Ceasefire debate, legal fight over mosque expansion reveal tensions within a diversifying Hilliard

When Mazen Rasoul first moved to Hilliard in 2008, once a month or so he would make the three-hour trip to Dearborn, Michigan, where he could shop at Middle Eastern markets, dine at restaurants that specialized in the region’s cuisine, and just generally enjoy the vibe in a place where he felt like less of an outsider than he did then living in the suburbs of central Ohio.

In more recent years, however, Rasoul said an influx of immigrants has helped to introduce welcome diversity in Hilliard, with the city changing to a point where his relatives who live elsewhere in the state will now routinely visit him to shop for fresh pita bread and sip Yemeni coffee in streetside cafes. 

“We have all of these small businesses that are very diverse and have so many options,” said Rasoul, adding that this gradual evolution was given a jolt by the pandemic. “Around Covid, there was a two-year period where people didn’t really travel, even to visit their home countries. So, they were willing to spend more money here, which is when we saw even more of those businesses open up.”

Hilliard City Council member Cynthia Vermillion, who has lived in the city almost 21 years, shared similar observations in an early May phone interview, drawing a sharp contrast between the lack of diversity she witnessed upon first moving to Hilliard with today’s reality. “I remember going to an after-school activity shortly after we moved here and I was just in awe at the lack of diversity,” said Vermillion, a mother of four who grew up in San Diego and moved to Hilliard from Phoenix, Arizona. “And then probably around 2008, I started noticing more diversity of people in stores when I was out shopping, and then slowly in the schools. So, it’s been coming slowly for 16 or 17 years. … But now I see a lot of Middle Eastern restaurants and cafes, Indian restaurants, and grocery stores aimed at Mediterranean foods. And it’s been wonderful to see.”

But in recent years, this growing diversity has led to a couple of instances that multiple people interviewed said revealed developing underlying tensions, with Rasoul pointing to last year’s Hilliard City Council debate over a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza as one inflection point, along with the ongoing legal fight between the city and the Noor Islamic Cultural Center, which on April 14 filed a federal lawsuit against Hilliard, City Council, and city manager Michelle Crandall alleging discrimination and a violation of First Amendment rights. In the wake of these dual incidents, a trio of Muslim residents participated in the City Council primary in the early May – Nadia Rasul, Dorothy Hassan, and Samer Bazerbashi – with Rasul placing fourth with 14 percent of the vote and advancing as a Democratic candidate to the November general election.

“I think most of those tension points started in the last two years. With the war in Gaza, I think people started to notice that the city, the representatives, they just didn’t listen to the community, they didn’t engage with the community,” said Rasoul, who was born in Youngstown and grew up in Palestine before moving back to Ohio to attend college at Ohio State University. “Before that, our elected officials had been receptive, and they were welcoming – up to a point. For example, I went to Hilliard City Council three or four years ago to get a proclamation honoring Arab American Heritage month in April, and that was very easy. … But with the war, you started to feel like it was all performative acts rather than inclusion, because when you go to ask them to address something that is really concerning to you, a lot of doors shut in our faces. …  And it was hurtful to see those people we thought were our friends and our neighbors completely turn their backs on us in that period.’

Vermillion, then serving as Hilliard City Council president, said she was compelled to take up the ceasefire resolution owing to testimonies given in council meetings by Hilliard residents of Palestinian heritage, who shared the challenges experienced by family members overseas, and the mental and emotional toll the war enacted on their daily lives. 

“Our community members here in Hilliard were being directly impacted, so that is why I felt, ultimately, that it was an issue for our local City Council,” said Vermillion, who traced the frictions that developed in part to the involvement of JewishColumbus, a nonprofit with the stated mission to “make Jewish life vibrant, accessible, and secure in Columbus, Israel, and around the world,” along with the influence of Crandall. “Our city manager, Michelle Crandall, she did not want us to touch the issue from the beginning, and immediately she brought in JewishColumbus to speak to those of us who were thinking about doing something.” (Crandall did not reply to repeated emails from Matter News requesting an interview.)

Hilliard City Council members were also under pressure from outside interests, including Joel Wanger of Democratic Majority for Israel, a former Clinton staffer with Hillary for America who emailed council members asking them to oppose any proposed ceasefire resolution, according to emails obtained via records request and shared with Matter News. One Hilliard city council member, Peggy Hale, forwarded Wanger’s April 2024 email to a personal account shared with her husband, Matt, which exists outside of the scope of public records. (Hale, who did not immediately return an email requesting comment, ultimately voted against the ceasefire resolution.)

Following a series of delays, in April 2024 Hilliard City Council passed a ceasefire resolution that Vermillion said took its language from a similar resolution passed successfully a month earlier by Columbus. The decision to take up the resolution was met with immediate blowback, however, with the vote having taken place on April 22, the first night of Passover, which Vermillion described as “unfortunate timing” attributable to her unfamiliarity with the Jewish calendar. The Hilliard Beacon extensively covered the fallout, which eventually led Vermillion to cede her council presidency amid a stern rebuke from Randall, whose letter to council was obtained via records request and shared with Matter News. “In the future, Council should refrain from taking up issues, international or otherwise, that do not pertain to the role and responsibilities of local government,” Crandall wrote.

In separate interviews, Rasoul, Vermillion, and Hilliard City Council member Les Carrier all raised concerns with how Crandall approaches the role of city manager, a position Vermillion said is designed to oversee administrative tasks and which reports to city council – not the other way around. 

“And what you’ve got now is an autocratic situation, where you’ve got four or five council members, depending, who believe the city manager runs the government,” Carrier said. “And then you have a couple council members like me that believe, no, we have a role to play.”

