James Hickman
James Hickman (aka Simon Black) is an international investor, entrepreneur, and founder of Sovereign Man.
In 1976, a young immigrant named Osama Siblani landed in the United States, full of gratitude for his adopted new country.
Siblani was escaping the brutal and bloody civil war that was tearing apart his native homeland of Lebanon, and America represented the peaceful haven of freedom and opportunity that he was seeking.
He settled in a modest Detroit suburb called Dearborn, and after a few years he launched a bilingual publication for his fellow immigrants from the Middle East called the Arab American News.
Soon, Siblani was living the American dream – safe, prosperous, and he even had his own business which had become the most popular publication of its kind.
But over time Siblani’s views – and the views expressed in the Arab American News, began to change.
By 2004, with the US engaged in two wars abroad, Siblani told the Washington Post: “Mr Bush believes Hezbollah, Hamas and other Palestinian factions are terrorists, but we believe they are freedom fighters.”
Keep in mind, by this time, Hezbollah and Hamas were responsible for hundreds of terrorist attacks.
Hezbollah had actually bombed the US Embassy in Beirut (Silbani’s home country) in 1983, killing 63 people. Later that year they struck the marine barracks, murdering 241 US service members in their sleep.
Throughout the 1990s, Hamas became infamous for suicide bombings – buses, cafés, markets – dozens of civilians slaughtered in one attack after another.
But Siblani saw them as “freedom fighters”.
His stance never changed. In 2022, he said, “Blessed [be] the blood of jihadi martyrs that irrigates the land of Palestine,” praising terrorists for “striking them with knives and with their bare hands…”
Even after the October 7, 2023, attacks which killed 1,200 innocent Israeli civilians, Siblani insisted that “Hamas is not a terrorist organization.”
At a rally in 2024, as the crowd chanted “Death to Israel,” Siblani celebrated. “America is changing,” he said. “Look at the universities,” where students engage in rampant support for Hamas terrorists.
Silbani also said they should take Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, “back to Poland,” – a reference to Nazi death camps during the Holocaust.
Well, Siblani’s adopted town of Dearborn, Michigan just named a street after him.
What a wild inversion. We all watched the hysteria in 2020 as monuments were torn down and schools renamed because the people they honored – some of whom lived hundreds of years ago – were insufficiently ‘progressive’ by modern standards.
George Washington. Abraham Lincoln. Thomas Jefferson. These men were apparently so ‘evil’ that many of their monuments were removed. But Siblani? A man whose views are flagrantly antithetical to mainstream American values is being honored.
Now, I still believe in freedom of speech, even (and especially) when that speech infuriates me. Siblani has a right to express his views. But that doesn’t mean he should be honored by the very city that took him in when he fled his homeland.
It turns out that not every resident in Dearborn was thrilled about naming a street after Siblani.
At a Dearborn City Council meeting last week, one local resident called it outrageous, saying, “I feel like having that sign up there is almost like naming a street Hezbollah Street or Hamas Street. Hezbollah bombed the embassy in Beirut, including many Americans. I just feel it’s quite inappropriate.”
Fortunately, Democracy worked. That mayor heard these comments and realized, ‘You’re right, we shouldn’t name a street after someone who praises terrorist groups that kill Americans.’
Just kidding. The mayor threw the guy out. Almost literally.
The Mayor of Dearborn, Mr Abdullah Hammoud, responded: “You’re an Islamophobe. And although you live here, I want you to know, as mayor, you are not welcome here.”
The mayor went on to say he would throw a parade the day this concerned resident moves out of the city.
This is not actually surprising to anyone familiar with Mayor Abdullah Hammoud.
At that 2024 rally, he took the stage seconds after Siblani threatened to send Netanyahu to a concentration camp, as the crowd chanted “Death to Israel” and “Allahu Akbar.”
And having someone like him in charge is exactly what Siblani has been working towards for decades.
In 2024, Siblani said that 40 years ago, the then-mayor of Dearborn warned of the city’s “Arab problem.” But now “the Arabs are ruling Dearborn… We are on the road to the White House, to Congress, to the decision-making everywhere in the US.”
It always starts small.
Dearborn is a tiny fraction of the US – .03 per cent of the population.
You could shrug your shoulders and ignore it. But how big does a movement have to be before it’s worth paying attention to?
We’ve written before about what’s happened in the UK and Europe: countries that sacrificed their culture, their children, their wives to the immigrants they welcomed. And their governments looked the other way as these immigrants committed rape, murder, and the grooming of children.
That starts somewhere. And it would be disingenuous to say it’s not happening in America too.
Today, local Muslim leaders are telling Americans they are not welcome in their own communities, in their own country.
And that country, ironically, is one whose values and culture allowed a Lebanese immigrant to escape his war-torn country, start a successful business, and use his power of free speech to destroy those very same values.
This article was originally published by Sovereign Man.
