This is the first installment of a multi-part series on anti-Zionism (and Antisemitism) in Dearborn, Michigan by CAMERA Senior Fellow Dexter Van Zile. Dexter’s Fellowship is thanks to a grant-funded collaboration between CAMERA and Middle East Forum, where he is Managing Editor, Focus on Western Islamism.
Inside a tastefully appointed coffee shop a short walk from the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, a handsome wooden sculpture hangs to the left of the door. An uninitiated observer might take the woodwork for an abstract design. In fact, it is a map of “Palestine” that erases Israel. It’s an artistic rendering of the slogan “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free,” that was echoed with troubling frequency and ferocity on college quads and in downtowns across the United States after October 7.
A map of Palestine hangs from a rope at a coffee shop in Dearborn, Michigan. (Dexter Van Zile)
Patrons at the coffee shop — which offers pretty good pastries — won’t hear that angry chant from the baristas behind the counter but the sculpture sends a clear message: “We hate Israel and want it to disappear. You should, too. Anyone who thinks otherwise is not welcome here.” This message permeates the public life of Dearborn and the communities that surround it.
Visitors to Dearborn can see this contempt on oblique display at the Arab American National Museum, which has an exhibit lionizing the late journalist, Helen Thomas. The museum, whose website offers a land acknowledgement that laments its sinful presence on tribal land — and celebrates “the larger ethnic and racial fabric” of the greater Detroit area — makes no reference to Thomas’s antisemitism which manifested itself when she told Jews to “to go back to Germany” in a now-notorious interview in 2010.
The message is clear. The museum will confess the sins of white settlers in the United States but has no problem with Arab Americans who demonize Jews in America. So much for respecting the ethnic and racial fabric of the greater Detroit area—which includes an estimated 70,000 Jews.
Wayne County named a busy intersection just outside Dearborn City limits after Osama Siblani, a local newspaper publisher who has expressed support for Hezbollah, a jihadist organization that has kidnapped and killed U.S. citizens. (Dexter Van Zile)
This hostility manifested itself in the willingness of Dearborn officials to attend a September 2025 ceremony to name a busy intersection located just outside the city limits after Osama Siblani, the publisher of Arab American News, a publication which regularly falsely accuses Israel of “genocide.” This same publisher once called on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to “go back to Poland.” A few weeks after the intersection was named after him, Siblani took to the steps of the steps of Dearborn’s Henry Ford Centennial Library to denounce “treacherous, criminal Zionist Israelis,” blame Israel for violence across the Middle East, and call on his supporters to resist Israel and its supporters by “all means of resistance.”
Given rhetoric like this, it’s no surprise that Dearborn protesters have been heard to chant “Death to Israel” and “Death to America!” on the steps of the same Henry Ford Library. Such contempt took on a religious hue on March 3, 2026, at the Islamic House of Wisdom, a mosque located in Dearborn Heights, when Mohammad Ali Elahi, a prominent local imam with ties to Iran, portrayed Israel’s attack on Iranian proxy Hezbollah as an effort to distract the American people from the “Epstein files.” He made the same argument ten days later when he condemned the U.S. attack on Iran.
Similar hostility was on display at the annual convention of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, which took place in Dearborn in late 2025. Speakers at the conference who refused to condemn October 7 condemned Israel for — you guessed it — perpetrating a genocide. Outside the conference, the ADC, which has a regional office in the city, tolerated the presence of a pickup truck adorned with a license plate that read “Hamas”—a jihadist group that has murdered Israeli and American citizens as part of its decades-long effort to destroy the Jewish state. The rear door of the truck was emblazoned with a sticker that read “DEATH, DEATH TO THE IDF” and another that read “BOOM, BOOM, BOOM TEL AVIV.” In the exhibition hall, a vendor sold anti-Israel ski masks and even a barbecue apron that read “Anti-Zionist AF.”
A pickup truck outside the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee’s 2025 convention in Dearborn, Michigan, falsely accuses Israel of “genocide” and calls for the death of Israeli military personnel. The front license plate (not shown) reads “Hamas.” (Dexter Van Zile)
Dearborn and the surrounding communities do more than serve as a bastion of anti-Zionism in the Midwest, but also act as a base of support for the decades-long war propaganda war against the Jewish diaspora in America. This information war began soon after the Six-Day War in 1967, gathered steam during the First and Second Intifadas, and accelerated beyond belief post October 7. In late February, the propaganda war culminated locally in a jihadist attack against a synagogue in West Bloomfield in which a resident of Dearborn Heights attempted to murder children in what the FBI described as a “targeted act of violence against the Jewish community.”
Not the First Time
Sadly, this isn’t the first time Dearborn has served as a muster point for hostility toward Jews in the United States. In 1920, Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company, which served as the base of the economy for the greater Detroit area, used his newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, as a vehicle to demonize the Jewish people. In a series of 92 articles later republished in a book titled The International Jew, the paper purported to explore “the corrosive manifestation of the ‘Jewish problem’ in nearly every aspect in American life,” reports Steven Watts in The People’s Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Alfred A. Knopf, 2005).
Numerous institutions such as the Federal Council of Churches pushed back against the calumnies Ford broadcast into American society and local car dealerships even canceled their contracts with Ford Motor Company in protest, to no avail. In 1923, Ford declared, “The Jewish are the scavengers of the world,” and that, “Whenever there’s anything wrong with the country, you’ll find the Jews on the job there.”
Eventually, after years of controversy, Ford apologized for his sins. In a 1927 statement, Ford asked forgiveness for “the harm that [he had] unintentionally committed” against the Jewish people. Louis Marshall, president of the American Jewish Committee, accepted the apology and declared that it was his “sincere hope that never again shall such a recrudescence of ancient superstition manifest itself upon our horizon.”
Sadly, Marshall’s hope was in vain. The specter of Jew-hatred has manifested itself once again in Dearborn, and it’s time to take stock. In the weeks ahead, I will examine the institutions and dynamics fueling this resurgence of hostility in Dearborn and its surrounding communities as part of a joint research project supported by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis and the Middle East Forum. In a series of articles, I will document how institutions, leaders, and cultural dynamics have allowed hostility toward Israel and Jews to take root so deeply in the Dearborn area.
Future installments will examine topics such as the role The Arab American News plays promoting anti-Israelism in shaping public discourse, the influence of religious institutions in circulating particular narratives, the activities of advocacy groups and their conferences, the rhetoric and decisions of elected officials and civic leaders, and the ways social media and street-level activism have amplified these messages and converged with broader national trends since October 7.
Buckle up. It’s going to be a rough ride for folks living so close to the Motor City. But in the long run, the United States — and the people of Dearborn — will be better off for having confronted the problem.