Similar tensions have developed around the planned Noor expansion, leading to a federal lawsuit currently making its way through the courts. The lawsuit extends from the mosque’s February 2024 purchase of the former BMW Financial Services location with plans to transform the 220,000-square-foot vacant office building into a multi-use facility containing a charter school, a daycare, offices spaces, and a restaurant, with roughly 10 percent of the space preserved for use as a community center by the mosque, which has begun to outgrow its nearby home at 5001 Wilcox Rd. – less than two miles from the former BMW site, which is located at 5550 Britton Parkway.

“The cat and mouse games we’ve had to go through in this case are very unique, to say the least,” said Fadi Suleiman, a Noor board member and part of the mosque’s expansion team, as well as a real estate developer with two decades of experience. “In a situation like this, the municipality, generally speaking, would usually be welcoming of any private entity … that wants to come in, redevelop a space, and commercialize it, bringing in revenue to the city through property tax, income tax, and what have you. In this case, it was not so much welcoming, and the amount of speed bumps they laid out in the process were meant, truthfully, to stifle this application and drive a sense of frustration where maybe we just say, ‘Hey, this is not doable,’ and then you just let go and move on with your life.”

Suleiman said these hurdles included the city of Hilliard dictating to Noor where in the building particular tenants could be housed – something the developer said he had never encountered in all his years working in real estate, and a sentiment repeated in interviews with Vermillion and Carrier. (In a letter included in the federal lawsuit filing and shared with Matter News, commercial real estate developer Skip Weiler of the Robert Weiler Company wrote that “I have never seen a community zone certain floors of a building for specified uses.”)

“When you dig deeper, what the city really told them was, ‘Here’s what you can do with your land and your building, which you just bought. And most of the stuff that’s nonprofit related has to be on the first floor only,’” Carrier said. “Now, that building is four floors. What in the world is that? No one has seen that type of zoning, or those types of restrictions placed on a zoning matter. And so, it was clear the city just didn’t want it. … And you look at it, you shake your head, and you say, it’s really problematic, the behavior you’re starting to see out of a government entity, where I believe they’re treating people differently from others who are similarly situated.”

While Crandall did not reply to emails requesting an interview, Hilliard released a statement in November 2024 about Noor in which the city said it followed existing land use regulations and worked diligently “to accommodate their evolving plans” for the building. “Noor has the opportunity to submit a new development plan for the site that aligns with the community plan,” the city wrote. “We remain committed to reaching a resolution so the building’s potential can be maximized for the benefit of our entire community.”

Suleiman countered and said that the comprehensive community plan passed by Hilliard in 2023 explicitly addressed obsolete office buildings such as the former BMW site and the need “to creatively repurpose them into something else, such as community centers.” 

“And that’s precisely what we proposed, a community center that’s commercially viable,” he continued. “But I guess the style of how we were planning on doing it was not what they envisioned. And they didn’t say it, but it sounds like they’d rather have [the building] torn down and make it something else.”

Multiple people interviewed expressed a belief that the legal battle over the mosque expansion and the extended debate on the ceasefire resolution combined to help compel a trio of Muslim candidates to run for Hilliard City Council earlier this month. “I think since that day, many circles and people within the community have been saying we need our own representation,” Rasoul said.

Carrier echoed this idea, saying he believed the three candidates chose to run at least in part because members in that particular community “didn’t feel like they were being heard.” “I know Nadia very well and I encouraged her to run,” continued the council member. “During the Gaza debate, I said, ‘If you think things are wrong, get up here. Saddle up.’ … And some might think, ‘Les, that’s crazy. That means she’s going to run against you.’ But I don’t see it that way. I see this as the type of activity that creates better outcomes for the community. And it’s not about me; it’s about the community.” (Rasul declined via text message to speak with Matter News.)

Dorothy Hassan, who placed fifth in the primary, just missing the cutoff for the general election, said her experience serving as the CEO of a nonprofit beginning in 2022 informed her decision to run, recalling how the position required her to communicate regularly with representatives from the City of Columbus. 

“And being in these circles, people would always ask, ‘Dr. Dorothy, when are you going to do something?’ And that’s how the decision came about,” said the Delaware-born Hassan, who moved to Hilliard in 2012 after learning of the city while living abroad in Yemen, where it was described to her as a culturally diverse place with schools populated by “culturally humble” teachers. “And when we returned Stateside, as an African American woman from the state of Delaware, I had never experienced any prejudice or racism that was verbally shaking to my core until we came to central Ohio. And it wasn’t in Hilliard, but there have often been other places in central Ohio where I’ve been mistaken for a Somali woman who doesn’t speak English, and people will say all sorts of bad things about me. … And I feel like Hilliard has actually always been the place where diverse families are coming because they’re not facing that loud other-ism that is still pretty present in the City of Columbus.”

Vermillion expressed a concern that the city’s current stance toward the Noor expansion, along with lingering resentments from the ceasefire debate, could damage this idea, leaving some communities feeling less welcome within Hilliard and potentially impacting the progress that has been made in recent years. 

“I’m not quite sure how to phrase it, but both of those situations left people feeling as though they weren’t part of the Hilliard community. They felt like they were treated, I think, more as outsiders. And I can understand it, and I believe those feelings are valid,” she said. “It’s easy for people to spout off and say they believe in diversity, equity, and inclusion. It’s an easy thing to say those words. But it’s another thing to really live them and to really show your community that you support that philosophy, that you like a diverse community, that you will treat people equitably, and that you will be inclusive of everyone. And those are the things we need to show people, and not just tell them. And we know not every single person in a community feels inclusive, and that not everyone wants diversity. I mean, we know that, right? But we certainly expect our city leaders to show the way. And my hope going forward is that our city will do a better job of that.”