome all refugees including Muslims. … We can’t seem to get them to distinguish between people who practice Shariah and the people who are already here and have suffered under Shariah. … At the grassroots level, people get it. And they’re pushing back, and that’s why we’re getting them to sign our resolution.

“There is a nervousness and fear as people realize how fast globalists are changing Michigan by changing its people. But the governor is doubling down.”

Leo Hohmann

Leo Hohmann has been a reporter and news editor at WND as well as several suburban newspapers in the Atlanta and Charlotte, North Carolina, areas. He also served as managing editor of Triangle Business Journal in Raleigh, North Carolina. His latest book is "Stealth Invasion: Muslim Conquest Through Immigration And Resettlement Jihad." Read more of Leo Hohmann's articles here.


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