By Thomas Madison
I was involved in a discussion earlier today regarding Muslim no-go zones in Europe, how many there are or whether they do in fact exist. Someone asked if there was any such thing in the United States and I immediately thought of Dearborn, Michigan. I’m not sure what Dearborn is like today, but here is a video from 2012, when Dearborn was 45% Muslim, showing a small group of Christians walking through a much larger crowd of Muslims at a city festival.
The Christians were cursed, physically assaulted, stoned, had bottles of water and urine thrown at them, and all while the local police looked on and did nothing. Eventually, the police forced the small group of Christians to leave the festival, clearly violating their First Amendment rights to free speech and assembly.
Among the greater problems facing our nation today, in my opinion, is the complete ignorance on the part of much of our local law enforcement of our Constitution, the rights citizens enjoy thereunder, and its inherent restrictions to government, including local law enforcement.
From Clare Lopez, Clarion Project
By now, close to 270,000 viewers have seen the video (see below) of the Christian street preachers being assaulted on the streets of Dearborn, Michigan. They were walking in public areas of the annual Dearborn Arab Festival on Sunday 17 June 2012 (Father’s Day), carrying placards and wearing T-shirts bearing mild statements expressing their Christian beliefs.
An unruly crowd of many dozens of Arab Muslim Festival-goers, both men and women, old and young, and including children became verbally abusive and then physically violent with the Christians, pushing, shoving, and hurling objects at them that included bottles, eggs, and rocks.
Clearly visible on the video are images of dozens of these projectiles that came flying at the Christians, whose grunts of pain at being struck are as clearly audible as the shrieking mob’s chants of “Allahu Akbar.”
Repeatedly, the Christians asked for protection from Wayne County Sheriff’s Department (WCSD) officers who were present at the melee and, repeatedly, they were denied that protection. WCSD Deputy Chief Mike Jaafar, whose implausible excuses for inaction were caught in their entirety on the video, steadfastly refused to provide even one or two law enforcement officers to defend American citizens who were clearly in imminent danger of physical injury.
Assault and battery are the least of the possibly applicable charges that could have been and ought to be brought against numerous individuals among that mob; dereliction of duty and misprision of assault and battery are among the potential charges that come to mind for Deputy Chief Jaafar and Ms. Ursula K. Henry, Director of Legal Affairs for the WCSD, who was also present. This was as clear-cut an example of law enforcement failure to defend the First Amendment rights of American citizens as will ever exist.
This incident crystallized in a single afternoon what happens when a sovereign nation relinquishes legal control of portions of its territory. So-called “No Go Zones” have become ominously commonplace across Europe: These are places that are effectively off-limits not only to non-Muslims but to the law enforcement and security forces of the country as well. In France, they go by the anodyne name of “Zones Urbaines Sensibles” (ZUS).
By 2006, there were already over 750 of them and they were helpfully published on the internet, complete with town, neighborhood and street information. In Britain, where Islamic law has been enforceablenationwide since 2008, there are dozens of No Go Zones, including all-Muslim enclaves in the London boroughs of Tower Hamlets, Waltham Forest and Bradford where “Shariah Zone” stickers went up on utility poles and lamp posts in July 2011.
