Michigan imam confronts ‘Death to America’ protester

Absolutely, 100%. I heard about it. By the way, it was just like a a few people who who initiated that that slogan and I talk against it publicly. I talk against it in Friday prayer. As a matter of fact, I saw one of the individuals that I had seen, I was not there. I was not in the in the rally, but one of the individuals who were saying it loudly. So I I talked with him and I expressed my disappointment because we are not for death, we are for life, we are for love, we are for peace and justice. Yes, we have absolute disappointment of the administration’s foreign policy and unfortunately that’s part of not just this president always, you know, US foreign policy, always, you know, you can question, there’s so many things been going on in the past, whether you have a Trump or Biden or Obama or Clinton or Bush, always something going on when it comes to foreign policy. But now to to correct that there should be a way of engagement and involvement. And as a Muslim community, we believe in voting and we believe in outreach as I do it with interfaith, with the media, with, you know, politicians, with every community. I go to churches, to synagogue, everywhere. So I’m absolutely against of saying death to America. Yeah, I know in certain countries they may say this thing. But I personally again, said even when they say this in any country, doesn’t matter where you say it and doesn’t matter, you know, because it doesn’t help. It doesn’t help. I mean, we have as Muslim community, we have so many friends and so many partners when it comes to like uncommitted votes. For example, this 100,000 They were not all Muslims, they were not all Arabs. Half of them were probably majority of them were not, were even non-Muslims. But they are with us when it comes to certain issues like truth and justice and foreign policy, the Palestinian issues, issues in Lebanon OR Syria, Yemen, Iran, everywhere there are people who show sympathy and solidarity with Muslim community. Now to come and to say death to America. I mean, first of all, we, we are dividing people who are part of this partnership. They, they don’t agree with this. That is very harmful to the cause of our community and to our cause. Because when you say this, America means us, people of America. That means that if we have 7 million Muslims, we are America too. So this is like a kind of self suicide. And we, we disagree with that. But then with those people who say this, we need to talk with them as well to, to, to listen to them, to have dialogue because they might be sincere people, but they, they need to have a bigger vision of, of what is going on. And we need to hear their voice and their frustration, their pain, their disappointment and their hopelessness and helplessness. And, and I think that we need to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem and contribute to a big solution. So we did a good job when that happened. I, I talked about it, other imams, they talked about that. We we talked to the few of those that we knew that they were part of that and we made sure that our message is very clear to them.