We met Rashid, a retired surgeon from Youngstown (OH), through Ali, our oldest friend from the '60s who after earning his master's degree in geology switched careers and managed medical school bookstores in Syracuse, New York and Baltimore before retiring to Youngstown a little over 20 years ago. Both Rashid Abdu and Ali Sakkaf were born in Yemen, and every year Raquel and I drive out to Youngstown to visit Ali on his birthday – this summer will be his 98th but that's another story. Our initial friendship was based on our shared enthusiasm for gardens and gardening, and every year visiting Youngstown's Mill Creek Park (the nation's largest) and Fellows Riverside Gardens are always part of the plan.

Usually Ali's birthday picnic is held at Rashid's place in Canfield, except if he's away at a meeting in Dearborn, Michigan. As far as I know Rashid has no family in the Dearborn area, but he does have a connection with a museum there. Nowadays Dearborn has a very large Middle Eastern population, as does Dearborn Heights and East Bloomfield, and I recently learned that all three towns are governed by mayors with a Muslim or Middle Eastern background.

All of this sent me digging through our personal library and the thousands of books filling our house left over from my bookselling days before we launched Book Source Magazine in 1985. It didn't take long to find a four volume set, in the original wraps, of “a Reprint of a Series Articles Appearing in The Dearborn Independent from May 22 to October 2, 1920.” The Dearborn Independent was published by Henry Ford from 1919 through 1927 and according to several sources had a circulation approaching 1,000,000 which placed it second only to the New York Times in terms of national readership. Much of the distribution was through Ford's national network of Ford dealers. The title of each volume is as follows:

The International Jew. The World's Foremost Problem. Being a Reprint of Articles Appearing in the Dearborn Independent from May 22 to October 2, 1920. Dearborn, The Dearborn Publishing Co. 1920. 235pp., blue printed wraps.

Jewish Activities in the United States. Volume II of “The International Jew.” A Second Selection of Articles from The Dearborn Independent. Dearborn, The Dearborn Publishing Co., 1921. 255pp. Olive green wraps.

Jewish Influences in American Life. Volume III of “The International Jew. The World's Foremost Problem.” A Third Selection of Articles from The Dearborn Independent. Dearborn, The Dearborn Publishing Co., 1921. 256pp. Olive green wraps.

Aspects of Jewish Power in the United States. Volume IV of “The International Jew. The World's Foremost Problem.” A Fourth Selection of Articles from The Dearborn Independent. Dearborn, The Dearborn Publishing Co., 1922. 246pp. Olive green wraps.

A quick check of Via Libri, a global book search engine that compiles results from nearly all sites such as Alibris, Amazon, Biblio, Bookfinder and others, yielded nothing. Very odd, I thought. An individual search on Bookfinder, however, did turn up a four volume set of the above reprint, with taped backstrips, from a Canadian bookseller for a bit over $7,000.00, and also a few shabby copies of individual volumes in various states of disrepair.

Today I repeated the search and all matches had been removed. A search of Worldcat.org was also unsuccessful. Nowadays unfounded accusations of censorship and metaphorical “book-burning” are thrown about casually and without evidence, especially when related to controversial topics, but this is my first encounter with the real thing.

The recent attack on a synagogue in East Bloomfield, not far from Dearborn, caused me to wonder if there was any connection between the well-known history (by those who read history) of Henry Ford, “The Dearborn Independent,” and the area's now-predominantly Middle Eastern population.

I myself lean towards coincidence rather than conspiracy, since the Detroit area, until recently, was a magnet for people seeking employment in the automobile industry – from the South during the mid-20th century and later on from various immigrant communities. Once established in the Detroit area, some of the newly arrived immigrants from the Middle East may have learned something of Henry Ford's anti-Jewish activities through The Dearborn Independent and thought the area fertile ground for an anti-Jewish cultural base.

I don't use the common term anti-Semitic, because Semites make up a very large group, including people from throughout the Middle East and the Horn of Africa, and include Assyrians, Babylonians, Arabs, Arameans, Canaanites, Ammonites, Edomites, Assyrians, Akkadians, Moabites, Israelites, Phoenicians, Philistines, and Habesha peoples.* Palestinians are mostly Philistine, but the point is when we speak about a Semitic people we're talking about a very large, inclusive group. To accuse Palestinians of being anti-Semitic would be like the Hatfields accusing the McCoys of being anti-Scots Irish. Or the other way around.

Henry Ford may have been an industrial genius, but in the area of ethnic and religious expertise and sensitivity, not so much. At any rate, I think that in the Dearborn community of today, Henry Ford's “Dearborn Independent” and the offprints described above, would be far less relevant and of little interest compared to the writings of Ibn Kutuhb (Sayyid Qutb), especially “Milestones”. This book, which I recall reviewing many years ago, outlines his polemical religious thought, experiences living in the United States in the late 1940s, religious nationalism including forced conversion, and other controversial ideas such as 'Men are the managers of women's affairs”, etc. More on this anon, perhaps.

* According to Wikipedia