by Paul Sperry
Founded by Alexander Hamilton as the first industrial city in America, Paterson, N.J., is now home to America’s largest Palestinian community and largest proportion of Muslim residents. Today, New Jersey’s third-largest city is effectively run by its 30,000 Muslims, some of whom say they don’t need to learn English because it’s like living “back home” in an Arab city.
Paterson holds an annual Palestinian flag-raising ceremony, during which residents chant, “Free Free Palestine!” And in 2022, it renamed a five-block stretch of Main Street “Palestine Way.”
In June 2023, Paterson Mayor Andre Sayegh signed a sister city agreement with the mayor of Ramallah, a city in the West Bank and the seat of power of the Palestinian Authority, which officially celebrates the killing of Israelis. And last year during a ceremony kicking off Ramadan, he declared his city the “capital of Palestine in the United States of America” and the “fourth-holiest city” in Islam. “We are 100% halal!” Sayegh gushed, meaning pure and lawful under Islam. The mayor even agreed to hang a sign at the city entrance that reads: “Welcome to Little Palestine.”
Paterson is just one of several American cities – which also includes Hamtramck and Dearborn in Michigan – now controlled by Muslims; followers of Islam also exert outsized influence in some larger cities such as Minneapolis and New York.
Cities such as Hamtramck, Mich. reflect the customs and culture of their Muslim residents.
AP
To varying degrees, the actions of Muslims in these communities echo those of immigrant groups who came before them – creating thriving communities that can feel more foreign than American, supporting one another to gain office and influence, renaming streets after their own heroes, giving recognition to their own holidays. But critics warn that communities such as Paterson also reflect the different challenges posed by Islam, which is now the nation’s fastest-growing religion.
As is also the case in Western Europe, assimilation is demonstrably rare in U.S. municipalities with heavy concentrations of Muslim migrants. In these areas, large influxes of Muslims from abroad have changed not only the complexion, culture, values and traditions of cities, but also the demographic makeup of city councils, school boards, police departments and courts. Muslim officials, in turn, have changed laws or how existing laws are enforced to conform to the tenets of Islam – an unwelcome trend for many non-Muslims and particularly Jews threatened by their militantly anti-Israel rhetoric and positions.
“Our number one and top priority is to protect and defend our community, it is not to assimilate,” asserted Linda Sarsour, a renowned Palestinian activist who lives in the Paterson area and has helped transform the city.
RCI’s reporting on this phenomenon has found that Muslims often break with U.S. norms on a wide range of fundamental issues – from the separation of church and state and attitudes toward people of different faiths to what constitutes women’s rights and terrorism. As Muslims remake communities in their own images, they are dramatically changing the ever-evolving idea of what it means to be an American.
Not Alexander Hamilton’s Paterson
This is perhaps no more evident than in Paterson, where elected American officials annually raise the Palestinian flag. Several years ago, Paterson’s Muslim-majority city council voted to change existing noise regulations to allow the city’s dozen mosques to blast out the Islamic call to prayer five times a day – from before dawn to after dusk. The move has incensed some non-Muslim neighbors, including one who recently entered a nearby mosque to complain about the noise. “Everybody’s not Muslim here,” the man yelled. “I don’t want to hear that s--- every day.”
Paterson’s largest mosque – the Islamic Center of Passaic County – is run by a radical cleric whose brother-in-law was a senior Hamas commander in the West Bank, where he orchestrated a number of suicide bombings against Israelis. Before immigrating to the U.S. from Jordan, this leading Paterson imam, Mohammad Qatanani, served time in an Israeli prison for his own confessed ties to Hamas. Yet he was presented the keys to the city by Paterson’s mayor in 2024.
Until last year, U.S. immigration authorities had sought to deport Qatanani because he hid his criminal record on applications for a green card. But last year, judges appointed by President Obama and President Biden ruled he could stay in the United States. They did so despite testimony showing that he’d called for a “new intifada,” or violent Palestinian uprising, against Israel in a Times Square rally in 2017. Hundreds of Israelis were killed during the first and second intifadas, and Qatanani has supported the families of intifada suicide bombers. A decade earlier, he gave a sermon condemning Christians to hell, telling Paterson’s Muslim faithful that “the followers of Jesus” as Lord will burn in the “pits of hellfire.”
The 62-year-old Qatanani, who has also admitted ties to the terror-tied Muslim Brotherhood, oversees satellite mosques in neighboring Clifton and Prospect Park, N.J., as well. His mentor and predecessor at the Islamic Center was its founder Mohammad El-Mezain. Qatanani worked alongside El-Mezain until El-Mezain was convicted of funneling millions of dollars to Hamas in 2008.
Qatanani denies supporting or advocating violence. He declined further comment.
Intensely political, the Palestinian community in Paterson shows up in force at council meetings, voter drives, and election events. Much of the political organizing centers around mosques, where the Israeli-Gazan war is debated and where politicians are groomed – or shunned. After Hamas terrorists slaughtered more than 1,200 Israeli Jews on Oct. 7, 2023, New Jersey’s U.S. representatives, senators and the state’s governor all declared their support for Israel. In response, Paterson leaders effectively banned the officials from mosques and public spaces in the Palestinian stronghold, according to published reports.
The state’s new Democratic governor, Mikie Sherrill, recently tried to thaw relations by visiting the Islamic Center and snapping a selfie with controversial imam Qatanani. She even covered her head with a hijab, in what critics said was an overt act of pandering to her Islamic hosts.
Paterson Muslims have turned out the vote to elect several brethren as councilmen, including Democrat Alaa Abdelaziz, who last year went on to become New Jersey’s first Palestinian-American state assemblyman. More than 40 Muslims now hold elected office in the state.
Even the Paterson police department has been Islamized – and politicized. More than 30 Muslims are now on the force, and some have sewn the Palestinian flag on their uniforms. Former Paterson Police Chief Ibrahim Baycora was sworn in on the Quran.
Another local hotbed for political activism is the Palestinian American Community Center, a well-funded anti-Israel operation with close to $2 million in assets, according to tax records. A mainstay of the greater Paterson community, the center helps organize the city’s “Palestine Day on Palestine Way” festival and lobbies for U.S. divestment from Israel, which it claims is carrying out “genocide” against the Palestinian people.
The center website claims that “U.S. support for Israel [is] rooted in perceived colonial bonds and white supremacy ... Zionism [is] part of a larger Western imperial project.”
The Palestinian center has invited radical Islamists to speak at events as “honored guests,” including Sarsour, an ethnic-Palestinian who has been blacklisted by the Anti-Defamation League. Sarsour says she is anti-Zionist, not antisemitic. It’s a distinction made by many of Israel’s critics, but one that has been increasingly blurred by pro-Palestinian activists. The Paterson center’s publication, the Falastin Magazine, included in its March 2024 issue a poem arguing for Palestine to be free “from the river to the sea,” echoing a Hamas battle cry for wiping Israel off the map.
Muslims led campus protests many considered antisemitic during Israel's war with Hamas.
AP
Two months after Hamas massacred 1,200 Israeli Jews on Oct. 7, 2023, the center’s president, Diab Mustafa, who grew up on the West Bank, told the New York Times that violent anti-Israel college protests across America “give [him] hope.” His office issues a form for student activists to work alongside Students for Justice in Palestine, a radical pro-Hamas and anti-Israel advocacy group which organizes student protests on college campuses.
While critics warn Paterson functions as an outpost for Hamas, the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ New Jersey chapter counters they’re “conflating Muslim civic participation and Muslim contributions in society with terrorism.” And it warns such criticism could put the Muslim community of Paterson, and specifically its mosques, “in the crosshairs.”
Surrounding New Jersey Towns
As Paterson’s mayor proclaims the city belongs to Islam, the religion’s dominance has spread beyond its borders. In nearby Clifton, N.J., Islamic leaders are proposing to build a new 40,000-square-foot mosque in place of a converted church where Muslims have been congregating. Muslims in Prospect Park, N.J., helped elect Syrian-born Mohamed Khairullah as their mayor. He leads three other Muslim men on the six-member city council.
Prospect’s school board is also packed with Muslim members. Its ethnic-Jordanian vice president, Arwa Bassam Entour, boasts they are “making a change” from the secular ways of the old board, including mandating Islamic holidays and halal school lunches approved by Islamic guidelines banning pork and other foods.
Thanks to chain migration, the area has become a magnet for migrants from Islamic nations. So many Muslims are settling in the Paterson area that apartment buildings have waiting lists. Critics warn more surrounding towns will fall to Islamic influence until, one day, Islam spreads across the entire tri-state region. This seems to be the plan. During a Jordanian flag-raising ceremony in Paterson this April, a county commissioner vowed: “Inshallah (Allah willing), one day we will be able to raise these flags throughout all 16 municipalities in Passaic County.”
At the same April ceremony, Palestinian American Community Center’s Mustafa walked up to the podium and compared the Islamification of Paterson – and one day America as a whole – to the Muslim prophet Muhammad’s mass migration to, and subsequent Islamification of the Arabian city of Medina, which was an important milestone in Islam known as the “hijrah.” Though Muslims made up only 15% of the population in Medina, they nonetheless were able to turn it into an independent Islamic state, going from refugees to conquerors in a relatively short period.
Likewise, according to the late Islamic scholar Patrick Sookhdeo, modern-day Muslims are encouraged to establish their own institutions in Western lands, rather than adapting to those of their hosts, and to transform the demographic and political landscape of cities entirely, as their revered prophet did in Medina. Islamic leaders like Mustafa often refer to U.S. cities with large Muslim populations such as Paterson as “American Medina,” for becoming central hubs of Islamic identity and control.
Located just 15 miles west of Manhattan, Paterson is part of a metropolitan area that includes New York City, where Zohran Mamdani, a Muslim, is now mayor. The Muslim population grew at an astonishing rate in the metro area, rising from 1.6% in 2000 to 5% of the total population in 2020, according to the Association of Religion Data Archives. The nearly 1 million Muslims now rival the estimated 1.3 million Jews residing in the metro area.
The Center for Security Policy maintains that an “electoral jihad” has already begun in the region. The Washington-based think tank notes that “radical” Muslim Adam Hamawy is now the prohibitive favorite to win the New Jersey seat in Congress representing the state’s heavily Democratic 12th Congressional District in November. Hamawy owes his success in large part both to the heavy Muslim turnout there in the recent Democratic primary and a flood of money from a new pro-Palestinian super PAC, American Priorities, which threw $1.6 million behind his candidacy. As RCI has reported, the PAC draws key funding from wealthy Muslims.
A former U.S. Army medical doctor, Hamawy won his June primary despite evidence that he once cozied up to notorious Al-Qaeda terrorist Omar Abdel-Rahman, better known as the “Blind Sheikh,” who masterminded the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. A vocal critic of Israel, Hamawy visited the al-Qaeda terrorist’s home and studied at his feet. He also acted as his translator and chauffeur at pro-jihad conferences, where the sheikh talked about “conquering the land of the infidels.” Hamawy testified as a defense witness for Abdel-Rahman at his trial.
