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The Council on American-Islamic Relations, the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, condemned the call for surveillance, saying it sends “an alarming message to American-Muslims who increasingly fear for their future in this nation.”

The Anti-Defamation League, a U.S. group that battles anti-Semitism worldwide, said Cruz’s plan harkens back to the relocation of Japanese-Americans to internment camps during World War II.

Linda Sarsour, executive director of the Arab American Association of New York, said she fears for armed groups “who are emboldened by the commentary from people like Ted Cruz and Donald Trump.”

“What’s scaring me more is the kind of potential fuelling of these vigilantes and people who might want to take up arms and go patrol Muslim neighbourhoods,” she said.

The Detroit suburb of Dearborn is widely known as the hometown of Henry Ford, who hired Arabs and Muslims in the early days of the Ford Motor Co. and helped create what is now one of the nation’s largest and most concentrated communities of residents who trace their roots to the Middle East.

Kebba Kah, a 46-year-old Ford employee who was entering a mosque in Dearborn for evening prayers Tuesday, said the bombings in Brussels were “a very terrible thing,” and insisting such attacks are roundly rejected by all Muslims save for “a few radical groups.”

“We believe we are part of the society. We have the same ideology as mainstream Americans,” said Osman Ahmed, a resident of a Somali neighbourhood in Minneapolis. “I don’t think the ideology of surveillance of a Muslim community neighbourhood is the right thing to do. That will send a message that Muslim Americans are not a part of American society … and that’s the message that terrorism groups are willing to hear.”

“We’re targeted even if it’s not our fault,” said Omar Ghanim, 23, eating Lebanese pizza Tuesday at a suburban strip mall in Orange County’s Little Arabia neighbourhood, just miles from Disneyland in California.

Ghanim said Islamic State doesn’t represent his faith.

“They don’t follow the Islamic rules or anything Islam,” he said. “We’re a peaceful people – we’re not violent.”



With files from Jeff Karoub, Gillian Flaccus, Vivian Salama, Jill Colvin, Steve Peoples, Ken Thomas, Lisa Lerer, Alan Fram, Jonathan Lemire, Deepti Hajela, Steve Karnowski, Amy Forliti and the National Post