‘Islamophobic’ Treatment of Muslim Court Pick by GOP Senators Sparks Backlash
The Council on American-Islamic Relations, the largest Muslim civil rights organization in the country, on Friday denounced three Republican senators for their treatment of President Joe Biden’s historic judicial nominee Adeel Mangi during his recent confirmation hearing.
GOP Sens. Ted Cruz (Texas), Tom Cotton (Ark.) and Josh Hawley (Mo.) berated and interrupted Mangi in his Wednesday hearing in the Senate judiciary committee, demanding that Mangi, who is Muslim, share his personal views on the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks as well as the Oct. 7 Hamas attack and the Israeli-Hamas conflict in general.
Mangi, if confirmed, will be the nation’s first ever Muslim American appeals court judge, and only the third Muslim American federal judge. Biden nominated him to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit, based in Philadelphia.
“We strongly condemn Senators Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley for subjecting Mr. Mangi to irrelevant, hostile questions about Israel and Palestine,” Edward Ahmed Mitchell, CAIR’s national deputy director, said in a statement.
“Singling out a Muslim judicial nominee and forcing him to answer ‘gotcha questions’ about the Middle East simply because of faith or because of his tangential connections to Muslims who comment on the Middle East is Islamophobic and un-American,” Mitchell said. “So is raising the hateful trope that presumptively assumes that Muslims are antisemitic.”
Read More:
Mitchell called on all senators “to reject this nonsense and start assessing Muslim American judicial nominees based on their expertise and qualifications, like all other nominees.”
Questions about personal views are inappropriate for any judicial nominee, as they are only supposed to talk about their legal expertise. Even so, the line of questioning that Mangi faced was particularly offensive, given that he is Muslim and repeatedly had to attest that he wasn’t antisemitic or sympathetic to terrorists.
At best, the Republican senators’ questioning was terrible optics. At worst, it was plainly Islamophobic.
Pressed to express views on the Palestinian issue, Mangi said, “I have no basis as a judicial nominee to cast a view on the Middle East.”
Read More:
Durbin apologized to Mangi for the way he was treated, and noted that his nomination was endorsed by the National Council of Jewish Women.
Republican senators have “reached a new low,” Durbin said, “hurling unfounded accusations of antisemitism at an historic Muslim American judicial nominee today.”
Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), also on the committee, said it was shameful to watch how Mangi was treated. Booker recommended Mangi’s nomination to the White House.
“I do know that Muslim Americans who have strong views of condemning antisemitism, condemning terrorism, are often forced to answer questions like that over and over again,” Booker said. “That, in itself, for so many Muslim Americans is insulting and unfortunate.”
Source: Huffpost.com
