As the voting in Sterling Heights reaches its final hours, a group of anti-Muslim bigots has again entered the fray, launching a series of wild political attacks that they hope will impact the election of the mayor and city council.
The so-called website known as macombpolitics.com has resurfaced, spewing 11th-hour rhetoric such as this:
Sterling Heights is rotting from the top down with radical secular progressives firmly in control of the city. They protest and assault their own peaceful citizens then yield like cowards to the local Muslim mafia.
Mayor Michael Taylor serves as the prime target of this shadowy group, which sarcastically claims that Taylor offers fawning support of the “militant LGBTQ-ABCDEF agenda.”
Political observers assume that the Macomb Politics group is backed by the radical slate of candidates that emerged for mayor and council in 2015: Paul Smith, Jazmine Early, Verna Babula, Jackie Ryan, Sanaa Elias and Joe Judnick.
Despite their conspiracy theories, the group has no explanation for the reason that not one person in Sterling Heights, the fourth-largest city in Michigan, filed to run against Taylor. Instead, Judnick, who has never come close to winning an election, eventually stepped up as a write-in candidate.
Judnick is a close ally of Smith, a former city councilman who has publicly labeled Latino immigrants as “wetbacks” and gays as “fags.” He has written online that he desires to see Muslims incinerated in fiery deaths. When he ran for mayor four years ago, he was crushed in a landslide loss to Taylor.
Smith and his religious supremacist supporters shook the city to its core in 2015 as anti-Muslim demonstrations occurred near a proposed mosque site in Sterling Heights and xenophobic declarations were spouted at raucous city council meetings.
Since then, the city’s growing Muslim immigrant population has faced hatred on the Macomb Politics site every two years at election time, with fear-mongering propaganda such as “Terrorists in YOUR neighborhood,” and “Hotel Damascus in Sterling Heights.”
In recent days, the headlines on the website included this:
- Sterling Heights Ethnic Committee member a crazed Jew hater
- Diversity is our weakness, assimilation is our strength
- ‘Welcoming Michigan’ – an Obama organization sabotaging America
Welcoming Michigan, with Sterling Heights and Macomb County among its members, is a nonprofit group that assists new immigrant arrivals as they acclimate to their new home. Without a shred of evidence, Macomb Politics asserts that the group relies upon cash from billionaire George Soros and that their actions are “tantamount to subversion and sedition on a massive scale.”
The administrator of the Sterling Heights Local Politics page on Facebook, Michael Lombardini (who uses the pen name Malcom McEasy online), said some political activists who once brushed aside the bigotry are now fearful of where this Islamophobia may be heading.
“Don’t get me wrong, even crazy people have their free speech rights,” he wrote on Monday, “but you eventually reach a point where snickering gets replaced with a genuine concern for the safety of the city; and I think we’re about there now.”
Photo: Facebook/In an altered photo, Mayor Michael Taylor depicted on macombpolitics.com alongside Muslims.
Why bother to give these nutjobs any press whatsoever, negative or otherwise? Each election proves they only have a tiny following and the majority of the residents in SH know better. I can only hope you are not just trying to get clicks by reporting on extremist views? What’s next? Reporting on the flat-earthers in the county?