Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”
Sign up to attend Michael’s talk in Los Angeles on Thursday, November 20: HERE.
Andrea Unger, who has lived for 40 years in the city of Dearborn, Michigan told Fox News Digital recently that the loudspeakers at a mosque about a quarter-mile from her home broadcast the Islamic call to prayer multiple times a day, sometimes as early as 5:30 a.m. and often for as long as five minutes. It can be heard clearly inside her home.
Ms. Unger recorded the call to prayer for 30 consecutive days and found that it consistently exceeded 70 decibels. The city ordinance states that noise in residential areas is not to exceed 55 decibels at night (after 10 p.m.) or 60 decibels during the day (from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m.). Loudspeakers are prohibited between the hours of 10 p.m. and 7 a.m.
She has raised concerns about this with the police department and city council over the past two years, to no avail. “There is no atheist, Christian, Jewish, Catholic, or other group that is allowed to use loudspeaker to blast a five-minute prayer into the homes of people in the East Dearborn community,” she told Fox.
Some of her neighbors have been reluctant to join her in speaking out.
“I have heard a lot of people say, ‘I’m glad you said something,’ because people are afraid they’ll get called names like ‘Islamophobic,’ like our mayor [Abdullah H. Hammoud] called [Dearborn resident and Christian minister] Ted Barham, because you disagree,” she said, referring to an incident I’ll get to in a moment. “We’re not Islamophobic, we’re not anti-Muslim, we are not anti-Jewish. We just want to live in the community that it’s always been [before]. Something changed two years ago to allow this.”
Dearborn Mayor Hammoud (pictured), who has been in office since January 1, 2022, dismissed these concerns on a recent episode of the Not From Here podcast, claiming “we’ve done decibel readings at these mosques, all within threshold, all within legal limit. And so for me, it’s not an issue.”
It’s not an issue for him because he’s Muslim. He added,
We also have to uphold our constitutional rights to freedom of religion. And I would say this, you know, that’s the thing. I’m saying this as a Muslim. People, of course, are going to say this is a call to prayer, but like, you know, why are these complaints just coming forward now?… Call to prayer has been happening since the 1970s in Dearborn.
The complaint about the call to prayer is not an issue of religious freedom – it’s an issue of the mosque consistently breaking the sound ordinance. Nevertheless, Hammoud went on to compare the sound of the call to prayer to that of church bells – as if the melodic tones of church bells are being blasted into Dearborn residents’ homes five times daily beginning at 5:30 a.m. for up to five minutes or longer. It’s also worth pointing out that the majority of Muslim-majority countries around the world prohibit church bells from being broadcast from loudspeakers at all – if churches are even allowed.
You may recall Hammoud as the mayor who unloaded on local resident Edward “Ted” Barham, a Christian, at a September city council meeting, after Barham objected to new street signs honoring Arab American News publisher Osama Siblani, whom he described as “a promoter of Hezbollah and Hamas.” Indeed, Siblani has proudly defended the two terror organizations as “freedom fighters” and refused to repudiate Hamas’ October 7, 2023 savagery in Israel, condemning instead “those people who drove the Palestinians” to carry out the barbaric attacks. Barham compared the “provocative” street signs to naming a road “Hezbollah Street or Hamas Street,” and stressed that as a Christian, he wanted to encourage peace.
An obviously triggered Hammoud then interjected with a hate-filled tirade that shocked many in attendance: “The best suggestion I have for you is to not drive on Warren Avenue or to close your eyes while you’re doing it. His name is up there and I spoke at a ceremony celebrating it because he’s done a lot for this community.”
He went on to smear Barham as “a bigot,” a “racist,” and “an Islamophobe” before declaring, “Although you live here, I want you to know as mayor, you are not welcome here. And the day you move out of the city will be the day that I launch a parade celebrating the fact that you moved out of this city.”
It’s absolutely jaw-dropping that an elected local official would launch a personal attack in this fashion on a citizen bringing a legitimate complaint about honoring a terrorism supporter. It’s especially telling that the Muslim mayor would target that citizen as being unwelcome in the city. Hammoud apparently is confident that, because Dearborn has the country’s highest per capita population of Muslims, he can threaten Christians like Barham as “unwelcome” without repercussions.
This is what we see happening from Europe to Australia to the United States: all too often, when Muslims in the West secure even local political power and a sizeable-enough population, Islamic supremacism rears its ugly head, and harassment, intimidation, and even violence follow.
Consider this in light of the recent revelation that a whopping 48 mosques have been constructed in Texas within the last two years alone. According to a 2020 survey by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU), the number of mosques in Texas had grown 35% since 2010, from 166 to 224 – although the Not the Bee website notes that online data scrapers list as many as 330 mosques in Texas as of 2025. Will no-go zones become inevitable? Will Houston, which has the largest Muslim population in the southern United States, become the next Dearborn?
At least one Texas politician is taking action. Gov. Greg Abbott on Tuesday signed a proclamation declaring the Muslim Brotherhood and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) as foreign terrorist organizations in Texas – a good start (now if only the Trump administration would take similar federal action). “The Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR have long made their goals clear,” the statement reads, “to forcibly impose Sharia law and establish Islam’s ‘mastership of the world.’”
Bravo for Gov. Abbott. The Lone Star State must not become the next Michigan.
Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior
