Sterling Heights mosque site. If Sterling Heights is forced to approve the mosque by the U.S. Department of Justice, it would be the city’s third mosque.
ishtartv.com - wnd.com
02/21/2017
Sessions
urged to undo Obama-DOJ's Muslim 'discrimination' suit against U.S. city
A
city of 130,000 people in southeastern Michigan is under the gun of Islamic
pressure following its denial of a mega-mosque in a residential neighborhood
populated largely by Christian refugees who fled Islamic persecution in Iraq.
Sterling Heights already has two mosques, but a third, the American Islamic
Community Center, applied for a permit and was rejected after it was determined
its proposed use was incompatible with the residential area. Too much traffic,
too little parking, the city planning commission decided by a 9-0 vote against
the mosque in September 2015.
But
in December, the mosque sued the city and the Obama Justice Department joined
in, claiming the real reason the mosque was denied was because the city was
caving to anti-Muslim bigotry in the community. Now, a settlement deal is
headed to the Sterling Heights City Council on Tuesday evening. If the council votes
to sign the deal, it could be very costly for the city.
Local
residents fear it’s a bad deal, something similar to the Obama DOJ-orchestrated
deal forced upon nearby Pittsfield Township, Michigan, last year. That town had
to pay out $1.7 million to local Muslims to whom it had denied a permit for an
Islamic school, and township employees were ordered to undergo sensitivity
training to assure they never again discriminate against Muslims.
Sessions
to the rescue?
Attorney
General Jeff Sessions could cancel any similar deal from taking effect in
Sterling Heights, but only if he is aware of it and acts quickly.
“If
the city council is found to be cooperating with the Obama DOJ staff who are
expediting this consent order to stick it to the Sessions/Trump team, then this
city will go nuts,” said Dick Manaserri, spokesman for Secure Michigan, a group formed to
educate the public on Shariah law and how it differs from American law.
In
last November’s presidential election, Donald Trump carried Sterling Heights,
normally a Democratic Party stronghold, by 56 to 44 percent over Hillary
Clinton. He also carried Macomb County, home to Sterling Heights and also
a Democratic-oriented county.
But
Trump’s new AG, Sessions, is apparently not yet fully in control of the Justice
Department, which includes many holdovers from the Obama administration.
“Why
else would Jeff Sessions not dismiss the Obama DOJ lawsuit against Sterling
Heights?” Manaserri asks. “We have been told by legal experts that he has the
power to simply dismiss the lawsuit. A consent order typically implies
wrongdoing with the application of penalties.”
When
the planning commission denied the mosque permit in September 2015, hundreds of
Sterling Heights residents gathered outside City Hall to celebrate. That
celebration was caught on
video, and critics cited it as evidence the city was somehow biased against
Muslims.
Tom
Mitchell is a resident of Sterling Heights whose family has been there since
1965. He’s seen the city’s transformation over the past couple of decades under
the control of what he calls “progressives.” He avoids the world “Democrat”
because the city’s elections are technically nonpartisan.
“I feel
that with the left taking over, they are destroying this community. I don’t
want to become another Dearborn or a Hamtramck. And our elected officials are
enabling this takeover,” he said.
Hamtramck,
just a few miles south of Sterling Heights, became the nation’s first city with
a Muslim-majority city council in 2016, and a large portion of Dearborn
resembles a Middle Eastern country with signs in Arabic and women walking the
streets with their faces veiled.
He
said it’s not a matter of discrimination. Churches have been denied building
projects in the past because their sites were too close to residential housing.
They didn’t get the federal government to sue the city; they simply picked
another site.
“I
truly believe this one man, Mr. Sessions, has the power to throw out any
consent decree that was engineered by Obama’s Department of Justice. That is
our hope,” Mitchell said. “In fact, I know of hundreds of us who are praying
for that opportunity to get it in Jeff Sessions’ hands, before Tuesday night, because
once it’s signed, how do you overturn that? Signing it is tantamount to a
consent that we’re a bunch of bigots here in Sterling Heights.”
‘A stinger in the eye’ of Iraqi Christians in Sterling Heights
Mitchell
said he and others are trying to get the word out in the community that the
Tuesday council meeting will include an agenda item on a proposed settlement to
the lawsuit.
