Pathetic...

Spectre of Sunni, Shia clash in US
Daily Times, January 11, 2007

CHICAGO: The vandalisation of two Shia mosques and five Shia-owned businesses in Detroit, Michigan has raised the spectre of sectarian clashes in the United States.

While police have not yet determined who threw rocks and bricks through the windows of the mosques and businesses, many in the community believe it was an attack by Sunnis, said Dawud Walid, executive director of the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

The vandalism came a week after the execution in Iraq of Saddam Hussein. Many Sunnis were offended by the way in which local Shias celebrated his death, Walid said.

The owner of one of the restaurants targeted received a threatening phone call on Saturday from a man speaking in Arabic and English who noted that he was a Shia and said, “you’re going to get yours ... what goes around comes around,” Walid said.

The windows were smashed sometime that night.

“We’ve never had anything like this before,” Walid said in a telephone interview Tuesday. “Dearborn is one of the largest communities of Muslims in America and we don’t even have fist-fights,” he said. “Our kids go to school together, they’re part of the same organisations.”

Sunni and Shia leaders were planning to meet on Wednesday to discuss the rising tensions in a community that had previously been free of sectarian violence.

“We need to control this at the early stages because it may get worse,” Mouhib Ayas, president of the Sunni coalition Islamic Shura Council of Michigan. “We need to reach out to the Shia and tell them Sunnis do not approve, that we condone it and we’re going to take the message strongly to our community and are going to ask all the imams this Friday to condone it from the pulpit.” afp