His campaign says he now condemns the late sheikh’s terrorist activities and anti-American rhetoric.
Yet many family members of Americans murdered on 9/11 are upset that such candidates are taking over Democratic Party races and could gain access to U.S. military and counterterror intelligence as members of Homeland Security and other sensitive committees in Congress.
“This guy Hamawy is going to try and forget all about [his earlier association with a known al-Qaeda terrorist],” said Don Arias, a former New York firefighter whose brother worked in the South Tower on 9/11 and died in the al-Qaeda plane attacks on the World Trade Center. “I’m not going to forget, and I don’t think people should forget.”
New York City
America’s most famous elected Muslim official, Zohran Mamdani, rode into office through strong support from New York’s largely immigrant Muslim community.
“The election of Mamdani is a game changer,” Yasir Qadhi, chairman of the influential Fiqh Council of North America, said in a sermon last year. “That is a victory for the Ummah.”
He also rejoiced in knowing that growing percentages of Muslims in Western cities are “terrifying” non-Muslim leaders. Noting such comments, Robert Spencer, a senior fellow with the David Horowitz Freedom Center, said that with Mamdani’s victory, “Muslim leaders are speaking openly now about the conquest and Islamization of the United States.”
Like members of rising immigrant groups before him, it is not surprising that Mamdani has appointed co-religionists to his team. What’s different, critics say, is that they tend to have connections to controversial policies and groups, including those tied to terrorism. An RCI analysis finds that Islamic activists now hold at least 10 high-ranking positions at Gotham’s city hall – starting with Ramzi Kassem. As the mayor’s top legal adviser, Kassem is in a position to influence the city’s anti-terror policies. It was Kassem who spearheaded the 2013 civil-rights lawsuit that three years later ended the NYPD’s surveillance of mosques and imams believed to be radicalizing young men to carry out violent jihad.
These days, Kassem won’t get as much pushback as he did last decade from the NYPD, which now boasts more than 3,500 active Muslim police officers– which is about 10% of the force, a figure in line with their citywide population. More than 40 Muslims are in NYPD leadership positions.
One of them is Pakistani-born Waheed Akhter, who was recently promoted from captain to the elite rank of deputy inspector of the NYPD. Akhter also acts as president of the NYPD Muslim Officers Society, whose website says it is “dedicated to building trust and improving relations between the Muslim community and the NYPD.”
Lobbying by the first-of-its-kind Muslim officers union led the NYPD to relax dress codes for religious minorities.
AP
Thanks to lobbying by this first-of-its-kind Muslim officers union, which also organizes annual pilgrimages to Mecca, NYPD now allows female officers to wear hijabs and male officers to wear turbans and kufi caps, as well as beards; Jewish officers are now allowed to wear yarmulkes. This year, NYPD hosted a Ramadan dinner at its headquarters.
Before joining the mayor’s office, the ethnic-Syrian Kassem was a pro bono attorney who defended al-Qaeda terrorists held at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay. More recently, he represented Mahmoud Khalil, the Syrian-born ringleader of the antisemitic protest encampment at Columbia University who was detained by ICE and slated for deportation.
Instrumental in raising money from fellow Muslims and getting out their vote for Mamdani, the Hamas-tied Council on American-Islamic Relations now has some of its alumni represented in senior posts inside City Hall. One of them is Faiza Ali, who Mamdani appointed commissioner of his office for immigrant affairs, where she will distribute an additional $32 million a year in funds for housing, childcare and healthcare, as well as legal services – “in a major way,” she says – to immigrants facing deportation.
New York is already a sanctuary city, but Ali has vowed to strengthen protections for illegal immigrants.
“We are in a new era,” declared Ali, who was previously employed by CAIR’s New York office. She has already set up a confidential hotline in Arabic and Urdu for illegal immigrants to call for legal help. In addition, she is partnering with the Muslim Community Network and Arab American Family Support Center to hold “immigrant rights workshops” to help them “navigate interactions with ICE.”
Other Muslim activists serving in Mamdani’s cabinet include: Waleed Shahid, deputy communications director of economic justice; Mir Bashar, chief administrative officer; Ahmed Tijani, buildings commissioner; Zara Rahim, senior adviser; Nadia Shihata, commissioner of investigations; Sherif Soliman, budget director; former CAIR lawyer Bitta Mostofi, special adviser for strategic coordination and operations; Aliya Latif, executive director of the mayor’s office of faith-based partnerships; and Ali Najmi, who chairs the mayor’s advisory committee on the judiciary and will help pick city judges to ensure an “equitable legal system.”
These officials, in turn, are recruiting other Muslims to fill staff positions, ensuring an Islamic agenda will be prioritized over Mamdani’s four-year term in office. (NYC mayors are limited to two terms.)
“We are developing a cadre of political leadership in New York City,” Sarsour, the Islamic activist widely seen as one of Mamdani’s mentors, said in a recent interview. Before his election, she declared, “Our friends on the inside need people on the outside to hold them accountable. Voting for Zohran is not, ‘We’re going to vote for Zohran and just let him do whatever the hell he wants when he gets to City Hall.’”
Along with Sarsour, Ali and Latif, Najmi previously founded the Muslim Democratic Club of New York, an influential incubator for Muslim political candidates that blamed Israeli “oppression” for Hamas’ Oct. 7 slaughter of Jews.
