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    Mamdani’s mayoral race was marred by unhinged Islamophobia. It’s not going away soon | Arwa Mahdawi

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    Pack your bags and flee, infidels: New York City has fallen to a cabal of socialist jihadists. With Zohran Mamdani to become the city’s first Muslim mayor, many are celebrating the democratic socialist’s historic win. Billionaires, Islamophobes and Republicans, however, are in the throes of hysteria. But what’s new? The New York mayoral race has been marred by bigotry so unhinged it’s almost impossible to parody.Far-right activist and unofficial Trump adviser Laura Loomer posted on X, for example, that “there will be another 9/11 in NYC” under Mamdani. New York City councilmember Vickie Paladino called the 34-year-old a “known jihadist terrorist”. Actor Debra Messing, meanwhile, has been having a Mamdani-induced meltdown on Instagram, posting story after story about how the puppy-eyed politician is a threat to civilization. She recently posted: “In Judaism and Christianity, we are commanded to speak the truth. In Islam, they are commanded to lie if it means spreading Islam … Now, take a look at Mamdani … He’s revealing their goal: mass conversion.”Mamdani’s goal, as he has made almost comically clear, is actually affordable mass transit and housing. One of the reasons his campaign was so successful is that it stayed laser-focused on affordability. However, Mamdani has addressed the attacks against him on a number of occasions, noting how common it is for Muslims to be branded as terrorists. And, it’s not just Muslims, I should note. Islamophobes don’t tend to differentiate between a Muslim of Indian descent who was born in Uganda, like Mamdani, and a Palestinian atheist like me. They don’t care if you’re a Christian Arab or even a Sikh. We’re all the same to them: brown barbarians.The incoming mayor has also called out how just how normalized Islamophobia is on both sides of the aisle. A couple of weeks ago Mamdani released a six-minute video addressed to Muslim New Yorkers in which he talked about how Andrew Cuomo “laughed and agreed when a radio show host said that I would cheer another 9/11”. He talked about how outgoing mayor Eric Adams said Mamdani and his followers wanted to “burn churches”. And he stated: “To be Muslim in New York is to expect indignity. But indignity does not make us distinct – there are many New Yorkers who face it. It is the tolerance of that indignity that does. In an era of ever-diminishing bipartisanship, Islamophobia has emerged as one of the few areas of agreement.”Amen to that. Islamophobia is so normalized that’s it’s not even seen as bigotry by many but, as conservative commentator and former Fox News host Megyn Kelly recently put it, “a sensible position”. It’s so normalized that trafficking in Islamophobia is not career-ending, but often career-elevating. Making breathtakingly racist comments about Muslims certainly didn’t stop Randy Fine from winning a special election earlier this year to represent Florida’s sixth district in Congress. Fine, by the way, is now leading a push to investigate Mamdani’s path to US citizenship in an attempt to denaturalize and deport him.And Islamophobia hasn’t hurt the career of Shaun Maguire, a partner at the influential venture capital firm Sequoia Capital. In July, Maguire, who has a well-documented history of making inflammatory statements, posted on X that Mamdani “comes from a culture that lies about everything. It’s literally a virtue to lie if it advances his Islamist agenda. The West will learn this lesson the hard way.” Sequoia didn’t take action against him, citing a policy of “institutional neutrality”. In the end, the only person to lose their job was Sequoia’s female COO. Sumaiya Balbale, a practising Muslim quit after Maguire’s comments; the Financial Times reported that she felt her position was untenable.In the US, Muslims make up only about 1% of the adult population. Media coverage, therefore, disproportionately affects people’s views of Muslims and support for anti-Muslim policies. And there is a huge body of research demonstrating the extent to which the mainstream media in the US has dehumanized Muslims. One 2018 study by Middlebury researchers, for example, found that Muslims were the most negatively portrayed minority in America, “principally due to reporting on foreign conflict zones”.The reason that someone like Cuomo was so comfortable insinuating that Mamdani was a terrorist sympathizer throughout the election is because the media has embedded the idea that all Muslims are terrorists. A 2019 analysis media coverage found that between 2008 and 2015 terror attacks carried out by Muslims received more than 350% more coverage in the US media than terror attacks committed by non-Muslims. That’s even though attacks by non-Muslims (largely white supremacists) were more prevalent during that timeframe.The mainstream media’s peddling of Islamophobia doesn’t just help politicians run racist campaigns; it helps them pass racist policies. There’s a direct link between the dehumanization of Muslims in the mainstream media and Trump’s Muslim ban. A direct link between decades of the media portraying Muslims as terrorists and US complicity in the genocide in Gaza. While it’s easy to call out the Laura Loomers of the world and their crass Islamophobia, it’s respectable Islamophobia that’s more insidious. The framing of newspaper headlines; the choice of which stories to cover; the way in which prestigious Wall Street Journal and New York Times columnists will casually compare Arabs to bugs and insects.The New York mayoral election may be over now, but the racism and Islamophobia underpinning it aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. However, Mamdani’s victory does provide a glimmer of hope. The first step in solving a problem is addressing it. And Mamdani has been steadfast in calling out Islamophobia and forcing people to confront it. During his victory speech, Mamdani mentioned the Islamophobic attacks against him once again, and rejected the cynical attempts by his detractors to pit Jews against Muslims.“[W]e will build a city hall that stands steadfast alongside Jewish New Yorkers and does not waver in the fight against the scourge of antisemitism,” Mamdani said. “Where the more than 1 million Muslims know that they belong – not just in the five boroughs of this city, but in the halls of power. No more will New York be a city where you can traffic in Islamophobia and win an election.”Inshallah. More

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      From scapegoats to city hall: how New York Muslims built power and shaped Zohran Mamdani