But
the city council did not publish its Tuesday-night agenda in the local legal
newspaper, the weekly Sterling Heights Sentry, and it didn’t put a notice on
its official website until late Friday.
Watch
video trailer for the book former Congresswoman Michele Bachmann is calling the
“must read of 2017″… It’s “Stealth Invasion: Muslim Conquest through
Immigration and Resettlement Jihad.”
“We just found out about this, so we’ve been rushing to try to put together an
opposition to stop the city from signing this document, which is an admission of
guilt to something we don’t think we committed,” Mitchell said. “As a local
resident, I’m gonna say we don’t discriminate in Sterling Heights. We’ve
already got two mosques, a Sikh temple, a Buddhist temple and many other
diverse houses of worship, so for this city to be called discriminatory is
unbelievable.
“The
unfortunate thing is, they want to plop it right in the middle of a Chaldean
Christian neighborhood,” Mitchell added. “Somebody planned that. Somebody is
seeking to put a stinger in someone’s eye.”
Dr.
Ramsay Dass, M.D., president of the American Middle
East Christian Congress, said he is not so concerned about another mosque
being built in Sterling Heights. He’s more concerned about the big picture of
political pressure being placed on small cities by an out-of-control federal
bureaucracy using coercive tactics.
“As
an American citizen, they are entitled to build a mosque, but I do not believe
in making laws that small cities and towns cannot fight politically or financially,”
Dass told WND.
The
federal law being used to coerce cities into approving mosques, even when the
mosque is in a residential neighborhood, is the Religion Land Use and
Institutional Persons Act, or RELUIPA, which was passed by Congress in 2000.
As
WND has reported, the Obama administration used this law increasingly against
communities denying mosques and less against those denying the construction of
churches.
“Any
city being hit with this kind of a rule cannot fight back and they submit,” Dass
said. “The time is too short, and I don’t think Sessions has the time to
discuss it before it is signed by the city. This rule was put in place, and the
Obama administration did not apply it to other religions the same as they
applied it to mosques. I am not against building a mosque or a synagogue or a
church; everyone has a freedom to build a house of worship, but I don’t believe
in making it a political issue.
“RELUIPA,
the way it is written, you cannot win, and the cities don’t have enough funds
to hire the lawyers to fight this. It depends on whichever minority has the
favored status of the government at any time, you go against that and they’re
now going to lose, period. My belief is the federal government should not
interfere in the local government unless it is a real black-and-white case of
discrimination. I work with the Jews and I work with the Muslims, and that is
what my Middle East Christian conscience is all about. We need to work
together, protect each other.”
The
reason the Christian community more often loses these fights is because it
is divided, Dass added.
“The
fault is with the Christians. We are divided. They are afraid to speak up, so I
believe the fault and the shame falls to us,” he said.
As an example of this division, he cited Archbishop of Greater Detroit, Allen
H. Vigneron.
“For
the past five years, he has refused to talk to us Middle Eastern Christians
living in his archdiocese, but he will go to the mosque and pray with the
Muslims there,” Dass said. “How do you expect us to move forward? I have
pleaded with him to at least meet with us. He knows me very well, but he
refused.
“You
want to know why we have a problem in Sterling Heights? That is the problem. I
have talked to the Armenians, Syrians, Catholics, I have talked to them all and
they cannot develop unity and unless we develop unity we are doomed, in
Sterling Heights and everywhere else. We are so badly divided, when the highest
Catholic authority will not meet with the Middle East Christians, he is afraid
he might offend the Muslims or the Jews. Why else won’t he talk to us, with no
agenda? This is our problem. We are a house divided, and the Bible says a house
divided cannot stand.”
Mitchell
said he would be surprised if there were more than 300 Muslims living in
Sterling Heights. And they already have two large mosques to attend.
The
proposed new mosque is more than 21,000 square feet in size.
“Why
are they building another mosque way larger than the numbers they have to
inhabit it?” Mitchell asks. “At 21,000 square feet, it could hold at least 250
to 300 worshipers. And just 4.5 miles due north of that location is the mosque
that was approved in 2011 and is approximately the same size.”
Perhaps
there are plans for many more Muslims to take up residence in the city. WND has
reported that a local Muslim leader, Assad Malik, has been temporarily housing
Syrian refugees in a hotel in Sterling Heights. They wait there until permanent
housing can be found in or around Macomb County, which, along with Oakland and
Wayne counties, has been a primary destination for Syrian refugees.