In 2021, the Muslim political club helped elect Shahana Hanif as the first Muslim woman on the New York City Council, where she caucuses with fellow Muslim council member Yusef Salaam. The pair has vowed to work closely with Mamdani to advance the interests of the Muslim community.
The Muslim club is now endorsing a slate of other Democratic candidates for state and federal offices ahead of the November elections, including 9/11 apologist, former CAIR operative and Palestinian activist Aber Kawas. The daughter of illegal aliens (her father was deported after criminal convictions), she is now the Democratic nominee for the New York State Senate District 12 and could become the legislature’s first Muslim woman. Also personally backed by Mamdani, Kawas has suggested the U.S. deserved to be attacked on 9/11 for “colonizing” Muslim lands.
When Muslim members of Mamdani’s administration joined him in observing Ramadan earlier this year, it signaled the start of an Islamic cultural revolution in the city, home to more than half a million Muslims who feel empowered by the ascension of one of their own. For the first time in New York’s history, more than 1,000 Muslim men took over Times Square, bowing prostrate on the ground in a mass pray-in, on the first night of Ramadan, the Islamic holy month.
While this can be seen as an example of pluralism and religious freedom, critics note that Mamdani broke his Ramadan fast with Mahmoud Khalil, whom he hosted for an Islamic dinner inside Gracie Mansion in March – even though the anti-Israel protester had attempted to justify the Oct. 7 massacre of Jews by Hamas. The mayor’s own wife, a Muslim of Syrian origin, has “liked” a variety of social media posts celebrating Oct. 7.
NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani posted a photo of himself with Siraj Wahhaj, who appeared on a prosecutor's preliminary list of unindicted co-conspirators in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
AP
Mamdani is not shy about rubbing shoulders with radical Islamists. Last year, he posted a photo of himself smiling and embracing Brooklyn Imam Siraj Wahhaj, who was investigated in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing case and appeared on a federal list of unindicted co-conspirators of the Blind Sheikh and Osama bin Laden.
A year before the deadly attack, Wahhaj told his flock: “If only Muslims were clever politically, they could take over the United States and replace its constitutional government with a caliphate.” He also said in a 1992 sermon: “If we go to war, brothers and sisters – and one day we will, believe me – that’s why you’re commanded [to fight in jihad]. When Allah demands us to fight, we’re not stopping and nobody’s stopping us.”
According to a transcript of the Brooklyn sermon obtained by the authors of “Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That’s Conspiring to Islamize America,” Wahhaj added: “I will never tell people, ‘Don’t be violent.’ That’s not the Islamic way.” To that end, he suggested recruiting New York street gangs and brandishing “9 millimeters and Uzis” for jihad. “These people have guts and courage that a lot of Muslims don’t have,” Wahhaj argued. “Some of these people are ready to stand in front of anyone and fight.”
The Islamic cleric has also preached that the Quran says Muslims should never take non-Muslims for friends and that homosexuals should be punished by death. Yet Mamdani recently called Wahhaj “one of the nation’s foremost Muslim leaders and a pillar of the community.”
The mayor’s office did not respond to requests for comment. Wahhaj, meanwhile, denies any connection to terrorism.
Hamtramck, Michigan
Situated in the middle of the Detroit metro area, Hamtramck is another microcosm of Muslims coming to power and gradually imposing their strict religious code on the greater community.
Muslim immigrants from mostly Yemen and Bangladesh have flocked to the two-square-mile city and carved out an increasingly Sharia-compliant enclave. Their numbers have made it a Muslim-majority city, and that’s translated into unprecedented political power. With almost 30,000 residents, Hamtramck is the first city in the U.S. to have an all-Muslim elected city council. Also sharing the Islamic faith are its mayor, city manager, attorney, comptroller, clerk and police chief. Like Paterson, one of the first acts by its Islamic leaders was to rename the city’s main street “Palestine Avenue.”
Like the Chinatowns and Little Italies that dot American cities, Hamtramck now reflects the sensibilities of its new majority. Storefronts display signs in Arabic, from hookah bars to halal butchers. Female shoppers dress head-to-toe in black niqabs covering everything but their eyes, and bearded men wear ankle-length white robes typically seen on the Arabian Peninsula. Arabic is spoken in public spaces. Many local businesses fly Yemeni and other Middle Eastern flags outside their shops and paint murals of the “struggles” in the Palestinian territories. Even the official sign outside the meeting hall of the city council is in Arabic.
And mosques are omnipresent. With more than a dozen so-called “masjids” and Islamic centers, 125-year-old Hamtramck now has more mosques per capita than anywhere else in the United States. Several were converted from church buildings.
Muslim leaders have gone further, changing laws to accommodate their religion. Once they gained majority power, Muslims on the city council overturned rules restricting outdoor noise to let mosques broadcast the Arabic call to prayer from minarets. Five times every day, the sounds of the “adhan” can be heard echoing from loudspeakers throughout the city. In a kind of reverse assimilation, non-Muslim residents in recent years stopped complaining about the incessant calls to prayer, according to the city’s largest mosque, Al-Islah Islamic Center, even though they trigger additional noise: the baying and barking of dogs owned by non-Muslims. What once was viewed as a nuisance has been normalized.
Due to Islam's prohibition on alcohol, hookah lounges are now replacing bars in some cities.
AP
In addition, Muslim officials banned traditional bars near mosques, even though Hamtramck was once known for its pubs and music. Islam forbids alcohol, so only hookah bars are allowed around places of worship. Hookah lounges are where Muslim men gather to smoke flavored tobacco from water-filled pipes that look like large, ornate bongs. Ads and signs for alcohol have dwindled along with the number of taverns.
