UPDATE: Dearborn Man Says He Was Attacked for Speaking Arabic

More than 40 percent of Dearborn residents are Arab Americans, and the majority of them are Muslim. As global anxiety over Islamic terrorism increases, some Dearborn residents say they don’t feel safe in their hometown. (Photo by The B’s/Flickr)

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This story has been updated:

The FBI said Friday that an alleged attack on an Arab American man who was speaking Arabic to his children in a Dearborn grocery store earlier this month was not a hate crime.

“Although ‘abusive language’ may have been exchanged as the altercation progressed, we have no credible statements or evidence, including the limited video available, to substantiate the claim that the altercation occurred due to the religion, race or ethnicity of any of the combatants,” Dearborn police said in a statement.

The Dearborn Police Department is continuing its investigation, but said witness statements offer conflicting accounts of the alleged altercation. Some of the witnesses have been active on social media, and “have given reports which contradict the version of events as described by all combatants,” authorities said.

“This type of situation could have been totally avoided had cooler heads prevailed,” Dearborn Police Chief Ronald Haddad said. “This was an isolated incident that is uncommon at the store in question.”.

Our earlier report:

Federal authorities are weighing whether to file hate charges against two Warren men who allegedly assaulted a man who was speaking Arabic at a grocery store in Dearborn, which has the highest concentration of Arab Americans in the United States.

“That seemed to have been the trigger,” Mayor John O’Reilly Jr. said of the Feb. 12 attack on the Arab American man at the Kroger store in Dearborn on Feb. 12, the Detroit Free Press reports.

The man, who wasn’t named, was speaking Arabic with his children “and they took umbrage at that,” O’Reilly said.

More than 40 percent of Dearborn residents are Arab American, and the majority of them are Muslims. The alleged assault raised concerns among Arab Americans about their safety during a time of increased global anxiety over Islamic terrorism, and, closer to home, the shooting deaths of three Arab-American Muslim students in North Carolina on Feb. 10.

“I hear ‘ISIS,’ I hear ‘terrorist,’ I hear ‘go back to your country’ and ‘raghead,’ “ Kathy Bazzi, 60, of Dearborn told the Free Press last week.

A lifelong Dearborn resident who converted to Islam and wears a hijab, the traditional Islamic headscarf worn by many Muslim women, Bazzi witnessed the encounter between the man and two white men.

The alleged attack occurred when one of the men taunted the Arab American man’s daughter for wearing a hijab, and made disparaging remarks about Muslims and ISIS, the acronym for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.

Then, “all of a sudden, the man is punching this Arabic man, fists started flying,” Bazzi said. She said the two white men threw the first punches, but appeared to take the brunt of the attack.

None of the three was seriously injured, O’Reilly said.

Mayor: ”Impossible Not to Have an Emotional Reaction”

O’Reilly said there is no evidence that the men who allegedly attacked the man are part of a larger group targeting local Muslims.

“This was a spur of the moment event,” O’Reilly said. “The alleged perpetrators are not part of any organization. There’s no evidence that they came to Dearborn with any intent.”

Local tensions are symptomatic of growing fear nationally about the threat posed by ISIS. A Gallup poll published last week found that 84 percent of Americans view terrorism as the gravest threat to U.S. security.

“It’s impossible not to have an emotional reaction to...ISIS,” O’Reilly said. “It’s concerning to everybody – including everyone in our community – this total disregard for life and for the rights of people, we’re seeing on TV. It’s an emotional time.”

Bazzi said the tension locally is “getting worse every day.”

“I don’t like to travel outside my comfort zone. When I leave my house, I’m starting to look over my shoulder when I go places,” she said. “It’s a terrible feeling. I just don’t feel secure, even in my own city. I grew up in Dearborn and lived here my whole life.”

FBI: Hate Crimes Against Muslims Underreported

The FBI said 160 American Muslims were victimized in hate crimes each year between 2011 and 2013, but qualified the number as significantly underreported, The Washington Post said.

A Pew Research Center poll in 2011 found that 6 percent of American Muslims said they had been threatened or attacked. There were about 2.6 million American Muslims at the time, and the poll results suggest that 156,000 of them may have been victims of hate crimes.

The Department of Justice said in 2013 that two of every three hate crimes are not reported, especially among American Muslims, who have been targeted in local and federal police investigations simply because of their religion in the 14 years since the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

That excessive scrutiny has eroded the trust necessary for victims to report hate crimes, The Post said.

The Charlie Hedbo attack in Paris has caused a spike in anti-Muslim hate rhetoric, Ibrahim Hooper, communications director at the Council on American-Islamic Relations, told Mashable.

Since the attacks on the satirical magazine last month, Hooper said he has fielded and turned over to the FBI “dozens and dozens of hate emails and calls and even threats.”

“We see this being replicated all over the country” as what has been termed “Islamophobia” takes root, he said.

Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center, a group that monitors hate crimes in the United States, told Mashable the actual number of hate crimes may be as much as 40 percent higher than the number reported to the FBI.

“Anecdotally, I don’t have the slightest doubt that anti-Muslim crime and hate speech is very much on the rise,” Potok said. “That is a function of ‘radical Islam’ being on the news recently.”

In addition to the Chapel Hill murders, other high profile attacks against American Muslims include one in Kansas City in December when a Somali Christian ran over and killed a 15-year-old Muslim boy; anti-Muslim graffiti sprayed on a school in Washington, DC; and a plot to blow up an Islamic center in Austin, TX.

Hooper thinks hate crimes against American Muslims will continue to increase in 2015. “Sometimes you’ll see more hate incidents, sometimes you’ll see more things like workplace discrimination,” he said. “It depends on the year.”

ISIS Recruiting in U.S. and Globally

Osama Siblani, publisher of The Arab American News in Dearborn, told WJBK-TV he’s seen an uptick in threats against American Muslims as ISIS steps up recruitment efforts in the United States and globally.

“We have people in this country ready to go and fight with ISIS. And we have people in this country who are crazy and want to kill Muslims,” he said. “They are putting it on Facebook and Twitter,” Siblani said.”Like ‘let’s burn Dearborn down because it has Muslims and Arabs, let’s start by burning Dearborn down to the ground.’ “

Earlier this week, the FBI detained Iraqi Al-Hamzah Mohammad Jawad, 29, of East Lansing as he tried to fly out of the Detroit Metropolitan Airport in Romulus to join ISIS in Iraq.

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