What do a six-year-old Chicago boy, a family in Maryland, a California sixth grader, a Florida State University student senate president, and a 46-year-old corporate lawyer from New Jersey have in common?
They are all victims of Islamophobia and/or anti-Palestinian racism.
Six-year-old Palestinian-American Wadea Al-Fayoume was murdered by his family’s landlord in Chicago in October 2023. According to his mother, who was also attacked, the landlord yelled, “You Muslims must die!” before attempting to choke and stab her.
A Maryland family that donated to a mosque for years had their donation flagged by PayPal with the following message: “In light of the ongoing national emergency in Israel, there may be delays in both the delivery of your purchase and communication from sellers.”
In 2021, a California public school counselor removed a Palestinian sixth grader from her class because her T-shirt bearing the Arabic words “Free Palestine” (فلسطين الحرة) was said to promote violence and made other students feel unsafe.
Ahmad Daraldik was the first Palestinian-American elected president of the Florida State University student senate in June 2020. Almost immediately, Daraldik faced a harassment campaign—he was attacked as unfit for office; he endured bullying, including Islamophobic, racist, violent, and misogynistic private messages. Florida legislators encouraged students to take action against him and even threatened to withdraw state funding for the school.
Adeel Mangi has lived in the United States for over 20 years. He was born in Pakistan and educated with distinction at Oxford University and Harvard Law School. A partner in a New York firm, he has a long record of pro bono advocacy, including civil rights and cases relating to religious freedom. In November 2023, President Joe Biden nominated Mangi to a seat on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals; if confirmed, he would become the first Muslim to serve as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals.
The New Yorker reported that at Mangi’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in May 2024, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) said, “I’m perhaps most troubled by the fact that you served as an advisory board member for the Center for Security, Race and Rights at Rutgers Law School from 2019 to 2023. And, sadly, I think that center embraces the same extremism and myopia that we saw on display from the presidents of Harvard, M.I.T., and Penn.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) cited a 2021 symposium co-sponsored by the Rutgers center entitled “Whose Narrative? 20 Years Since September 11, 2001,” which Graham considered “deeply hateful and antisemitic.” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) demanded to know if Mangi personally considered Israel to be a “violent colonialist state.” Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) held up a Washington Times op-ed that called Mangi “Hamas’ favorite judicial nominee.”
Prominent Jewish organizations, including the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee, defended Mangi, stating that the Republican senators’ meritless attacks amounted to “inappropriate and prejudicial treatment,” arguing that “this was an attempt to create controversy where one did not exist.” Mangi’s nomination has not yet been brought to the floor.
In their May 2024 book, Global Islamophobia and the Rise of Populism, Sahar Aziz and John Esposito note the disturbing rise of Islamophobia worldwide. Blaming Muslim minorities for economic, political, and social problems is an increasingly common rhetorical strategy for politicians in countries globally. A narrative of the “threatening Muslim invader” is prevalent, regardless of whether the targets of such rhetoric are born citizens or new arrivals.
The authors point to the deadly and devastating consequences for Uyghurs in China—indefinitely detained in concentration camps—Indian Muslims attacked in pogroms, and the Rohingya victims of genocide. In the West, Muslims are banned from wearing hijabs, building minarets, opening Islamic schools, or legally immigrating to certain countries. In the United States, Europe, and India, Islamophobic rhetoric is essentially normalized.
Islamophobia is commonly understood to be a fear, hatred, or prejudice toward Islam and Muslims that results in a pattern of discrimination and oppression. Islamophobia creates a distorted understanding of Islam and Muslims by transforming the global and historical faith tradition of Islam, along with the rich history of the cultural and ethnic diversity of its adherents, into a set of stereotyped characteristics most often reducible to themes of violence, civilizational subversion, and fundamental otherness.
Anti-Palestinian racism may also be Islamophobic, but importantly, not all Palestinians (or all Arabs) are Muslim (just as not all Muslims are Arab). Anti-Palestinian racism foments a distinct form of discrimination faced by Palestinians and those advocating for Palestinian rights (including non-Arabs and non-Muslims, e.g., Christians and Jews). Palestinians and their advocates encounter anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia regardless of whether they identify as secular, Muslim, Christian, Druze, or Jewish.
In her 2024 article “Palestine as a Litmus Test for Transitional Justice,” Matiangai V.S. Sirleaf notes that groups in the Middle East, including both Arabs and Jews, have historically fallen in and outside constructed ideas of European whiteness. Sirleaf makes reference to the writings of Edward Said, who observed that Palestinians are subject to Orientalism—a worldview that she explains depicts people from the Middle East as inferior in comparison to those in the West.
Anti-Palestinian racism silences, excludes, erases, stereotypes, defames, and dehumanizes Palestinians. This is used to deny and justify violence against Palestinians and fails to acknowledge Palestinians as Indigenous people with a collective identity while erasing their human rights and equal dignity and worth.
The No Fly List, created in 2003, is a secret “terror watchlist” that allegedly identifies individuals suspected of being involved in terrorism or related activities. While the U.S. government provides neither reasons nor documentation to the individual(s) involved, it is reported that individuals are often placed on the watchlist after international travel to Muslim-majority countries. Following the inadvertent exposure of the list by an airline in 2023, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) found that over 98 percent of the names are identifiably Muslim/Arab.
While president, Donald Trump took Islamophobia as an official policy to new heights with his Muslim Ban, among other acts, official and non-official. His rhetoric of divisiveness gave permission for anti-Muslim bigotry to emerge from the shadows without having to invoke terrorism as a rationalization. Islamophobia is now embedded deeply in our social and political terrain.
The predominant narrative of Palestinians as a dangerous and imminent threat to Israel and Jews everywhere has been assisted by eliminating moderate and pragmatic voices. Leading nonviolent and secular Palestinian advocates of a negotiated end to Israel’s occupation have for decades been sidelined, arrested, deported, and/or killed.
The struggle over the definition of antisemitism has also played a significant role in defining Islamophobia in at least three ways. This struggle centers on the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism. Israel and many representing “mainstream” American and European Jewish organizations promote it, claiming that it is a neutral framework and universally accepted. It is neither. Of its 11 examples of antisemitism, seven relate to Israel.
First, the assertion that identification with and support for Israel are intrinsic to Jewish identity facilitates the supposition that criticism of Israel is criticism of the Jewish people, which many would call antisemitism. The flaw in this thinking is that not all criticisms of Israel are discriminatory (though they may overlap). Moreover, Israel is not central or even relevant to all Jews. Many Jews do not support the Israeli government’s policies, do not relate to Israel as “the Jewish homeland,” and are even uncomfortable with the idea of a religious state.
Second, Jewish identities—like Muslim identities—reflect religious beliefs and diverse cultures. Referring again to Said’s theory of Orientalism, Israel’s history of racial and socioeconomic discrimination among its Jewish population is well established. To argue that Jews everywhere feel “safer” because of the existence of the state of Israel is highly contested by Jews in the United States and throughout the world.
Third, the IHRA definition of antisemitism has exacerbated this problem because it equates criticism of Israel with antisemitism per se. The IHRA definition of antisemitism has been weaponized on college campuses, at all levels of government, and in corporate spheres—literally everywhere—to silence opposition to Israeli policies.
Islamophobia has also been juxtaposed against antisemitism, and Muslims are seen as the agents of antisemitism. Critically, this disguises the pervasive fact that both Jews and Palestinians are considered semitic people, and the deeply held racist, xenophobic, and neo-genocidal tendencies are firmly grounded in the passions of right-wing white supremacists. In today’s political environment, the loudest, most aggressive Islamophobes include the most persistent Holocaust deniers.
The complexity of the various political agendas, compounded by the sensitive history of Jewish and Palestinian relationships with one another as well as with the West, leave the conversations open to political manipulation, extreme hypocrisy, as well as emotional and intellectual dishonesty, leading to disinformation on all sides.
In 2002, the World Union of Jewish Students published the Hasbara Handbook: Promoting Israel on Campus. The handbook advocates tactics for defending Israel in public forums, e.g., “[l]isteners have deep-seated fears of violence and disorder, which can be tapped into by creating false dichotomies.” Its propaganda strategies include “Call[ing] demonstrations ‘riots,’ many Palestinian political organizations ‘terror organizations,’ and so on. Listeners are too preoccupied by the threat of terrible things to think critically about the speaker’s message.”
From the same playbook, a GOP-affiliated political action committee placed ads in Michigan Muslim and Arab American communities emphasizing Vice President Kamala Harris’s long-standing support for Israel, portraying her husband, Doug Emhoff, exercising his Jewish faith and the Israeli flag. It was a maliciously cynical dog whistle implying that Harris and Emhoff are enemies of Palestine—another example of politicians using antisemitism for short-term political gain.
In today’s political environment, where modern American so-called populism is often little more than thinly disguised white supremacy, it is imperative that, as lawyers, our discussions about Muslims, Jews, Palestinians, and their advocates, and about Israel, Palestine, and the Arab world, be specific and scrupulously truthful. We must pierce through the shroud of false “facts” and misinformation.
Defenders of human rights must ground their arguments in law, fundamental legal principles, and verifiable facts so that each person, regardless of race, religion, gender, ethnic identity, or national origin, is treated with the same human dignity, rights, and privileges to which we all are entitled. These issues must be less about power and control; they must be about the rule of law and justice for all.
Please note: The views expressed herein have not been approved by the House of Delegates, the Board of Governors, the Section of Civil Rights and Social Justice or the Human Rights Editorial Board of the American Bar Association and, accordingly, should not be construed as representing the policy of the American Bar Association. They are the views of the individual authors themselves in their personal capacities.