At Hamtramck schools, Easter break has been replaced with vacation at the end of Ramadan. Lunch menus are 100% halal: “The animals have been blessed by a Muslim” before being slaughtered for school meat, according to a school document certifying the practice. In 2023, the city council voted to permit the slaughtering of goats and sheep on residential property as long as it conforms to the Islamic ritual of slitting the live animal’s throat with a knife and draining the blood before further cutting and processing.
Importing Corruption
Islamic governments, particularly those of Yemen and Bangladesh, are notoriously corrupt, according to global risk indexes (here and here); and this foreign culture of corruption appears to have been imported into Hamtramck, which has been plagued by a series of corruption scandals involving its immigrant Muslim officials.
It’s not uncommon in the American immigrant experience for new cultures to erase the old in heavily migrant communities. Self-dealing and election shenanigans among ethnic groups that come to power in municipal politics often follow as well. Hamtramck is keeping this dubious tradition alive – and then some.
Five of its six Muslim council members have been charged with, or are currently under investigation for, election fraud. These include allegations they conspired to forge the signatures of recently naturalized Muslim immigrants on absentee ballots or buy their votes, according to a state law enforcement document. Last month, a jury convicted councilman Mohammed Hassan, who also serves as Hamtramck’s mayor pro tem, on charges he provided a false statement for an application on an absentee ballot in the 2023 election. Earlier this month, Hassan was sentenced to one year of probation and community service by a county judge who expressed astonishment at the extent of corruption in the city. Despite the conviction, Hassan remains on the city council. Another councilman was charged with several election fraud felonies, but charges were dropped after two witnesses failed to appear to testify against him. Other council members reportedly remain under investigation by a special prosecutor named by the state attorney general, who has been working with the FBI.
The voting fraud scandal bubbled to the surface last year when former city manager Max Barbarino blew the whistle on mail-in ballot malfeasance he witnessed, as well as alleged criminal misconduct involving the city’s Muslim police chief, who was recently forced to resign. After Barbarino initiated a preliminary investigation into the misconduct, the Muslim mayor and council fired Barbarino and replaced him with a fellow Muslim. In turn, Barbarino, who is white and non-Muslim, sued the council, claiming racial discrimination. He complains the “racially biased” Muslim council also pressured him to fire blacks and gays in city hall.
“These past few years have been horrible,” said Barbarino, a former police chief. “Dealing with this corrupt council, always doing what I could to hold the line and protect the city. Frankly, they have put my staff and I through hell.”
In his whistleblower lawsuit, Barbarino said at least one councilman was caught on video stuffing “large batches of absentee ballots” in drop boxes as part of a “ballot-harvesting” scheme in 2023. He also alleges that former Hamtramck Police Chief Jamiel Altaheri leaked sensitive information from the election fraud investigation to council members who were targets of the investigation. He claimed the chief routinely provided “updates” on evidence gathered on the suspects.
In addition, the suit describes a “disturbing pattern of domestic violence from Altaheri.” On two occasions in 2024, Altaheri was said to “hit and punch” the mother of his child. He allegedly ordered responding officers not to write up incident reports, arguing, “You guys here in Michigan don’t handle things the correct way; you guys make everything formal,” suggesting such cases should be handled through mosques following the tenets of Sharia law, which does not proscribe wife-beating as a crime. Altaheri, who did not respond to requests for comment, is also accused in the suit of punching a man “in the head at a hookah lounge in Dearborn [Mich.].”
Altaheri, who is of Yemeni descent, previously served as a New York police officer where he co-founded the NYPD Muslim Officers Society and the Yemeni American Law Enforcement Officers Association. He also headed the NYPD’s Office of Equity and Inclusion, where he led efforts to hire more Muslims on the force.
Barbarino said he got pushback from Yemenis on the council when he suspended Altaheri, pending an investigation by the FBI into his conduct. (Altaheri has resigned but maintains his innocence.) At a May 2025 council meeting, the then-city manager had refused demands to keep the top cop on the job.
Dearborn, Michigan
Just 15 miles from Hamtramck is another city with a dense concentration of Muslims. Almost half the Dearborn police force is now Muslim. Abdullah Hammoud, Dearborn’s Democratic mayor, has called for the annihilation of Israel “from the river to the sea” and said Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack was “inevitable,” adding, “Ending this violence requires ending the occupation.”
Critics worry these Sharia-compliant enclaves are providing a theocratic blueprint for surrounding towns, and they warn the entire Detroit area, like that around Paterson, could come under Islamic control given current demographic trends. In 2020, the share of the Muslim population more than tripled in the Detroit metro area, rising to 5% of the total population from 1.4% in 2000, according to the latest data from the Association of Religion Data Archives.
Men take part in the Friday midday prayer at the Islamic Institute of America mosque in Dearborn Heights, Michigan.
AP
Dearborn’s influence already has spread to its western neighbor, Dearborn Heights, where its police department introduced an Arabic version of its uniform patch, in the shape of a badge, worn by officers. In Southfield, Mich., another inner-ring suburb of Detroit, a Sharia-compliant bank has sprung up that caters exclusively to Muslims. It’s called the University Islamic Financial Corp., and it provides alternative loans for homes, autos, and businesses that conform to Islamic principles that prohibit the charging or earning of interest. UIF Corp. offers no other products, yet it is now the top Islamic finance institution in the country thanks in large part to demand from the surfeit of Muslims in the Detroit area. UIF has sold more than $1 billion in Islamic mortgages in Michigan and more than 15 other states. As RCI has previously reported, following pressure campaigns by Muslim lobby groups, American financial giants, including Morgan Stanley, AIG, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Merrill Lynch, Citicorp, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan Chase, now offer Sharia-compliant products that strictly adhere to such Islamic criteria.
