Mayor to Angle: Come to Dearborn
Martina Stewart
AC360° Digital Producer
Editor’s Note: Watch Anderson's interview with Dearborn Mayor John O'Reilly.
(CNN) – Republican Senate candidate Sharron Angle will soon receive a personal invitation to visit Dearborn, Michigan – and a bit of the history lesson in the process.
Last week at a rally of Tea Party movement supporters, Angle said Dearborn and Frankford, Texas are subject to Sharia, or Islamic law.
“We're talking about a militant terrorist situation, which I believe isn't a widespread thing, but it is enough that we need to address, and we have been addressing it,” Angle said according to audio of the rally obtained by the Washington Post. “My thoughts are these. First of all, Dearborn, Michigan, and Frankford, Texas, are on American soil, and under constitutional law. Not Sharia law. And I don't know how that happened in the United States.”
In a letter sent to Angle Monday, Dearborn Mayor John O’Reilly, Jr. fired back at the Nevada Republican.
Read O'Reilly's letter to Angle
“I am deeply distressed that you have been misled about our community and the way that we conduct our affairs,” O’Reilly writes.
After explaining that the Detroit metro area, which includes Dearborn, has one of the country’s highest concentrations of Arab-Americans in the country, O’Reilly also informs Angle that “Arab-Americans practice religions other than Islam and the Chaldean and Lebanese cultures in our area represent a substantial number of Christians.”
“I am afraid that many share the perception that Muslims have only recently immigrated to this area and are imposing their culture on our region,” O’Reilly also writes, directly addressing Angle’s claims about the role of Muslims in his community.
The Michigan mayor adds, “Muslims have been practicing their faith in our community for almost 90 years without incident or conflict. To suggest that they have taken over ignores the fact that Dearborn hosts 7 mosques and 60 Christian churches.”
O’Reilly also asks Angle to visit his city.
“I invite you to visit Dearborn and see for yourself what is really going on in our community,” he tells her.
And if Angle doesn’t have time to come to Dearborn? O’Reilly also has a Plan B in mind: “I would welcome a phone call so I could tell you more about our community, which is really a world class hometown.”
–CNN’s Jeff Simon contributed to this report.
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Filed under: 360° Radar • Islam • Martina Stewart |
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Sharron Angle is playing desperate politics now, she knows her time is up in 19 days. Democrats will retain that seat, Go Harry!
Angle has no clue of what she talks about, on anything.
Doing away with the department of education, social security, health care, etc.
And now this.
I can't possibly see how she'll win here in Nevada with all the sewage that spews from her mouth.
ms. angle and the rest of the tea party people are riding on the same paranoia set by the bush administration after the 9-11. and they believe that those who knows not much would believe them. they are relying on the uninformed to put them in office. hope they don't. what they are doing is causing hate like what nazis did in the 1930's to the jews.
I am a resident of Nevada and let me tell you that I am scared to death that this crazy woman might actually become our U.S. Senator.
We have the highest unemployment and foreclosure rates in the country. But, I don't blame Harry Reid for that. Those problems began long ago and go much deeper than simply blaming any one individual. Angle is a wacko who has taken her Christian faith and turned it into a hateful philosphy of intolerance.