Some eyewitnesses have come forward to recount what they saw happening over the weekend when police arrested four Christians for allegedly disturbing the peace during an Arab American festival in Dearborn, Mich. The group has also published a video and some images of what happened here.

Judging by the footage it apparently now takes seven Dearborn policemen to corral and stop three would-be evangelists from handing out a booklet containing the gospel of John…outside the festival grounds. Again, I’m going only by the images thus far posted, but these guys are tame, make that lame, compared to, say, Hare Krishna devotees hawking their beliefs any day of the week in New York’s Times Square. Why the show of police force?

It turns out that prior to the start of the festival, attended predominantly by Muslim Arab-Americans, a U.S. district court judge in Dearborn issued a ban on groups distributing literature on sidewalks. George Saieg, a Muslim convert to Christianity who oversaw some of the Christians attending the event with a group called M2M Network, said he wanted to distribute handbills relating to Christianity as a way not to appear confrontational. But Dearborn authorities told the judge that the restrictions would help control foot traffic. The police who later surrounded Christians handing out literature instructed them that they had to be outside a five-block radius of the festival. The Christians arrested inside the festival, according to some witnesses, were carrying video cameras but were not at the time engaging festival-goers in a debate. Said David Wood, one of the four arrested: “There are certain elements of Sharia law being adhered to in Dearborn.”