Cultural changes are one thing. But the influx of Muslim immigrants has triggered a surge in jihadist terrorism in the Dearborn area, including recent plots tied to ISIS, according to Homeland Security data. The terror suspects frequented mosques, some of which preach jihad. According to the 2020 U.S. Mosque Survey, the number of mosques in the state almost doubled from the previous decade to 127. Last year, Ammar Abdulmajid-Mohamed Said allegedly used a drone to surveil an Army base in Warren, Mich., where he planned to use armor-piercing ammo and Molotov cocktails to kill soldiers on behalf of ISIS before his arrest, according to an FBI affidavit. The 19-year-old Muslim said he was “fed up with this country [and] I want to go for jihad.”
Surveys show a sizable share of Michiganders are not happy with the spread of Islam in their state and have soured on Muslim immigration.
Almost two in five (37%) agree there are now “too many” Muslim immigrants in the state, according to a poll taken in May of 1,456 state voters by TechnoMetrica. By a six-to-one margin, more voters say Michigan accepts “too many” Islamic immigrants versus those who say the state accepts “too few.” Even Democrats who voted for Kamala Harris in 2024 tend to agree, with nearly double saying there are “too many” Muslim immigrants in the state compared with those who say there are “too few.”
Islamic leaders say these attitudes reflect pervasive anti-Muslim prejudice that colors their efforts to participate in American life. Even so, Muslim political candidates in the state are gaining traction thanks to the growing number of Muslim voters. And some are highly controversial.
Abdul El-Sayed, for one, is a strong Democratic Senate candidate in Michigan despite calling Israel “just as evil” as the terrorist organization Hamas, and suggesting Washington needs to do a better job of understanding the motivations of terrorists, including a Muslim Arab-American who earlier this year attacked a Michigan synagogue.
“Hurt people hurt people,” El-Sayed said. He claims Israel is committing “genocide” against Gazans, citing debunked death toll figures put out by the Hamas-controlled government there. He bashes the “sins” of America and its “sordid history.” In March, he privately told staffers the previous day’s slaying of Iranian ayatollah Ali Khamenei created problems for campaign messaging, because, “There are a lot of people in Dearborn who are sad today.”
Born in Detroit to Egyptian immigrant parents, El-Sayed also has advocated for abolishing ICE, turning Michigan into a sanctuary state, and defunding the police. The Democratic Senate candidate is so orthodox in his Islamic beliefs that he even took out a mortgage from University Islamic Financial to be “Sharia-compliant.” And according to his financial disclosure statement, he and his wife have invested as much as $425,000 in Amana Mutual Funds, an investment firm established by DOJ-identified Muslim Brotherhood front groups whose Sharia-compliant portfolio screens out U.S. defense contractors and companies doing business with Israel. Equally devout, his wife covers her head and neck in a full hijab. At the University of Michigan, where he became a Rhodes Scholar, El-Sayed was vice president of the Muslim Students’ Association, which was founded by the radical Egypt-based Muslim Brotherhood.
In 2011, El-Sayed penned columns supporting a Muslim Brotherhood revolution in Egypt, and pledging solidarity with “my 80 million Egyptian brothers.” The next year, he signed a petition exalting the “revolutionary decisions” of Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Morsi, who brought Egypt under Sharia rule as president from 2012 to 2013.
Former FBI agent Lara Burns testified recently that MSA was founded by Muslim Brotherhood leaders as a “covert front organization stealthily designed to seed an Islamist narrative and radicalize others [on American campuses].” MSA members recite the following pledge: “Allah is my Lord, Islam is my life, the Quran is my guide, the Sunna is my practice, Jihad is my spirit, Paradise is my goal, I will die to establish Islam.”
The father-in-law of Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Michigan, is connected to two Muslim Brotherhood front groups.
AP
El-Sayed’s campaign is funded primarily through a super PAC – Fighting for Michigan PAC – which has ties to his family. Its top donor is his Michigan Muslim father-in-law, Jukaku Tayeb, who FEC records show gave $300,000 to the PAC in three installments this year, along with a $14,000 direct contribution to El-Sayed from him and his wife. Tayeb is a longtime board member of two Muslim Brotherhood front groups identified by federal prosecutors as unindicted co-conspirators in a scheme to funnel more than $12 million to Hamas – the Islamic Society of North America and CAIR, according to ISNA records. El-Sayed is a regular speaker at CAIR events, according to his financial disclosure report. He and his father-in-law did not respond to requests for comment.
Vying to become the United States Senate’s first Muslim, El-Sayed won the Aug. 4 Democratic primary and will square off against GOP candidate Rep. Mike Rogers in November for what is expected to be a must-win seat in the battle for control of the Senate.
Testifying at a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing the day after the Michigan primary, Center for Security Policy analyst Kyle Shideler warned the Democratic nominee’s win is also a victory for the Egypt-based Brotherhood, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, which celebrated his election on its official website.
“It shows the success of the Muslim Brotherhood network over multiple decades,” he testified. “It achieved what they said they were going to achieve, which was to normalize support for Hamas and normalize support for terrorism.”