But
while the local Muslim population may not be that large yet in Sterling
Heights, there are some powerful Muslims living in the community who have
influence beyond their numbers, local activists say. A local CAIR-connected
Muslim leader, Mohammad Alomari, has a seat on the city’s influential Ethnic
Committee, which recently handed out an achievement award to a resident who
helped the city place hundreds of Syrian refugees in the area.
Iraqi
Christian’s great-grandfather crucified by Muslims
Nahren
Anweya is a spokesperson for the persecuted Middle Eastern Christians living in
Michigan. She has appeared on Fox News and spoken at congressional hearings on
Christian persecution in the Middle East. Her family has been living in
Michigan since they escaped Iraq in 1989. She said Sterling Heights is home to
the nation’s second largest Chaldean Catholic community of Iraqi Christians.
They thought they found a safe haven, only to find out their ancient nemesis,
the Middle Eastern Sunni Muslims, were being resettled in the same county and
wanted to build a mosque right in the middle of their neighborhood.
Most
Iraqi Christians are either Chaldean Catholic or members of an even more
ancient Christian sect, the Assyrian Church of the East. The Assyrians speak
Aramaic, the language of Jesus.
“My
family they’re pretty patriotic American Assyrian Christians. Both of my
great-grandfathers were crucified by Muslims literally on a cross,” Anweya told
WND. “And that was because they were proud Christians, my great-grandfather
used to walk around with a large gold cross around his neck, we never tried to
hide it.”
So
to see those ancient persecutors not only showing up in Macomb County en masse,
but building a mosque on top of the Chaldean neighborhood, is “traumatizing,”
Anweya said.
“While
we are living in our safe haven, to allow a mosque to be built where we are is
like putting us back to Iraq. We left everything behind to start from scratch,
and then watching it follow us, this is traumatizing,” she said. “There are so
many Muslim countries who could take these Muslim refugees, but they send them
here. If we were treated fairly in their countries, then I would say let them
build as many mosques as they want, but that day is far from reality.”
She
said Muslim leaders don’t believe in equality, and anything they say on that
level is mere pandering to gullible local Christians.
“They
don’t believe in equality, even if they say they do,” she said. “Show me a
Muslim country where Christians are treated 100 percent equal. Why is
Christianity being degraded in every Muslim country? In 2003, we were 1.3
million Christians in Iraq, and that is where Christianity began and thrived,
and now these are people who would be beheaded for their Christian faith.”
So,
she said, the Assyrian and Chaldean communities have news for the Islamic
centers that wish to build in their midst:
“These
people are not going to give up their Christian faith,” Anweya said. “Where a
nation is most vulnerable, is when they are not even calling themselves
Christian anymore, that’s the most dangerous I believe.
“When
the sword is placed to your neck it’s too late,” she added. “The Christians
from Iraq, we are not building churches in Dearborn, so why are they building
mosques in Sterling Heights?
“If
we started building churches in Dearborn, I think you would see a few protests
coming from them.”
She
said that may be the only answer to Islamic expansion in Michigan and other
states.
“We
need to start the most aggressive missionary work right in their areas. They
are pushing us into a corner in the West, the entire Middle East has been taken
over, where Christianity thrived and was so strong,” she said.
Once
in a lifetime opportunity?
She
believes now is the time, while Trump is president.
“America
right now, because we have an aggressive president who is not afraid to speak
out, I think we are being given a reprieve,” Anweya said. “We are literally
given an opportunity to see the problem and look people in the face and say:
Will I let it take me over or will I change?
“Will
I stop being politically correct? This is a very serious threat, and it will
take over the entire country. It will spread very quickly. It can happen in 30
to 50 years. They have a lot of money behind them. They have Iran behind one
group and Saudi Arabia behind the other, two of the most wealthy countries. The
Saudis, everything they do in front of Americans is fake. They are the No. 1
funder of terror around the world. The royal family in Saudi Arabia is funding
ISIS and all the others.”
Nahren Anweya’s family fled Iraq in 1989 after being decimated by Muslim community there. Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2017/02/mega-mosque-being-forced-on-christian-refugee-community/#tvDltximKscUTAmc.99
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