DEARBORN, Mich. (Michigan News Service) – Suzanne Sareini, the first Arab to be elected to Dearborn’s city council, said when her father arrived from Lebanon, he wanted to be an American, like any other immigrant group who came to this country because they were attracted to its ideals.

In a 1985 interview with the Detroit Free Press, Sareini said the Arabs who came in the 1980s to Dearborn had other motives for coming to America. The Lebanese Civil War, Iranian Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War brought over Arabs who came out of survival, not necessarily attracted to American culture.

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“My father, when he came from Lebanon, he wanted to be an American, as did the people who came from Germany or the people who came from Ireland. The people that came because of the (Middle East) war are in crisis. They have financial crisis or they lost a family or whatever,” Sareini said. “All they are worried about is survival. They are not sure they want to be here, and they are looking around to see what we are all about. I love Dearborn. I’m a Dearbornite first. It’s going to be a while before they are going to be Dearbornites first.”

Forty years later.

Now, 40 years after Sareini’s comments, Dearborn, Dearborn Heights and Hamtramck have evolved in a community that is trying to preserve its Middle Eastern culture, not assimilate into America’s.

Author Jay Murray wrote this week for the Michigan Enjoyer that in Dearborn, a simple act of standing for the National Anthem during sporting events is not a consideration.

“Even white suburban liberals who frown on overt patriotism as a concept stand at attention during the national anthem,” Murray wrote. “In the stands at a Dearborn Fordson football game, these minimal American traditions are really just for the visiting team.”

Changing times.

In September, the Dearborn Heights police department published a photo of a police patch that featured an Arabic script. Two days later, the city scrapped the idea after a backlash.

Earlier this year, a video of Dearborn Police Chief Issa Shahin was posted where he said the city is better served with more Arab police officers and then recited a Muslim prayer.

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Shahin boasted that in a short amount of time, the department has increased the percentage of Arab police officers from 3% to 45%, which he said better serves a population that is nearly 50% Arab.

In Hamtramck in 2024, a street was renamed as “Palestine Avenue.” In Dearborn, the city renamed a part of a street previously named after a Revolutionary War hero to honor Osama Siblani, a controversial figure in Arab-American culture. Siblani has a history of controversial remarks, from praising Hezbollah leaders as “heroes,” to telling Israeli Jews to go back to Poland, and at a 2024 rally promising that Hezbollah would “take care of the job” against Israel while the crowd chanted “death to Israel.”

Christians in Dearborn.

When a Christian man objected to the street being renamed in honor of Siblani at a September Dearborn city council meeting, he was attacked by Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud.

At that September city council meeting, Hammoud, an Arab, told Christian Ted Barham, who also lives in Dearborn, that he was not welcome in the city and that the mayor would throw a parade in celebration when Barham left.

Hammoud has not apologized for his remarks.

James Dickson, a conservative media influencer formerly of the Detroit News, compared Hammoud to former Dearborn Mayor Orville Hubbard. It was Hubbard who favored segregation of races during his tenure from the 1940s to the 1970s and gave Dearborn a reputation as a Sundown Town, where blacks were not allowed to be seen within the city limits after the sun went down.

“Modern Dearborn is a lot like historical Dearborn, in that one group runs the city and have no problem excluding others,” Dickson said in an email to Michigan News Source. “The mayor telling a Christian man he was not welcome could have happened 60 years ago, had that man been a Detroiter trying to buy a home. Dearborn should try something new — being a home for all of Dearborn. Nobody supreme over anyone else.”

A “third world enclave.”

Some of the criticism of America that comes from what conservative commentator Matt Walsh referred to as a “third world enclave” is anti-American.

When liberals criticize President Donald Trump by saying democracy is at risk with Trump at the helm, the underlying notion in their claim is that America’s democracy is worth saving.

That wasn’t the case in Dearborn Heights earlier this month when a video surfaced of an Arab man championing the fall of the United States. The video was posted Sept. 22 of an Arab man at Palestine event in Dearborn Height who said, “This American empire has been hurting our people from the beginning.’” The man then added, “imperial Western powers must fall, and inshallah, they will fall.”