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      Life was never the same for New Yorkers after the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001, with every resident coping with the trauma and devastation of that day.But for Muslim New Yorkers there was an added burden: the suspicion and sometimes physical harm now lurking around every corner.Vigilante violence against Arabs and Muslims exploded across the city and around the country. In what feels very much like a precursor to today’s ruthless ICE raids, mass arrests swept up Muslims on flimsy immigration pretexts, with many of them being held under extremely abusive conditions. The contemporary national security state was born atop the vestiges of Muslim civil rights.Twenty-four years later, the situation in New York appears completely different. The country’s largest city is now poised to elect its first Muslim mayor, Zohran Mamdani, a 34-year-old democratic socialist who won the Democratic slot on the ranked-choice primary earlier this summer. What accounts for this profound change?The practically unstoppable rise of the man with a smile as wide as the West Side Highway can certainly be explained by his oratorical gifts and political skills. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, among others, has described him as a “once-in-a-generation leader”. But Mamdani’s success is also part of a larger story of how young Muslim New Yorkers have been organizing themselves after the dangerous situations they were in after 9/11.Spurred by the necessity to counter a rising tide of Islamophobia, young Muslim New Yorkers have spent years developing political power in the city, building local political institutions, and leaning into a different kind of politics, one that embraces identity yet also moves beyond its sometimes shallow appeal. That movement has been growing quietly and steadily for years. Mamdani is now its best and most accomplished expression.View image in fullscreenAs the Muslims of New York have been organizing, their numbers have also been steadily growing, making it impossible to ignore Muslim voters for anyone who wants to run for office and win. The city probably has about 1 million Muslims (there are no official numbers tallied for religious groups), which is about the same number as Jews in New York City.The Council on American-Islamic Relations estimates more than 350,000 Muslim New Yorkers of that million are registered to vote, though only about 12% voted in the 2021 mayoral election. That is also now changing. Muslim and south Asian voter turnout in the mayoral primary this summer was up 60% compared with the 2021 primary, according to the Muslim Democratic Club of New York. And despite what rival Andrew Cuomo claims when he stated last month that “the Muslim community are not socialists,” it is clear that Muslims are a growing political force pushing the Democratic party to the left on fundamental issues.“People are looking at Zohran as being a very unique candidate, and he is,” said Saman Waquad, president of the Muslim Democratic Club of New York. “But his prominence in this election is built on the work of Muslims over the past decades, in the post-9/11 era.”That work began immediately after the 2001 attacks. Within days, the government began using federal immigration law to arrest anyone it suspected of having a connection with terrorism, which often meant little more than being an immigrant and having a Muslim name. Hundreds of people were detained, and the justice department refused to release their names, leaving families scrambling to look for those who had in effect been disappeared into jails around the country.Fahd Ahmed, executive director of Desis Rising Up and Moving (Drum), a community-based social justice organization of working-class south Asians and Indian Caribbeans, recalled the moment. His organization, he said, was doing “the work of finding people in jails, organizing them on the inside, organizing their families on the outside, and warning community leaders about working with the FBI and the NYPD”.View image in fullscreenMost efforts in the years after 2001 were often reacting to crises rather than building alternatives. And the crises were many. The Bush administration began requiring all adult males from two dozen Muslim-majority countries to register with the government. The FBI interviewed Muslim community members as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq began. Spies and informants infiltrated mosques and community organizations across the city and around the nation. The Obama administration’s Terrorism Screening Database ballooned to more than 680,000 names. Through the whistleblower Edward Snowden, the NSA was revealed to by spying on ordinary Americans, including Muslim Americans. Working with a CIA officer, the NYPD engaged in a years-long campaign of warrantless surveillance of Muslims Americans across the city.Muslim New Yorkers had little influence in city politics during those years. The only Muslim elected to city council was Robert Jackson, who won his seat in 2001 and who subsequently became a trailblazer for politically minded young Muslims. (In 2018, Jackson became the first Muslim elected to the state senate.)But Jackson’s victory was unique at the time, and by the time the 2013 mayoral election season rolled around, Muslim New Yorkers were still searching for more structural solutions to battle government repression targeted at them and fight for political recognition.The Muslim Democratic Club of New York was formed that year, and the club co-sponsored its first mayoral forum, where all the major Democratic candidates, including Bill de Blasio and Christine Quinn, showed up. Each candidate was asked about incorporating Muslim holidays into the public school calendar (a campaign some Muslim New Yorkers began in 2006, when a state regents exam was held on the same day as a major Muslim holiday) and if they believed warrantless surveillance of Muslims was unconstitutional. Only two of the seven candidates found the spying unconstitutional.Mamdani’s rise to the top of New York city politics began with the Muslim Democratic Club of New York. Ali Najmi, its co-founder, is a lawyer who specializes in election law. In 2015, he attempted a run for city council. Najmi’s childhood friend, the rapper Heems, had endorsed him in the race, which was enough to inspire Heems fan Mamdani to trek to Queens to volunteer for Najmi’s campaign. In 2017, the Palestinian American Lutheran pastor (and Democratic Socialists of America member) Khader El-Yateem ran for a seat on the council. Mamdani, who joined the DSA around this time, was his canvassing director. And in 2018, Mamdani managed the left-leaning political journalist Ross Barkan’s run for state senate.Najmi, El-Yateem and Barkan all lost their races, but as Najmi told the newspaper amNewYork: “Zohran’s ascension is the culmination of a bunch of people losing, myself included. And you learn lessons, you learn as you go. There’s institutional knowledge that was passed.” In 2021, Shahana Hanif became the first Muslim woman elected to city council.Mamdani served on the board of the Muslim Democratic Club between 2018 and 2019, shortly before winning his own seat as a state assembly member in 2020. Soon after assuming office, he joined a 15-day hunger strike organized by the Taxi Workers Alliance to win debt relief for taxi drivers who, out of an exploitative system, owed enormous amounts of money on the medallions which authorized them to drive their cabs.View image in fullscreen“In a city where a large number of taxi drivers are south Asian, there’s a natural affinity between Zohran and taxi drivers,” said Fahd Ahmed of Drum. “And Zohran used that to cultivate a relationship with the Taxi Workers Alliance. Similarly, with us. After he was elected to the state assembly, he reached out to us to say: ‘I know you all have historically worked on [the issue] of [warrantless] surveillance of Muslim communities. What can my office do?’”It would be a mistake, however, to assume Mamdani bases his politics on identity over values. “Other candidates have been south Asian or Muslim, but they’ve not succeeded in capturing the community’s vote the way that Zohran has,” Ahmed said. “He instead uses identity as a way to get to people’s issues.”Asad Dandia, a community organizer and friend of Mamdani’s, echoed Ahmed. “Zohran and I both came of age when 9/11, the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, the 2008 financial crisis, the Arab spring, Occupy Wall Street and NYPD surveillance of Muslims all occurred before we turned 20,” Dandia wrote in an email. “We were only a year or two out of college when Trump won the 2016 election. These are the events that shaped us.”View image in fullscreenDandia has personal experience with the NYPD spying on his life. When he was 19 – years – old, Dandia co-founded a charity in New York, Muslims Giving Back, to aid poor families throughout the city. The charity was soon infiltrated by a paid informer for the NYPD, Shamiur Rahman, who later admitted that he had been recruited by the police to spy on Muslims, for which he was cleared of a drug arrest and paid first $1,000 a month and then $1,500 a month. He was to “create and capture” opportunities for Muslims to say suspicious things about terrorism and report them to the police. He never saw anyone he “spied on do anything illegal, not even littering”, he later wrote.In retrospect, Dandia said, he should have seen this coming. Rahman’s behavior was odd. He would arrive late to meetings and photograph the sign-on sheet. He would take pictures of food being placed in cars to get license plates in the photos. He began posing strange questions, asking if killing innocent people is justified. Dandia eventually joined and won a lawsuit against the NYPD, which in 2017 established a new office of civilian oversight over the police force. He began thinking of the connections between surveillance capitalism and Islamophobia and, in 2020, he co-founded a Muslim caucus in the Democratic Socialists of America.“We could not hide the fact [from the world] that we are Muslim,” Dandia said, referring to himself and Mamdani. “Yet we do not anchor our politics strictly on these identitarian terms. Adequate housing is a ‘Muslim issue’, public transit is a ‘Muslim issue’, and universal childcare is a ‘Muslim issue’. Zohran fights for these issues because they advance the common good for all of us, Muslim or not, and align with both democratic socialist principles and Islamic values.”Campaign fundraising statistics bear out how Mamdani’s affordability message is resonating beyond the confines of the Muslim community. According to Open Secrets, a non-partisan group tracking money in US politics, the Mamdani campaign has raised $16.8m, with about 90% of Mamdani’s donors contributing less than $250. The average contribution is $98. By contrast, the average contribution to the Cuomo campaign is $615, yet Cuomo has raised only $12.6m. Cuomo-supporting Super Pacs, on the other hand, have received 11 times as much money – including millions from Airbnb ($10m), former mayor Michael Bloomberg ($8.3m) and DoorDash ($1.8m) – than the Super Pacs that support Mamdani or oppose Cuomo.But the most powerful political action committee of the season is arguably the city of 87,000 volunteers for Mamdani who are knocking on voter doors across the five boroughs talking about building an affordable New York City with the Muslim democratic socialist nominee.View image in fullscreenOver the last decade, there has been a rising number of Muslim American politicians who are members of the Democratic Socialists of America or lean very deliberately left: Mamdani, Rashida Tlaib, Omar Fateh, Zaynab Mohamed, Shahana Hanif, Ilhan Omar, Abdul El-Sayed. It is not the first time a religious minority in the US played an outsized role in the left. For decades, the American Communist party was made up of a disproportionate number of Jewish Americans.“The left has been one of the only places that has been generally open, receptive and supportive of Muslim communities since 9/11,” said Ahmed. “In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, and then in the anti-war movement around Iraq and Afghanistan, there was nobody else standing with us against our repression. Many of us grew into our organizing at that nexus.”Waquad is a member of the DSA and president of the Muslim Democratic Club. For Muslims, she explained, the DSA is “an alternative to the mainstream Democratic party”. The general election “showed how disenfranchised a lot of voters felt. Muslim voters felt pretty much ignored.“The feeling that I had submitting my ballot for the general election was one of sadness. There [wasn’t] much of a choice in what we could vote for,” said Waquad.“Whereas when I submitted my ballot for the primary for the mayoral race, I cried,” she said. “I’m not just voting for somebody who is Muslim. I’m voting for somebody that I truly believe is the best candidate right now for the city and its people.” More

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      Charlie Kirk was a divisive far-right podcaster. Why is he being rebranded as a national hero?

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      The streets of Washington DC are unmistakable. In addition to noting the city’s signature architecture and public monuments, one will know they are in the nation’s capital when they can barely go half a city block without spotting a US flag. Two weeks ago, those flags were flying at half-staff, but not in recognition of the passing of a high-ranking public official, as would be customary. Instead, the half-staff was ordered by the White House in a highly politicized effort to memorialize the 10 September killing of Charlie Kirk, a 31-year-old podcaster, hard-right party operative, and Maga youth influencer, as an event of national tragedy.Kirk ruled over an online fiefdom peddling his signature brand of rage-baiting racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic and misogynistic commentary. It wasn’t just his vitriolic style, but also his popularization of cruelty, humiliation and dehumanization of political opponents – especially college students – that attracted millions to his audience. He famously said empathy was “a made-up, new age term that does a lot of damage”.As a Black woman, I felt no sorrow watching these flags hang limp and lifeless from chrome posts in the stiff, humid summer heat that, even on the eve of autumn, will not unhand a city already stifled by federal threats of military occupation. I felt the same when, just hours after the shooting, the speaker of the House of Representatives called for a moment of silence on the floor for a private citizen who had never held office nor served in the military. (The brief silence erupted seconds later into a shouting match melee when congresswoman Lauren Boebert requested that members hold an open prayer for Kirk from the floor). Just nine days later, the House passed a Republican resolution eulogizing Kirk’s life with a sweeping 310-58 majority.I felt no mourning when seven teams in the National Football League – the very organization that has long been criticized for its inconsistent and often hypocritical stance on the place of politics in sports – held in-game memorials for Kirk, who never played any professional sport nor held a role within the league. In the Dallas Cowboys stadium in Texas, Jumbotrons featured a statesman-like image of Kirk, what one might expect for the passing of a former president or a longtime team affiliate. The grand gesture was drenched in hard-to-miss hypocrisy: forced silence from Black players who were punished for advocating for social justice in 2020, while, in the endzone, a painted astroturf read “End Racism” – a relic of just how fleeting the league’s lip service to the Black Lives Matter movement just a few years ago proved to be.I feel no grief because these memorials to Kirk are not created for me to grieve. Instead, they seek not only to enshrine Kirk into the national consciousness, but also to foster national memories about what he represents ideologically and culturally. The lionizing is an official effort to coalesce the state into his movement – a brazen proclamation that his consistently hostile white nationalist, homophobic and misogynistic convictions represent the federal government’s interests, and thus, what the presidency believes should be the national priority.It’s reminiscent of the long aftermath of the civil war, when Confederate memorials were fashioned well into the 20th century not by those seeking to grieve any one individual, but rather by those who wanted to send a message about racial politics in the present. Some people have settled comfortably into a belief that the recent years of anti-racism protests and organizing have successfully toppled enough of these Confederate monuments, that their white-washed histories collapsed with them. But memorials to Kirk conducted by the country’s most powerful institutions are evidence of the revival of a new iteration of neo-Confederate memorialization.Like the Confederate tributes and monuments of the past, current memorials to Kirk function to throttle any interrogation of their subject. Those who are elevated to the esteem of official national memorializing are commonly – although with notable exceptions –figures that the public agrees are beyond reproach. In honoring Rosa Parks with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1996, for example, Bill Clinton sought to canonize the entire Civil Rights Movement for which she fought. It cemented the era as worthy of national honor because it telegraphed the meaning of democracy and freedom for all Americans.In contrast, with the insta-extolling of Kirk, Donald Trump, who has announced that his late close personal friend will be awarded a posthumous Medal of Freedom, echoes the intentions behind Confederate memorials of yore. Instead of public recognitions that reflect the long march towards a national reckoning with our past, memorials like those for Kirk elevate his consistent record of hard-right extremism above the reach of public questioning.Kirk’s style of seizing upon those who challenged his ideologies and punishing his detractors is an agenda that has expanded well beyond Trump’s track record of punishing his personal and political enemies. Though I, like the majority of Kirk’s critics, do not condone his shooting, Kirk himself said gun deaths were “worth it” to maintain gun rights. While rhetoric this extreme, including his claim that Black women in government and media lacked “brain processing power”, is being euphemized in tributes as his “advocacy for free speech”, media figures and government employees who openly question if he should be publicly lauded are being fired from their jobs.Additionally, hundreds of college professors were doxed, harassed and threatened by Kirk’s organization, Turning Point USA, and its notorious “Professor Watchlist”, which published the names and information of any academics with views Kirk construed as incompatible with his own. It’s curious how a virtue like “doing politics the right way” can be afforded to someone who sought to devastate the lives of scholars and intellectuals.The aggrandizing of Kirk shares yet another, more lasting legacy with Confederate memorialization. The historian David Blight notes that in the aftermath of the civil war, the call for reconciliation between white northerners and southerners was achieved at the expense of erasing the legacy of slavery from the postbellum narrative. Thus, the reunification of the white citizenry was done wholly on southern terms and exacerbated the racial atrocities that were never addressed in the postwar era, leaving Black Americans to be wholesale lynched and terrorized throughout the south.Further still, reunification campaigns exonerated and elevated rebel insurgents who were, by definition, traitors and enemies of the state, to a status otherwise reserved for senior statesmen and decorated US veterans. It was a damning declaration that even those who sought to overthrow this country would be celebrated as its heroes before Black Americans would be treated as its citizens. The same tone is struck in the tributes to Kirk that exalt a highly controversial private citizen as though he were a national hero.Elected officials, journalists and public figures on the left who stress calls for unity do so on the right’s terms, and are reminiscent of the kid-gloved white northerners who sought to rebrand a war fought expressly over human trafficking and bondage into a national moment for celebration of duty, honor and valorous military service on both sides. Those who call for us to honor the life of a man who said the 1964 Civil Rights Act was a “huge mistake”, and who described Martin Luther King Jr, as “awful”, have betrayed those of us who heard Kirk espouse eugenics and replacement theory loud and clear, with such vast online influence that it prompted a 2024 investigation by the Southern Poverty Law Center.The valorization of Kirk by his far-right defenders is an insult to millions of the most marginalized Americans who lived every day in the crosshairs of his rhetoric. Kirk’s memorialization by his supporters and apologists is but a new opportunity to announce an old message about whose country this is and whose it isn’t.

      Saida Grundy is an associate professor of sociology and African American studies at Boston University, and the author of Respectable: Politics and Paradox in Making the Morehouse Man More

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      Landlord who stabbed Palestinian American boy to death dies in prison

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      A landlord jailed for decades after he attacked a Palestinian American boy and his mother has died.Three months ago, Joseph Czuba was sentenced to 53 years behind bars for the attack. He was found guilty in February of murder, attempted murder and hate-crime charges in the death of Wadee Alfayoumi and the wounding of the boy’s mother, Hanan Shaheen.The 73-year-old Czuba targeted them in October 2023 because of their Islamic faith and as a response to the war between Israel and Hamas, which started days earlier.Czuba died Thursday in the custody of the Illinois corrections department, the Chicago Sun-Times reported, citing the Will county sheriff’s office. The law enforcement agency did not return a call seeking comment on the death.Ahmed Rehab, the executive director of Council on American-Islamic Relations’ Chicago office, said in a statement on Saturday that “this depraved killer has died, but the hate is still alive and well”.Evidence at trial included harrowing testimony from Shaheen and her frantic 911 call, along with bloody crime scene photos and police video. Jurors deliberated less than 90 minutes before handing in a verdict.The family had been renting rooms in Czuba’s home in Plainfield, about 40 miles (64km) from Chicago when the attack happened.Shaheen told jurors Czuba attacked her before moving on to her son, insisting they had to leave because they were Muslim. Prosecutors also played the 911 call and showed police footage. Czuba’s wife, Mary, whom he has since divorced, also testified for the prosecution, saying he had become agitated about the Israel-Hamas war, which had erupted days earlier.After the start of the war, Czuba told Shaheen that they had to move out because Muslims were not welcome. Later, he attacked her and her son.“He told me: ‘You, as a Muslim, must die,’” said Shaheen.Shaheen had more than a dozen stab wounds.Czuba attacked her with a knife before going after her son in a different room. Police said Czuba stabbed the boy 26 times, leaving the knife in the child’s body. Some of the bloody crime scene photos were so explicit that the judge agreed to turn television screens showing them away from the audience, which included Wadee’s relatives.The case, which generated headlines around the world, comes amid rising hostility against Muslims and Palestinians in the US since Hamas attacked Israel in October 2023, killing roughly 1,200 Israelis, and Israel’s attack on Gaza, which has killed more than 48,000 Palestinians.The attack hit particularly hard in Plainfield and surrounding suburbs, which have a large and established Palestinian community. Wadee’s funeral drew large crowds, and Plainfield officials have dedicated a park playground in his honor.Marina Dunbar contributed reporting More

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      Zohran Mamdani won by being himself – and his victory has revealed the Islamophobic ugliness of others | Nesrine Malik

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      Zohran Mamdani’s stunning win in New York’s mayoral primary has been a tale of two cities, and two Americas. In one, a young man with hopeful, progressive politics went up against the decaying gods of the establishment, with their giant funding and networks and endorsements from Democratic scions, and won. In another, in an appalling paroxysm of racism and Islamophobia, a Muslim antisemite has taken over the most important city in the US, with an aim to impose some socialist/Islamist regime. Like effluent, pungent and smearing, anti-Muslim hate spread unchecked and unchallenged after Mamdani’s win. It takes a lot from the US to shock these days, but Mamdani has managed to stir, or expose, an obscene degree of mainstreamed prejudice.Politicians, public figures, members of Donald Trump’s administration and the cesspit of social media clout-chasers all combined to produce what can only be described as a collective self-induced hallucination; an image of a burqa swathed over the Statue of Liberty; the White House deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, stating that Mamdani’s win is what happens when a country fails to control immigration. Republican congressman Andy Ogles has decided to call Mamdani “little muhammad” and is petitioning to have him denaturalised and deported. He has been called a “Hamas terrorist sympathiser”, and a “jihadist terrorist”.It is a measure of how racist the reaction has been that Donald Trump calling Mamdani a “communist lunatic” seems restrained in comparison. Some of the responses have been so hysterical that I often couldn’t tell what was real and what was parody. Because the idea that Mamdani, whose style is, above anything else, wide-grinned earnestness, was some sinister Islamist sleeper agent is so clearly a joke.But it’s not a joke, and if it is then it’s on me for still, after all these years, underestimating what Muslims in the public sphere do to people’s brains. And how utterly comfortable many are with anti-Muslim hate. And why shouldn’t they be? To date, the most senior figures in Mamdani’s own party, Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, have not called out this onslaught, and those politicians and public figures who made them will suffer no censure or consequence. Because, fundamentally, anti-Muslim hate, like all racism when it becomes normalised, thrives when there is a systemic blessing of it through not even registering its offensiveness.But the apathy towards assaults against Mamdani is because he is an outsider in more meaningful ways, not just in his religious background. His crime is not one of daring to be Muslim and a politician – he might have “passed” if he was a conventional Democratic apparatchik – but of having strong opinions about economics and politics that mark him out as a challenger of mainstream orthodoxies regarding capitalism and Israel.Given his leftwing opinions on taxation and rent control, and objections to the slaughter of Palestinians on the US’s dime, a backlash to Mamdani was always likely. But he has done much to counter it. He has made thorough explanations of his abhorrence of antisemitism, of his pledge to combat all hate crime, and of the fact that his economic agenda is based on making the city, from its food to its childcare, more affordable.His offence has been in his unwillingness to water down his principles, not toeing the line on Israel, and not making frankly embarrassing assertions, like those running against him did, that Israel would be his first foreign trip. He has refrained from debasing himself through serial condemnations of phrases that have arbitrarily been erected as litmus tests of a Muslim’s acceptability in the public domain.Mamdani’s refusal to reject the phrase “globalise the intifada”, on the grounds that it expresses “a desperate desire for equality and equal rights in standing up for Palestinian human rights” has been seized upon as an indication that he supports some kind of violent jihad – a reading that ignores his frequent assertions that Israel has the right to exist and condemnations of any violence against Jews. What are we doing here?There is no degree to which Mamdani could have become acceptably Muslim while holding these opinions – even though they are clearly universal enough for him to receive emphatic support from New Yorkers, including from Jews who voted for him, and the Jewish candidate Brad Lander, who endorsed him. He cannot be secular enough, American enough, or elite enough, as the son of a film-maker and a professor, to hold politics that will not be reducible to his inherently suspect identity.Even in demeanour, he has spoken of how he constantly has to measure his tone, lest he be smeared as a “beast”. And in this, he mirrors a broader, exasperating reality – one where Muslims and pro-Palestinians are condemned as threatening, while there is a colossal attack on their rights and safety across the world, simply for opposing an incontrovertible crime being perpetrated in Gaza. From detention and deportation proceedings against activists such as Mahmoud Khalil in the US, to the vilification and securitisation of pro-Palestinian speech and activism in the UK and Europe, the messenger is shot, and then framed as the aggressor.But smears and diversions and outrageous extrapolations will not change the facts on the ground, which are that the Israeli state is occupying the West Bank, starving and killing Palestinians in Gaza, and accused of war crimes and genocide, all with the sponsorship of the US and support of western regimes. In that sense, Mamdani’s victory is a threat, because it reveals how finally, all attempts to maintain an indefensible and intolerable situation have lost their grip on the growing number of people who are thinking for themselves.Mamdani isn’t even mayor yet, and he will probably face an escalating campaign using his identity as a way of discrediting his beliefs, both economic and political. And here is where the response to his win is both alarming and potentially propulsive, like the clammy buildup to the final breaking of a fever. Mamdani is where he is because he is not alone. Not by a long shot. And in drawing out such naked and explicit anti-Muslim hate, Mamdani has inadvertently revealed the ugliness and weakness not just of his opponents, but of the wider political establishment, as well as their anti-democratic impulses.In drawing them out, Mamdani has shown how prejudice is rarely about individuals, but the fear that marginalised minority views could ever become powerful majority ones. In this mayoral race, from Palestine to local policing, anti-Muslim hate is not just a repellent phenomenon confined to Mamdani, it is a barricade against the desires of the voting public. Once people start making that connection, it really is over.

      Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist

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      Trump Pentagon pick Pete Hegseth’s books foreground anti-Muslim rhetoric

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      Donald Trump’s defense secretary pick Pete Hegseth, who has the crusader motto “deus vult” tattooed on his arm, has put bigoted anti-Muslim rhetoric at the center of several of his published books, according to a Guardian review of the materials.Hegseth, especially in 2020’s American Crusade, depicts Islam as a natural, historic enemy of the west; presents distorted versions of Muslim doctrine in “great replacement”-style racist conspiracy theories; treats leftists and Muslims as bound together in their efforts to subvert the US; and idolises medieval crusaders.Experts say that Hegseth’s view of Islam is riven with falsehoods, misconceptions and far-right conspiracy theories. Yet Hegseth, if his nomination is successful, will head the world’s largest military force at a time of conflict and instability in the Middle East.The Guardian emailed Hegseth and the Trump transition team for comment and received no response.The Guardian has previously reported that in his 2020 book Hegseth calls for an “American Crusade”, targeting both “internal” or “domestic enemies” and the enemies of Israel. Hegseth also connected the two, writing: “We have domestic enemies, and we have international allies … it’s time to reach out to people who value the same principles, relearn lessons from them, and form stronger bonds.”‘False, totally wrong’In American Crusade, Hegseth presents the medieval crusades as a model for Christian-Muslim relations, but one historian of the period says his presentation of the history of that period is “just totally wrong”.In a chapter entitled Make the Crusade Great Again, Hegseth writes: “By the eleventh century, Christianity in the Mediterranean region, including the holy sites in Jerusalem, was so besieged by Islam that Christians had a stark choice: to wage defensive war or continue to allow Islam’s expansion and face existential war at home in Europe,” adding: “The leftists of today would have argued for ‘diplomacy’ … We know how that would have turned out.”Hegseth continues: “The pope, the Catholic Church, and European Christians chose to fight – and the crusades were born,” and “Pope Urban II urged the faithful to fight the Muslims with his famous battle cry on their lips: ‘Deus vult!,’ or ‘God wills it!’”Hegseth has a tattoo of the same crusader slogan, which is also associated with Christian nationalism, white supremacist and other far-right tendencies.For Hegseth, the crusaders’ short-lived victories in the Holy Land means they can be credited with safeguarding modern values. “Enjoy Western civilization? Freedom? Equal justice under the law? Thank a crusader,” having written the same thing again earlier in the chapter.Matthew Gabriele is a professor of medieval studies in the Department of Religion and Culture at Virginia Tech, and the author, with David Perry, of Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe.In a telephone conversation, he said that Hegseth’s picture of Muslim encroachment in the 11th century was misplaced.“There were absolutely no incursions into mainland Europe,” he said, adding “If anything, Islam was kind of on the retreat in Iberia and other places as well. So there was no large geopolitical shift or any kind of immediate threat of Islam taking over Europe.”On Hegseth’s presentation of the crusades as a victory for the west against Islam, Gabriele said: “The Crusaders lost. They lost everything.“The idea that they kind of like emerged victorious is absolutely false.“This narrative of the crusades as a defensive war, where if the Christians didn’t launch this offensive towards Jerusalem that Europe would be overrun has been a bog-standard narrative on the right: it’s something that was espoused by Anders Breivik, the Norwegian mass murderer, in 2011 and by the Christchurch shooter a few years ago.”On Hegseth drawing a direct line between the crusaders and the modern west, Gabriele said: “It’s the worst kind of simplistic thinking,” adding: “Anybody who tells you these simple stories is selling something.”“The British were invaded, and they didn’t even know it”Elsewhere in American Crusade, Hegseth repeatedly characterizes Muslim immigration to Europe as an “invasion” in a way that mimics racist “great replacement”-style conspiracy theories about immigrants displacing white populations.At one point he tries to connect – an expert says falsely – an aspect of Islamic history with the purported “capture” of Europe.Hegseth writes: “In Islamist circles, there’s a principle known as hegira,” and then claims: “This term refers to the nonviolent capture of a non-Muslim country.”Hegseth writes: “Hegira is a cultural, physical, psychological, political, and eventually religious takeover. History is replete with examples of this; and because history is not over, it’s happening in the most inconceivable places right now.”Hegseth posits the US as an example where, he claims: “Radical mosques and schools are allowed to operate. Religious police control certain sections of many towns. Sharia councils dot the underground landscape. Pervasive political correctness prevents dissent against disastrous policies such as open borders and nonassimilation.”Adducing proof, Hegseth bizarrely writes: “Take the British cities of London, Birmingham, Leeds, Blackburn, Sheffield, Oxford, Luton, Oldham, and Rochdale. What do they all have in common? They have all had Muslim mayors.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFor Hegseth, this shows: “The British were invaded, and they didn’t even know it. In one generation – absent radical policy change – the United Kingdom will be neither united nor a Western kingdom. The United Kingdom is done for.”He adds: “The same can be said across Europe, especially following the disastrous open-borders, pro-migrant policies of the past few decades. Countries such as Germany, France, Norway, Sweden, and the Netherlands threw open their doors to Muslim ‘refugees’ and will never be the same because of it.”According to Hegseth, countries that do not restrict Muslim immigration ignore that “Islam itself is not compatible with Western forms of government. On the other hand, countries that want to stay free … are fighting like hell to block Islam’s spread.”Jasmin Zine is professor of Sociology and Muslim Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, and the author of a book-length report, The Canadian Islamophobia Industry: Mapping Islamophobia’s Ecosystem in the Great White North.Zine said Hegseth’s narrative appeared to be an “Islamophobic conspiracy theory distorting the practice of ‘hijra’ or the migration of the Prophet Muhammad and early Muslims from Mecca to Medina in 622 AD looking for safety from persecution”, which “is now being used to promote the xenophobic idea of a Muslim ‘takeover’ of the west”.Zine added: “These ideas are also linked to white nationalist demographic replacement conspiracies about Muslim birth rates in the west (AKA ‘demographic jihad’) and scare stories about ‘creeping shariah’, which have spawned retaliatory ‘crusader’ narratives in far-right subcultures.”‘Hard-core leftism provides the best gateway for Islamism’At other points in American Crusade, Hegseth appears to try to scapegoat Muslims for familiar conservative grievances, in narratives that suggest Muslims and leftists are colluding to undermine the US.In case of a Biden victory in 2020, Hegseth predicted that an “anti-Israel and pro-Islamist foreign policy” would be introduced along with “speech codes instead of free speech, bye-bye Second Amendment” and “naked socialism, government-run everything, Common Core education for everyone, a tiny military, and abortion on demand – even postbirth”.Hegseth also tries to connect his narrative with gripes about supposed censorship on social media platforms. “Who are the first people being banned on social media?” he asks, answering: “Not intolerant jihadists or filthy leftists but outspoken conservatives.”At times he seems to admire what he imagines to be the thoroughgoing religious zealotry of Muslims compared with an increasingly secular west.“Almost every single Muslim child grows up listening to, and learning to read from, the Quran,” Hegseth writes. “Contrast this with our secular American schools – in which the Bible is nowhere to be found – and you’ll understand why Muslims’ worldview is more coherent than ours.”At another point in the book he engages in a lengthy diatribe about the Council for American Islamic Relations (Cair), which has been a bugbear for US conservatives since the “war on terror”, and claims Democrats are helping the organization cement a radical “Islamist” agenda.“Groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood and [Cair] have advanced the radical mission of Islamism for decades,” Hegseth claims, adding: “In the past two years alone, more than one hundred members of Congress – including Ilhan Omar, Adam Schiff, Rashida Tlaib, Elizabeth Warren, and Amy Klobuchar – have signed letters endorsing CAIR.”Hegseth then singles out “Socialist Bernie Sanders”, who he claims is “a favorite among Muslim Americans due to his support for Palestinian causes and distaste for Israel”.Sanders has repeatedly publicly supported Israel’s right to defend itself, even after the commencement of the current war in Gaza, while also saying: “Innocent Palestinians also have a right to life and security,” and calling for humanitarian pauses and ceasefires, and last week leading efforts to restrict the sale of offensive weapons to Israel on the grounds that it was in violation of the international laws of war.Some of Sanders’s positions since 7 October 2023 have drawn criticism from the left, who have seen them as insufficiently critical of Israel and insufficiently supportive of Palestine.Hegseth meanwhile, as previously reported in the Guardian, is unconditionally supportive of Israel, and has appeared to argue that the US military should ignore the Geneva conventions in favor of “winning our wars according to our own rules”.According to Hegseth in American Crusade, though: “Leaders of CAIR speak very highly of Bernie because his hard-core leftism provides the best gateway for their Islamism.” More

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      Ex-official exits running for Trump team over Sebastian Gorka appointment

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      A frontrunner to be deputy national security adviser in Donald Trump’s administration reportedly withdrew from the running after learning that he would have to work with Sebastian Gorka, the president-elect’s choice as counter-terrorism adviser.Michael Anton, a conservative speech writer and national security official in Trump’s first presidency, removed his name from contention over Gorka’s appointment against a backdrop of acrimonious past relations between the pair, the Washington Post reported.His withdrawal graphically signifies the unease provoked by the prospective return to the White House of Gorka, a controversial figure who was forced out of Trump’s first administration, where he worked closely with Steve Bannon, within its first seven months.His departure is believed to have been engineered by John Kelly, who became White House chief of staff in July 2017 with the task of bringing order to the chaos that characterised Trump’s first months. Kelly, who later resigned, has since turned against Trump, saying he met “the general definition of a fascist” in interviews given shortly before this month’s presidential election.Gorka, who has worked at the National Defense University, has drawn multiple accusations of Islamophobia.Being considered anathema by Anton – who was believed to be under consideration to become deputy to the prospective national security advisor, Mike Waltz – is all the more striking given Anton’s own hardline views on Islam, which he has called “a militant faith”. He argued that “only an insane society” would accept Muslim immigrants following the 9/11 terrorist attacks.But his opinions have paled in comparison to those of Gorka, who has depicted the religion as a threat to western civilisation and has peddled fears about America falling under sharia law.He was a vocal supporter of the Muslim travel ban enacted against citizens of seven majority Muslim countries during Trump’s first administration. When he departed, he wrote a resignation letter lamenting the president’s failure to use the term “radical Islamic terrorism” in a speech on Afghanistan.The Washington Post cited a source in Trump’s national security transition team as saying there was widespread dismay at the prospect of Gorka’s return, which does not need to be confirmed by Senate hearings.“Almost universally, the entire team considers Gorka a clown,” the source said. “They are dreading working with him.”Anton has previously written about the animosity between Gorka and himself. He recounted how Gorka called him a “coward” and scolded him in a Fox News green room.Gorka, who first came to attention as a firebrand pundit working at the rightwing Breitbart News, declined comment, telling the Post: “I don’t comment to the fake failing news.”Anton’s reported withdrawal follows scathing comments on Gorka’s qualifications by John Bolton, who was national security in Trump’s first term before being fired.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSpeaking to CNN, he called Gorka “a conman” and said the FBI should investigate his credentials.“I wouldn’t have him in any U.S. government,” Bolton told the network’s Kaitlan Collins. “I don’t think it will bode well for counterterrorism efforts.”Gorka, a US-British citizen and the son of Hungarian immigrants to the UK, drew criticism when he appeared at Trump’s first inauguration ball wearing an honorary medal from the Hungarian nationalist organisation, Vitézi Rend. The World Jewish Congress has said some members of the outfit were complicit in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews in the Holocaust.His views on Islam have been distinguished by a rejection of interpretations attributing the root causes of Islamist terrorism to poverty, repression or US foreign policy mistakes.“This is what I completely jettison,” he told the Washington Post in 2017. “Anybody who downplays the role of religious ideology … they are deleting reality to fit their own world.”In a video filmed after Hamas’s murderous 7 October attack on Israel last year, he said he had watched unedited footage of the episode and offered advice to Israeli leaders on how to deal with the Palestinian militant group.“Kill every single one of them,” he said. “God bless Israel. God bless Judeo-Christian civilisation.” More

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      Rashida Tlaib condemns cartoonist for racist image of her with exploding pager

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      Rashida Tlaib, the Palestinian American congresswoman, has accused a political cartoonist of racism after he depicted her next to a pager exploding days after such devices blew up across Lebanon in what the Arab country has said was an attack by Israel.A statement from the Democratic US House representative also expressed concern that the cartoon by Henry Payne would “incite more hate and violence against Arab and Muslim communities”.“And it makes everyone less safe,” Tlaib said of the cartoon – published by the Republican-friendly National Review – which also showed her thinking how “odd” it was for the nearby pager to explode. Pagers had been a preferred method of Hezbollah members in conflict with Israel, before such devices exploded across Lebanon recently. “It’s disgraceful that the media continues to normalize this racism against our communities,” she said.The congresswoman’s statement about the publication of the cartoon “Tlaib Pager Hamas” came after many users on the social media platform X had condemned it as anti-Arab as well as Islamophobic. Among them was the mayor of Dearborn, Michigan, Abdullah Hammoud, who wrote on X: “Absolutely disgusting. Anti-Arab bigotry & Islamophobia have become normalized in our media.”The mayor added: “At what point will people call this out?”Other users condemned Payne’s cartoon directly on his own X profile. One wrote: “You should be ashamed,” and another user said: “What the fuck does she have to do with the war crimes of Israel terrorizing the [Lebanese] people? It’s because she’s Arab you thought it was okay to draw this shit?”Payne is a political cartoonist for the Detroit News, one of two major daily newspapers in the city, which is Tlaib’s hometown. The Guardian sent him a request for comment on Friday.The slew of pager and walkie-talkie explosions to which the cartoon alludes have killed dozens of people while wounding thousands more, including children.The Lebanese government and Hezbollah have blamed Israel for the attacks.Israel has stopped short of claiming responsibility for the deadly attacks. However, in their wake, its defense minister complimented the Mossad – the Israeli intelligence agency – for its “great achievements”.The intensifying tensions across the Middle East come as Israel’s deadly war on Gaza approaches its first anniversary on 7 October. Israel launched that war after it was attacked by Hamas, who killed about 1,100 Israelis and took 200 more hostage.Israel in response has killed more than 41,000 Palestinians while leaving 2 million survivors forcibly displaced across the Gaza Strip amid a severe shortage of food, water and medical supplies inflicted by Israeli restrictions, according to Gaza’s health ministry.As the only Palestinian American federal lawmaker, Tlaib – who has since dealt with a string of anti-Arab and Islamophobic abuses – has been among the few voices in Congress condemning Israel for its deadly war across Gaza. Several United Nations human rights experts have decried the war as a genocide.Last November, the Republican-controlled US House censured Tlaib over her criticisms of Israel. In response, Tlaib said: “I will not be silenced,” adding: “I can’t believe I have to say this, but Palestinian people are not disposable.” More

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      Washington is pushing policies to combat antisemitism. Critics say they could violate free speech

