De Facto Sharia Costs Dearborn Michigan $100K

That's the ruling from a judge in Detroit on a case that determined that the decision by police in neighboring Dearborn to arrest a Christian pastor who wanted to hand out Christian tracts at the city’s Arab fest in 2009 was illegal.

After Judge R. Steven Whalen ruled that the City of Dearborn violated the First Amendment rights of Sudanese Christian Pastor George Saieg, his attorneys requested that Dearborn pay the legals costs incurred in their defending Pastor Saieg, and Judge Whalen awarded $103,401.96 in fees and costs to be awarded to attorney Robert J. Muise.

Since Muise was working on behalf of the Thomas More Law Center at the time, the fees will go to them.

Muise now works with heavyweight attorney David Yerushalmi in the American Freedom Law Center, a new law firm that fights for faith and freedoms through litigation, public policy initiatives and other activities.

“The award of attorney fees in this case,” he said, “is critical in the lawfare against civilization jihad and dhimmitization, or subjugation, of an entire municipality in Michigan. Dearborn has a long record of this kind of illegal, heavy-handed treatment of Christians as an attempt to placate Dearborn’s Shariah-faithful [Muslims]. The court’s ruling today demonstrates that this kind of behavior will come at great cost.”

The judge said in the order, “In this case, the plaintiff received the full relief he sought – an invalidation of the leafleting restriction and a permanent injunction barring its enforcement. … Because this result ‘cannot fairly be labeled as anything short of excellent, [plaintiff] is entitled to a fully compensatory fee.’”

The Saieg case was just one of several that have developed in recent years because of the city of Dearborn’s special protections for Islam at the festival, at the cost of those who would speak of, or hand out information about, other religions.

Muise, in fact, recently won acquittals on charges of “disturbing the peace” brought by Dearborn against a group of Christians after they were arrested by Dearborn police in 2010 for a similar kind of speech activity.

The Detroit News had reported that officials for a pro-Islamic advocacy organization accused the Christians of not playing by the rules of the Arab fest. The report said members of the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations accused the Christians of passing out missionary literature at the festival in violation of rules that required them either to pass out the materials from a “paid booth” or “outside of the festival area.”

Whalen said Saieg and his Arabic Christian Perspective organization sued Dearborn and its police chief, Ron Hadda, because after distributing Christian information at the event for several years, he was told police would arrest him if he gave information to anyone at the Arab fest.

Heh!

'Dearbornistan', as it's known locally has been notorious for this kind of discriminatory behavior for some time,aided and abetted by Chief Hadda and Dearborn's dhimmi Mayor Jack O'Reilly.

Of course, in a egregious civil rights violation like this, the Pastor would normally be represented by civil rights attorneys from our Department of Justice if we had a DOJ that was actually concerned about civil rights rather than appeasing Islam.

But we don't.