Minnesota
Thanks to the profusion of Muslim immigrants primarily from Somalia, Islam is flourishing in Minneapolis, and the faithful are mainstreaming Sharia practices across the city. Like parts of Detroit, the Minneapolis area has struggled to integrate waves of Muslim migrants. Numbering roughly 80,000, Somalis now make up close to 20% of Minneapolis’ total population. The state’s largest city is now known as “Little Mogadishu,” after the capital of Somalia.
In Minneapolis’ Cedar-Riverside ward, where bazaars displaying Arabic signage and halal eateries have replaced once-popular bars and clubs, Islamic men have organized posses to patrol the streets and enforce Sharia law, including prohibiting alcohol and the mixing of sexes, and ordering women to wear head-to-toe religious garb, according to local reports. At the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, the mostly Muslim taxi and Uber drivers are known to turn away non-Muslim passengers carrying alcohol or escorted by dogs (which are prohibited as pets in Islam). Muslim cashiers at Target and other stores selling groceries have even balked at scanning bacon, pepperoni pizza, and other pork-based products.
In the previous decade, Minneapolis became a terrorist hotspot, as dozens of young Somali men joined al-Qaeda and ISIS, according to the FBI. Recently, another scandal has unfolded from mass Muslim immigration: massive welfare fraud, which has been linked by federal investigators to the funding of terrorist groups in Somalia. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been stolen from state and federal welfare and childcare programs – and from taxpayers – almost exclusively by Somali immigrants running sham charities and no-show social service agencies, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. DOJ, which is leading the ever-widening investigation, estimates that as much as $9 billion may have been paid out on fraudulent claims. More than 85 Muslim defendants have been charged so far in the Somali fraud ring. Federal authorities believe much of the government money has ended up in the hands of al-Shabaab, al-Qaeda’s offshoot in Somalia.
Evidence suggests that some high-ranking Muslim politicians in Minnesota helped facilitate the Somali crime racket.
Rewind to 2020. That’s when the Minnesota Department of Education suspected one of the shady Somali nonprofits – Feeding Our Future – was defrauding the state by filing false claims for reimbursement for meals allegedly served at child-care centers. Initially, the department suspended processing of the organization’s site applications. But then Keith Ellison, the state’s first Muslim attorney general, stepped in. Instead of prosecuting the fraudsters, he agreed to continue processing the applications.
Two years later, FBI investigators set up surveillance cameras outside a dozen Feeding Our Future sites that were supposedly feeding thousands of children each day. They observed that the kids were nowhere to be found. Agents then raided the sites, leading to the arrests of some of the same Somali scammers Ellison had protected.
Ellison was brought before Congress to answer questions about his failure to back state regulators against Feeding Our Future and other Somali fraud fronts. He denied any wrongdoing, including allegations he obstructed fraud investigations in exchange for campaign contributions.
But a December 2021 audio recording surfaced of him meeting with some members of the Somali community who were later convicted of fraud, including one of the Feeding Our Future ringleaders: Ikram Mohamed. The would-be fraudsters could be heard demanding that Ellison, whom they called “Brother,” fend off regulators and investigators and free up frozen payments on their claims, while pledging “votes” and dollars” to keep him in office so he would feel “comfortable and safe” enough to protect their interests.
Minnesota's first Muslim attorney general, Keith Ellison, allegedly protected co-religionists who were defrauding the government.
AP
“The only way we can protect what we have is by inserting ourselves into the political arena, putting our votes where it [sic] needs to be, but most importantly, putting our dollars in the right place, and supporting candidates that will fight to protect our interests,” Abshir Omar, a Feeding Our Future consultant and site operator, said on the tape.
“That’s right,” Ellison responded, according to a transcript.
“But if you are secure in your donor base, and if you are secure in your power base, you can act the way you want to act,” Omar added.
“Money is freedom,” Ellison said, chuckling.
“We are jumping into the fight with some serious money, serious organizing, and we need you in this fight with us,” Omar asserted. “We are gonna commit to backing you.”
“I’m here to help,” the attorney general replied. “Let’s fight these people … put a stop to it.”
Ellison vowed to convey their complaints to the Minnesota Department of Education. “I’ll call them in my office and demand some explanations,” he said.
A House Oversight Committee investigation concluded that, “Attorney General Ellison knew about fraud in the Child Care Assistance Program as early as spring 2019.”
Nine days after the recorded 2021 meeting, state records show Ellison received $10,000 in donations from some of the convicted fraudsters for his 2022 reelection, though he later quietly returned the gifts – four years later, after their roles in the fraud scheme were revealed, according to Minnesota Campaign Finance Board filings. In early 2022, Ellison got an additional $2,500 from another conspirator in the fraud, records show, but that gift also was returned a year later.
Whistleblowers from the state agencies reported to congressional investigators that “they were told not to say anything about the fraud because they would be called ‘Islamophobic,’” according to the House report.
Critics say Ellison is a cautionary tale about the potential problems with electing Muslims who could be in a position to prosecute fellow Muslims for alleged crimes. The massive fraud case, which could have been stopped earlier, has resulted in a black eye for the Land of 10,000 Lakes. “A once high-trust society devolved into a culture that tolerates the kinds of systemic, large-scale frauds that Somali migrants now perpetrate upon the citizens of Minnesota,” said Steve Cortes, president of the League of American Workers.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz counters that the fraudsters represent a small minority of the state’s Muslim population. The 2024 Democratic Party vice presidential nominee has accused critics of “demonizing” a community that has been saddled with what he says is an unfairly negative image.
