The day of the Democratic Party’s Michigan primary, White House National Security Advisor John Kirby bragged that the Biden administration was changing its Israel-Gaza war policy to reflect the concerns of pro-Hamas activists in Michigan. The White House, Kirby explained, is “willing to adjust” how they were “approaching the conflict and the way we’re talking about the conflict” to “reflect” the “concerns” of Dearborn.
Imagine the president sending high-ranking White House officials to Borough Park in Brooklyn to hear out the perspective of Putin-boosters regarding the Ukraine war, then adjusting American policy and rhetoric to better embrace those outlooks. Granted, you’d have to stretch the imagination to its limits to picture Russian immigrants defending terror groups.
Although Joe Biden handily won Michigan with 80 percent of the primary vote, more than 100,000 Democrats voted “uncommitted” to protest the president’s allegedly pro-“genocide” position. This, despite Biden dispatching senior aides to Dearborn to bend the knee to “pro-Palestinian” leaders like Osama Siblani, who not only contends that the United States is “bought” by the “Zionist lobby”—a popular conspiracy theory among antisemites—but that “Hamas is not a terrorist organization.” The hundreds of families of Americans the group has murdered over the years likely disagree.
Siblani made his Hamas remarks to demonstrators packing the Ford Performing Arts Center in Dearborn on Oct. 10, 2023, before Israel launched its offensive. The jihadi kidnappers of Gaza, by the way, have not only rejected a slew of ceasefires—including one just yesterday—but attacked, raped, disfigured, and kidnapped civilians during a ceasefire on Oct. 7. “Ceasefire” is a euphemism for “saving Hamas.”
Now, it is inevitable that someone will complain about the “Islamophobic” tenor of attacking the Dearborn faction of the Democrat Party. What better description is there for the imam of Dearborn’s Islamic Center of Detroit, Imran Salha, who only months before Oct. 7 had his flock giving “amens” as he prayed that Allah would “eradicate from existence” the “sick, disgusting Zionist regime”? Or the pro-Hamas and Hezbollah marchers decked out in keffiyehs chanting “intifada” and “from the river to the sea,” and calling America “a terrorist state”? Are any of Dearborn’s civic leaders offended by this rhetoric?
What about Dearborn’s Ahmad Musa Jibril, “perhaps the most influential English-speaking jihadi sheikh,” according to MEMRI, who preaches that “mothers in America and the West should nurse their infants with the love of jihad, ambition to become a mujahid and a martyr.” On the day hundreds of women and children were massacred, raped, and kidnapped—including American citizens—Jibril wrote that “hearts haven’t been overjoyed like this in so long.”
When the Wall Street Journal op-ed page ran an article by Steven Stalinsky detailing the extremism in Dearborn with the headline “Welcome to America’s Jihad Capital,” Biden didn’t react by condemning antisemitic, anti-American, pro-terrorist rhetoric, but “anti-Arab hate.” Deflecting the seriousness of leftist and Islamic Jew hatred by scaremongering about “Islamophobia” is his modus operandi.
Corporate media constantly label Biden a staunch supporter of the Jewish state. Other than give a nice speech right after the massacre, however, the president has spent most of his time pressuring, cajoling, undermining, and insulting Israel. It was Biden who immediately re-instituted funding to the UNRWA and Hamas. It was Biden who opened funding to, and re-emboldened, Iran. Most of the aid and pro-Israeli mechanisms of the U.S. government are embedded into policy that Biden has merely adopted.
Sure, there are many progressive activists, intellectuals, Iran-loving podcasters, State Department creatures, and White House staffers and interns who see Israel as a nefarious colonial power. But consider a new Harvard CAPS-Harris poll, which finds Americans still overwhelmingly support Israel. Also, 67 percent back a “ceasefire” only after Hamas has been removed and all the hostages are freed.
So why is Dearborn so important to Biden? One, Americans rarely predicate their vote on foreign policy. Biden, a man without any principles, has surrounded himself with Obama-era officials who are enamored of Iran.
Second, Biden can afford to ignore the concerns of American Jews who care about this issue, because it won’t matter enough in states like New York, California, and Florida, where the outcomes are foretold. The chance that nominally pro-Israel Democrats would criticize the president is slim.
Michigan, which Donald Trump won in 2016, is far more complicated. Around 101,000 Democrats cast protest votes as uncommitted in the state’s primary. That’s around 13 percent of the vote. Projecting that total out to the general election probably means three percent of overall votes cast for Democrats.
It surely plays out differently in the general, but any depression in turnout could be bad news for the president. In 2020, Biden beat Trump by a 2.8 million to 2.6 million margin. Considering Biden’s unpopularity, the town of Dearborn staying home can make a difference. No appeasement will be enough to pacify the terror cheerleader.
The entire sordid effort is reminiscent of how small, extremist parties can dictate policy in parliamentary coalitions. In this case, Dearborn, abhorrently, is the extremist party helping dictate Biden’s Middle East policy.
