That Ayatollah Khomeini invented “Quds Day” is not surprising. “Al Quds” is Arabic for Jerusalem; the name derives from the Hebrew nickname for “the Holy City,” Ir HaKodesh. Khomeini introduced the holiday in 1979, shortly after the revolution that installed him in power. Celebrated on the last Friday of Ramadan, the festival is generally attended by anti-American and anti-Zionist protests and chants calling for the death of both nations. 

Back in 1979, America was glued to TV screens receiving updates on the Teheran hostage crisis, which was national news and contributed to the downfall of then-president Jimmy Carter. In 2012, a similar hostage crisis, in an American diplomatic facility in Libya, hardly gathered attention. Today, few in the U.S. are aware that Palestinians still hold (if they are still alive) five Americans hostage in Gaza and that they killed dozens more in Southern Israel during the massacre in October last year. The Biden Administration does not appear to be preoccupied with their release. By contrast, Vladimir Putin secured the release of Russian-Israeli dual national Roni Krivol, despite him being a male of military age.  

That Quds Day is observed in Dearborn, Michigan is not surprising either—but it is disturbing. This year the occasion stirred controversy because it was marked by chants calling Death to Israel and Death to America. It wasn’t the first time such screams were heard in the Heartland, but now they are getting noticed. Even more recently, a group of Chicago leftists planning their protests for the Democratic National Convention this summer were delighted to learn how to chant “Death to America” in Persian.  

Following the Dearborn incident, a Fox Business news crew approached Michigan Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib asking her to comment on the incident. Tlaib refused, posturing as a victim and a hero at once, the righteous defender of the innocent Dearborn civilians. “Using racist tropes against my community is what Fox News is about, and I don’t talk to Fox News!” immediately adding, “You guys know exactly what you do. And I know you’re Islamophobic. But you guys gotta deal with it your own self, you’re not gonna use me!” 

If pointing out that Tlaib’s constituents chant Death to America is Islamophobic, the constituents themselves are inviting Islamophobia. Tlaib herself might see nothing wrong with the phrase—or the fact that some Michiganders celebrate Ayatollah holidays—but the rest of us have a stake in America living in peace and prosperity.  

If I were a Democrat voter, I’d be mighty upset. The country’s middle class is hollowing out, prices are skyrocketing, and the border is wide open. But after Michigan Muslims flexed their muscle and, at Tlaib’s urging, voted undeclared in the state’s Democrat primary, the Biden Administration changed its tune on Hamas and is now pressuring Israel to surrender. One by one, high profile Democrats are falling in line as the people they are pandering to cry Death to America!  

The United States is behind the curve of Islamization. Our Muslim population is still relatively small, under 3.5 million, or just above one percent. A significant portion of them are properly civilized—we are home to many refugees from the Iranian revolution and their descendants.  

Contrast this to Europe, where Islamic communities have established roots in recent decades. In the U.K., the Pakistani Muslim First Minister of Scotland Humza Yousaf, the brother-in-law to a Palestinian recently arrested in connection with the death of a man and previously charged with drug deals, complained that white people are too prominent in his land. Then he instituted draconian hate speech laws.   

Close to 5 percent of the population in the U.K. espouses the Muslim faith. What are they like? A recent poll revealed that nearly half support Hamas and a quarter denies the 10/7 massacre. Fifty-five percent want to criminalize the portrayal of Mohammad and about one third want to implement Sharia law.  

The survey was by no means an outlier—in a 2016 poll, over 90 percent of Muslims reported that they feel accepted in their local community in the U.K. It didn’t clarify what is meant by local community, but considering that they stick to their tribal ways, I doubt they hang out with too many Britons. Eleven percent expressed approval for terrorism, including suicide bombing, while just 66 percent had it in them to condemn the stoning of adulterers, and 23 percent wanted to see the introduction of sharia on British soil. An exclusive ethnic enclave governed by its own law is what we call a colony.  

Britain is the European country most similar to us. We can expect that an America where Muslims are the largest religious minority would look a lot like Great Britain. France may be a host to an even larger Muslim population than its neighbor across the channel, but it passed some specifically anti-Islamist laws like partial bans on burkas—not that it solved the problem of Islamic extremism. But Britain, unable to reconcile its tradition of individual liberties with the push for totalitarianism, went for ridiculous and unevenly applied hate speech ordinances hurting the natives.  

We may end up worse than the U.K. because we have our own raw heritage of ethnic strife into which the newcomers appear to be assimilating. One of the Dearborn speakers pulled a quote from Malcolm X: “We live in one of the rottenest countries that has ever existed on this Earth.” New Islamic arrivals find it easy to merge into indigenous anti-Americanism because our educational and other institutions are increasingly hostile to the nation, its traditions and founding principles.  

It looks like our children and grandchildren will have to share the country with the people who hate us. The newcomers’ enclaves are growing. Being just a tiny faction of the population, they took over one of our two largest parties.  

I want congressional hearings on how it happened that the tangible number of America-hating newcomers are now established in the Midwest. For instance, we now have DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas admitting that the department put the one time PLO mouthpiece Nejwa Ali in charge of refugee admissions. Being a member of an immigrant community, I can tell you that at the time Russian-speaking Jews went through naturalization in the nineties, there was a lot of talk about antisemitism among the foreign-born immigration employees.  

We dealt with it by our own means, but who else did they process? And what is the role of the NGO’s in bringing questionably qualified foreign nationals? Most importantly, what can be done to address this problem?  

If we hired the wrong people to look into the background of the individuals we brought into this country, can we reopen their cases and correct our mistakes? As I mentioned in my prior essay, support of terrorism, like Communist and Nazi sentiments, should render these people ineligible for entry. Correcting our mistakes can be costly and time-consuming, but it’s less strenuous than dooming our children for the life with the haters who chant Death to America!