However, prosecutors say the Somalis arrested are just a fraction of the total number from the community who participated in the conspiracy to shake down welfare agencies. They say participants who could be prosecuted, if authorities had the staff and resources to bring them all to trial, number as many as 320 potential defendants – and they even include leaders of local mosques. One of the most prominent members of the community who participated in the meals programs is the wife of a Minneapolis city councilman who has talked about creating a “Muslim caucus” on the council.
Prosecutors say they have focused on going after the biggest players in the case, some of whom billed millions of dollars to the government falsely claiming they prepared and served several thousand meals a day to Somali children from their small apartment units. Prosecutors say the one scheme may have bilked as much as half a billion dollars from taxpayers.
It’s not the first time Ellison, who did not respond to requests for comment, has been accused of protecting Muslim constituents from law enforcement.
A college-age convert to Islam, Ellison began his political career in 2007 as the first Muslim elected to Congress. He was sworn in on the Quran. Two years later, the young Muslim congressman would defend an extremist local mosque in his home district where more than 20 Somali men had been radicalized for jihad, according to published local reports at the time.
Also in 2009, he held a meeting in Minneapolis urging Somalis to organize themselves into a powerful political and economic coalition to help fend off FBI investigations, the reports said. At the time, the local Somali community was the target of federal investigations into terrorist money laundering. Agents suspected Somali refugees were funneling millions of dollars in fraudulent food stamps through Somali grocery stores into overseas bank accounts used by al-Qaeda.
Ellison joined forces with CAIR to defend the Somali store owners against the allegations, even meeting with the head of the civil-rights unit of the USDA to complain about the agency’s food stamp investigations, according to a confidential CAIR memo obtained by the authors of “Muslim Mafia.”
He also worked with CAIR to help recruit Muslim candidates for office, as well as Muslim staffers to work on Homeland Security and other sensitive congressional committees. Ellison set a goal of electing 15 more Muslim lawmakers and even envisioned forming a Congressional Muslim Caucus. “I want to see many more Muslims serving in Congress,” including as U.S. senators, he said.
Like Ellison, top CAIR officials came of age attending college in Minneapolis around the same time period. CAIR Communications Director Ibrahim Hooper, who roots for “the government of the United States to be Islamic sometime in the future,” and CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad, who said he was “happy to see” Hamas massacre Jews on Oct. 7, 2023, got their start as Islamic activists in Minneapolis, where they protested Israel.
Awad, CAIR’s co-founder and national director, is so connected to Hamas that the FBI several years ago decided to cut off community outreach to him and CAIR pending further investigation. While running CAIR’s campaign to elect hundreds of Muslims to office, Awad has personally backed such candidates, providing more than $50,000 of his own money to them in state and federal races, according to Federal Election Commission and other records reviewed by RCI. His most recent recorded donation was a $500 gift in April to Hamawy, the al-Qaeda-tied Democrat running for Congress in New Jersey.
Another powerful Minneapolis Muslim leader is Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minneapolis.
Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar sponsored legislation that allegedly made it easier for Somali-Americans to commit fraud.
AP
A Somali immigrant, she introduced the initial legislation – the Meals Program Act of 2021 – that loosened regulations on federal food programs and enticed her Somali constituents to create a raft of new nonprofits and meals sites to exploit the bonanza of new federal dollars coming to states.
“She sponsored the act that facilitated the Feeding Our Future fraud, and her congressional district served as its epicenter,” said Scott Johnson, a former Minneapolis attorney and Claremont Institute fellow.
Johnson notes that Omar was close friends with Salim Said, who last year was convicted in the Feeding Our Future case on 21 felony counts and attended the recorded December 2021 meeting with Ellison. She filmed a promotional video for the fraudulent meals program run by Said at his now-infamous Safari Restaurant in Minneapolis, which received more than $16 million in fraudulent Federal Child Nutrition Program funds and was one of the biggest food fraud sites conspiring with Feeding Our Future.
It was Omar’s own MEALS Act that allowed for-profit restaurants like Safari to participate for the first time in the food program normally meant for schools. Prosecutors say Said used the millions he pocketed from taxpayers to buy a mansion and several luxury cars. “Yet despite these facts, Omar claims to have known nothing about the fraud,” a skeptical Johnson said.
Rep. Omar’s sister has been linked to some of the main culprits in the fraud ring. State incorporation records show Sahra Noor used the same residential address for her $20 million consulting firm Grit Partners – 17626 Hyacinth Way in Lakeville, Minn. – as another firm, Diversity Childcare Center LLC, used to register its own office. In 2022, Diversity Childcare’s co-owner pleaded guilty to defrauding the child meals program out of $7 million. Noor, whose husband previously worked for the Minnesota Department of Human Services, has not been charged with a crime.
Omar has strenuously denied knowing about the scheme run out of her district. As the number of fraud cases has swelled, Omar has strongly condemned the misuse of funds intended for children’s meals, though Republican investigators on the Hill are seeking to question her under oath about her possible role in the scandal.
Omar’s Somalia homeland consistently ranks as one of the most corrupt countries in the world. Critics warn that importing the values from nations like Somalia is creating an underworld of criminality in host cities across the U.S., in addition to the broader problem of Islamic customs and laws clashing with modern Western social norms.
“We have seen beautiful nations crying out for help. Germany, France, Sweden and other Western countries have opened their doors to the Islamic threat,” warned Krista Shields, who worked as an American Airlines flight attendant on 9/11 and now lobbies Texas legislators to ban Sharia in her state. “America must learn from their mistakes. If we do not fight back now, Sharia will eventually dominate this culture, and the America that millions fought and died for will cease to exist.”
This article is the seventh in RCI’s series, Islam’s Rise Across America. The series so far:
