Reuters reports:

President Joe Biden on Sunday denounced anti-Arab rhetoric in response to a Wall Street Journal opinion piece targeting Dearborn, Michigan, that the mayor called “bigoted” and “Islamophobic.”

The WSJ published the piece on Friday headlined as “Welcome to Dearborn, America’s Jihad Capital,”, suggesting the city’s residents, including religious leaders and politicians, supported Palestinian Islamist group Hamas and extremism. The column drew outrage from Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud, as well as several U.S. lawmakers and rights advocates from the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee.

The mayor said on Saturday he had ramped up the city’s police presence at houses of worship and other public places after “an alarming increase in bigoted and Islamophobic rhetoric online targeting the city of Dearborn.” As of Sunday afternoon, there were no reports of any unrest in Dearborn, a suburb of about 110,000 people that borders Detroit.

Biden, while not referring directly to the WSJ or the article’s author, said on social media platform X, it was wrong to blame “a group of people based on the words of a small few.”

“That’s exactly what can lead to Islamophobia and anti-Arab hate, and it shouldn’t happen to the residents of Dearborn – or any American town,” Biden said on the platform formerly called Twitter. [Continue reading…]