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      Against the backdrop of demonstrations against Israel’s war in Gaza on college campuses, the White House and Congress have announced a string of policies and commitments aimed at addressing what Joe Biden warned was a “ferocious surge of antisemitism” in the United States.Antisemitism was on the rise in the US before Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October, killing roughly 1,200 people and taking another 250 hostage. But the ensuing war has exacerbated the problem, with the law enforcement officials recording a spike in threats against Jewish Americans.Several of the proposals coming out of Washington DC have converged around college campuses, where hundreds of students have been arrested as part of pro-Palestinian demonstrations against Israel’s ongoing offensive in Gaza, which has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians and caused catastrophic levels of hunger.Many Jewish students have said that rhetoric common to the protests – for example, their denunciations of Zionism and calls for a Palestinian uprising – too often veers into antisemitism and poses a threat to their safety. A number of Democratic and Republican lawmakers, as well as the president, have echoed their fears, condemning documented instances of antisemitism on campus.But critics say some of the actions and polices under consideration threaten free speech and are part of a broader effort to silence legitimate criticism of Israel.“The view that these encampments, these student protests, are per se antisemitic, which I think some people have, is leading to very aggressive repression,” said Genevieve Lakier, a professor of law at the University of Chicago law school and an expert in the first amendment. “I also think it is incorrect, particularly when the student movement is being populated and led in many ways by Jewish students.”​The wave of student activism​ against the war in Gaza has renewed a charged debate over what constitutes antisemitism.Many supporters of Israel say the situation on college campuses validates the view, articulated in 2022 by the Anti-Defamation League’s chief executive, Jonathan Greenblatt, that “anti-Zionism is antisemitism”. But the Jewish and non-Jewish students involved with campus protests say their critiques of Israel, and its rightwing government’s prosecution of the war, are legitimate political speech that should not be conflated with antisemitism.In remarks at a Holocaust remembrance ceremony at the Capitol last week, Biden vowed to leverage the full force of the US government to fight hate and bigotry against Jews and outlined specific policy steps his administration was taking to confront antisemitic discrimination in schools and universities.The debate is also playing out on Capitol Hill, where the Senate is considering a bill that would codify into federal law a definition of antisemitism adopted in 2016 by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), an intergovernmental organization based in Stockholm.The IHRA defines antisemitism as “certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews”. But it also includes several modern examples of antisemitism that alarm free speech advocates, among them “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination”, claiming Israel’s existence is a “racist endeavor” and “applying double standards” to Israel that are not expected of other countries.Supporters say the bill, known as the Antisemitism Awareness Act, is critical.“We really believe it’s the single most important thing that Congress could do right now to help bring under control the rampant antisemitism we’ve seen on campus,” said Eric Fingerhut, president and CEO of the Jewish Federations of North America, which is lobbying in support of the legislation.But opponents are urging the Senate to block the bill, recently approved by the House in a resounding 320-91 vote,“In a democratic society, we’re allowed to engage in political advocacy and political protests that criticize any government in the world,” said Tyler Coward, lead counsel for government affairs at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (Fire). “Taking some ideas off the table for one country is classic viewpoint discrimination that the courts just won’t tolerate.”Fire has opposed iterations of this bill since it was introduced in 2016, citing concerns that the definition is “vague, overbroad, and includes criticism of Israeli government policy”.If enacted, the Department of Education would be required to use the definition when conducting federal investigations into alleged incidents of discrimination against Jewish students. Colleges or universities found to have violated the law could be stripped of federal funding.Fingerhut said free speech concerns were a “red herring”, arguing that the legislation was designed to give the Department of Education and academic institutions a “clear” standard for punishing acts of antisemitism.But the bill has drawn condemnation from pro-Palestinian advocacy groups who view it as an attempt to quash their ascendent movement.The Council on American-Islamic Relations (Cair) condemned the legislation as a “one-sided, and dishonest proposal about campus antisemitism that ignore[s] anti-Palestinian racism and conflates criticism of the Israeli government with antisemitism”.Since the Israel-Hamas conflict began seven months ago, the law enforcement officials have also warned of a rise in threats against Muslim and Arab Americans, and advocates are monitoring an uptick in Islamophobia on college campuses.One of the effort’s most notable opponents is a lawyer and scholar who authored the IHRA’s definition of antisemitism. Kenneth Stern, who is the director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate and is Jewish, has said the definition was created with the purpose of collecting better data on antisemitism across borders, not to be turned into a campus hate-speech code.“In my experience, people who care about campus antisemitism, and want to do something about it, sometimes advocate things that feel good … but actually do great harm,” he testified in 2017 against a previous iteration of the bill.That version stalled, but two years later, proponents won a significant victory when Donald Trump issued a sweeping executive order instructing federal agencies to use the IHRA definition when investigating civil rights complaints.In recent months, alarm over rising antisemitism – which Jewish groups say is not unique to college campuses – appears to have broadened support for the Antisemitism Awareness Act. Still, the vote split House Democrats, including some Jewish members of the caucus, who disagreed over whether it was the right legislative fix.The representative Josh Gottheimer, a New Jersey Democrat who sponsored the House bill, said it was a necessary response to the “tidal wave” of antisemitism, while Maryland representative Jamie Raskin, a Democrat and constitutional scholar, voted for the bill but called it “essentially symbolic”.“At this moment of anguish and confusion over the dangerous surge of antisemitism, authoritarianism and racism all over the country and the world, it seems unlikely that this meaningless ‘gotcha’ legislation can help much – but neither can it hurt much,” Raskin said.But the representative Jerry Nadler of New York, who describes himself as “an observant Jew, a proud Zionist, a strong supporter of Israel”, voted against the bill. In an op-ed for the Washington Post, Nadler explained that he supported the sentiment behind the bill, but feared the it could “sweep in perfectly valid criticism of the state of Israel that, alone, does not necessarily constitute unlawful harassment or antisemitism”.“I want my Jewish community to feel safe on campus, but I do not need it shielded from controversial views simply because those views are unpopular,” he wrote.The legislation has also drawn opposition from some conservatives over concerns that it could be used to persecute Christians who express the belief that Jews killed Jesus, an assertion widely regarded as antisemitic that historians and Christian leaders, including Pope Benedict, have rejected.Civil liberties advocates are also raising concerns about an anti-terrorism bill approved overwhelmingly by the House last month in the wake of Iran’s unprecedented missile assault on Israel. Proponents say the measure is a necessary guardrail to prevent US-based organizations from providing financial support to Israel’s enemies. But critics have called it an “Orwellian bill aimed at silencing nonprofits that support Palestinian human rights”.Last week, Biden announced a series of actions that build on what the White House has called “the most comprehensive and ambitious US government effort to counter antisemitism in American history”.It included new guidance by the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, sent to every school and college, that outlines examples of antisemitic discrimination and other forms of hate that could lead to a federal civil rights investigation. Since the 7 October attack, the Department of Education has launched more than 100 investigations into colleges and public school districts over allegations of “discrimination involving shared ancestry”, which include incidents of antisemitism and Islamophobia.The initiative also includes additional steps the Department of Homeland Security would take to help campuses improve safety.Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, House Republicans have vowed to use their majority to intensify scrutiny of antisemitism on college campuses, part of their election-year strategy to use the unrest as a political cudgel against Biden and the Democrats, who are deeply divided over the Israel-Gaza war.Wielding their oversight powers, several House Republican chairs have announced plans to investigate universities where pro-Palestinian student protests have flourished. On Wednesday, a House subcommittee held a hearing, titled Antisemitism on College Campuses, in which Jewish college students testified that their university administrations had failed to stop antisemitic threats and harassment. And during a congressional panel last week, Republicans challenged the leaders of some of the nation’s largest public school systems to do more to counter antisemitism in their schools.It follows a tense hearing on antisemitism with administration officials from some of the nation’s most prestigious universities that precipitated the resignations of the presidents of Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania. A congressional appearance last month by Columbia University’s president, Minouche Shafik, escalated the antiwar protests at her school that then spread to campuses across the country.“There are a lot of shades of McCarthyism as the House keeps calling people in to shame and name them, to spread moral panic,” said Lakier of the University of Chicago law school.Facing enormous pressure from Congress and the Department of Education, as well as from students, faculty, donors and alumni, universities and colleges, Lakier argued, are collectively showing less tolerance for the pro-Palestinian student protests than they did for Vietnam war-era campus activism.On dozens of university campuses, state and local police officers, sometimes in riot gear, have dispersed pro-Palestinian protesters, often at the request of university officials. As many as 2,400 people have been arrested during pro-Palestinian campus protests in recent weeks, while many students have been suspended or expelled.“From a first amendment perspective, one hopes you learn from the past,” Lakier said, “but to be repeating it is distressing.” More