Columns



Eric Freedman

Michigan: Hate Magnet?

May 16, 2011

What is it about Michigan that makes our state a magnet for religious hate-mongers?

A number of recent events spark that troubling question, including the sojourn of Terry Jones to the Wolverine State. He’s the Florida pastor who gained worldwide attention and triggered anti-American protests in Afghanistan by burning a Quran after promising not to do so. Legal wrangling over his First Amendment right to protest near a Dearborn mosque aside, the concern is his choice of Michigan as the pulpit for preaching his message of religious intolerance and anti-Islam bigotry.

But Jones is by no means alone among the zealots who have Michigan in their crosshairs.

Another is almost-U.S. Sen. Sharron Angle of Nevada. On the campaign trail last fall, she told a crowd: “I keep hearing about Muslims wanting to take over the United States…on a TV program just last night, I saw that they are taking over a city in Michigan and the residents of the city, they want them out. They want them out.”

She said at a political rally: “My thoughts are these, first of all, Dearborn, Michigan, and Frankford, Texas, are on American soil, and under constitutional law. Not sharia [Islamic] law. And I don’t know how that happened in the United States. It seems to me there is something fundamentally wrong with allowing a foreign system of law to even take hold in any municipality or government situation in our United States.”

Dearborn, of course, has the highest concentration of Arab-Americans of any U.S. city. It’s also the location of the FBI’s 2009 fatal shooting of Imam Luqman Ameen Abdullahand and home to the Arab American National Museum. [As for conjoining Frankford with Dearborn under her umbrella of intolerance, the Associated Press dryly commented: “It was not immediately clear why Angle singled out Frankford, Texas, a former town that was annexed into Dallas around 1975.”]

Another is Texas state Rep. Leo Berman, who wants to amend his state’s constitution to read: “A court of this state may not enforce, consider or apply any religious or cultural law.” His rationale: sharia is enforced in Michigan courts.

According to press reports, Berman told a legislative panel, “It’s being done in Dearborn, Michigan, because of a large population of Middle Easterners. And the judges in Dearborn are using and allowing to be used sharia law.” How does he know that? Well, as he said in a press interview, “I heard it on a radio station here on my way in to the Capitol one day. I don’t know Dearborn, Michigan, but I heard it [Sharia is accepted law there] on the radio. Isn’t that true?”

When Berman isn’t occupied by worries of sharia sneaking into the Texas judicial system or cringing at the thought that it’s already infected Michigan’s justice system, he finds time to advocate anti-immigration legislation, push for a constitutional amendment to make English the state’s official language and honor the Texas Merchandise Vending Association.

Meanwhile, the Ann Arbor-based Thomas More Law Center is pressing a court challenge to the government bailout of AIG. The grounds for litigation? The insurance giant “used over $100 million in federal tax money to support Islamic indoctrination through the funding and promotion of sharia-compliant financing [which] follows the dictate of sharia law.” U.S. District Judge Lawrence Zatkoff dismissed the case, finding no evidence of improper government entanglement with Islam.

The center describes itself as a nonprofit “public interest law firm dedicated to the defense and promotion of the religious freedom of Christians, time-honored family values and the sanctity of human life.” The center is appealing the decision by Zatkoff, who is, incidentally, a Reagan appointee.

The center’s president, former Oakland County Prosecutor Richard Thompson, called Zatkoff’s ruling “astonishing.” Sounding more like a campaigning politician than chief counsel to a “public interest law firm,” Thompson said the ruling lets “Wall Street bankers” and the U.S. government “explicitly promote sharia law — the 1,200-year-old body of Islamic canon law based on the Quran, which demands the destruction of Western Civilization and the United States…the same law championed by Osama bin Laden and the Taliban.”

Hyperbole and sensationalism are filling the right-wing blogosphere. A headline from America’s Independent Movement (“This is OUR country & we need to take it back”) paraphrases Thompson’s rant on the AIG case: “Judge Zatkoff’s ruling allows for oil-rich Muslim countries to plant the flag of Islam on American soil.” Jihadwatch.org proclaimed, “Federal judge approves government funding for sharia indoctrination,” and labeled it “another foolish decision by an ignorant and politically correct judge.” Conservativebyte.com headlined its post on the Dearborn suit this way: “‘Honor Killings’ OK by Michigan Shariah.”

Meanwhile, the Thomas More Law Center also represents out-of-state Christian missionaries who were arrested last year on charges of disturbing the peace at Dearborn’s Arab International Festival. They’re suing the police chief, mayor and executives of the American Arab Chamber of Commerce for violating their constitutional rights.

Certainly, litigation to vindicate government abridgement of freedom of speech and religion is an appropriate use of the judicial system, but some of the wording in the center’s 96-page complaint is unnecessarily — and, I would argue, deliberately — inflammatory. For example, it makes nine references to sharia, including paragraph 267 that refers to an unnamed Dearborn police officer: “The sympathetic police officer told Plaintiffs that there were instances in the City where ‘honor killings’ permitted by sharia law had taken place, but they were covered up.” Another example: in discussing the plaintiffs’ missionary group, the complaint refers to the “threat that sharia law poses to religious freedom in this country.”

The center recently added the good Reverend Jones to its client roster.

History shows that Michigan has been no stranger to hate. Remember that in the mid-1990s, Oklahoma City bombing conspirators Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols attended Michigan Militia meetings. Currently, the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit national civil rights organization, says 35 hate groups — more than in any other Midwest state — now operate in Michigan, from the KKK to the Jewish Defense League to the Nation of Islam to the American Nazi Party.

Sadly, religious bigotry has deep roots in our state’s past.

A new book by historian Craig Fox describes Michigan’s KKK movement after World War I, focusing on rural Newaygo County and its strong anti-Catholicism. Given the clandestine nature of the organization, its diversified organizational structure and the destruction of most of its records, there’s no precise figure on the number of “Invisible Empire” members across the state during that period. Estimates ranged from 80,000 to as high as 875,000.

“As it had done elsewhere, the Klan swept across Michigan like wildfire, an extended recruitment drive seeing the hooded order arrive in villages, towns and cities through the state during the summer months of 1923,” Fox writes in Everyday Klansfolk: White Protestant Life and the KKK in 1920s Michigan (Michigan State University Press, $29.95). His conclusion: “The KKK thrived” in the Wolverine State, “and its influence certainly extended well beyond Detroit, and even into some of the most provincial of outposts.”

During the 1930s with World War II looming, Father Charles Coughlin of Royal Oak’s National Shrine of the Little Flower Church used the radio to preach anti-Semitism to millions of listeners and used his weekly magazine, Social Justice, to blame Jews for Marxist atheism — sometimes in the words of Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Germany’s propaganda minister.

Is this to be our legacy?

Pulitzer Prize-winner Eric Freedman is associate professor of journalism at Michigan State University and director of Capital News Service. He and Dome columnist Stephen A. Jones are editors of African Americans in Congress: A Documentary History (Congressional Quarterly Press).