Fine’s comments on X were in response to a post Omar made criticizing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s U.S. visit.

“I’m sure it is difficult to see us welcome the killer of so many of your fellow Muslim terrorists,” Fine wrote on X in response to Omar, who is Muslim and a Democrat.

“The unhinged, racist and Islamophobic comments made by Randy Fine about Rep. Ilhan Omar are bigoted and disgusting,” House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Whip Katherine Clark and Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar said in a statement.

Omar welcomed the Democrats’ support on X. Fine dismissed their criticism in a subsequent online post, labeling them sympathizers of extremism.

Robert McCaw from the Council on American-Islamic Relations advocacy group labeled Fine as “anti-Muslim” and pointed to past comments from him, saying his remarks should be condemned in a bipartisan manner.

“We are just weeks removed from heinous acts of political violence targeting elected officials in Minnesota for assassination,” the Democrats noted. A Democratic state assembly woman in Minnesota, where Omar is from, was fatally shot along with her husband in mid-June.

Advocates have raised concerns about escalatory rhetoric in the U.S. due to political polarization in recent years and, more recently, due to rising anti-Muslim sentiment and antisemitism during the Israel-Gaza war.

Omar’s post to which Fine responded, cast Netanyahu as a “war criminal.” The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant in November against the Israeli leader over war crimes in Gaza. Netanyahu denies the charges, despite damning evidence proving attacks on civilians, civilian infrastructure, including hospitals, refugee camps, aid distribution centers and more.

U.S. ally Israel has faced accusations of genocide at the International Court of Justice and of war crimes at the ICC over its military attacks and inhumane blockade on Gaza.

Source: The Daily Sabah

Article by Dalia Mogahed and Saher Selod

As the United States presidential election approaches, the race to attract voters has intensified. Among the different constituencies the Democrats and Republicans are battling over, there is one that stands out: the Muslim community.

Although Muslims constitute roughly 1 percent of the American population, they are an important voting bloc because they are concentrated in swing states, which are often narrowly won in elections.

In this election cycle, the Muslim community seems more united than ever over a single political issue: the war in Gaza.  Any candidate hoping to win over large segments of Muslim voters would have to address community demands for an end to the bloodshed in Palestine.

This is according to a new study published by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU) in partnership with Emgage and Change Research. It is based on a survey conducted in late June and early July focused on how Muslims in three swing states – Georgia, Pennsylvania and Michigan – intend to vote in the 2024 presidential election.

What we found is that President Joe Biden’s handling of the war in Gaza has turned Muslims, who in 2020 were some of his biggest supporters, into his sharpest detractors.

In 2020, about 65 percent of Muslim voters in these states showed up to cast their ballots for Biden. This support was vital to his electoral victory because he won key swing states by small margins. He won Georgia by just 12,000 votes, a state where more than 61,000 Muslims voted, and Pennsylvania by 81,000 votes, where 125,000 Muslims voted.

By contrast, in our survey, conducted before Biden dropped out of the presidential race, only 12 percent of respondents said they would vote for him, marking a dramatic drop in support not seen among any other group studied. While this impacts the presidential race, it has also manifested in a broader disillusionment with the establishment of the Democratic Party.

The war on Gaza has unified Muslim voters in a way that no other issue has in recent memory. According to the 2020 American Muslim Poll conducted by ISPU, healthcare (19 percent), the economy (14 percent) and social justice (13 percent) were the top voting issues for Muslim voters.

Compare that with 2024: Across the partisan spectrum, the top priority of Muslim voters in Georgia, Pennsylvania and Michigan is the war in Gaza (61 percent), followed by keeping the US out of foreign wars (22 percent).

Reduction of military aid to Israel also garnered the support of the vast majority of Muslim voters in our study, who, regardless of partisan sentiments, all overwhelmingly see this policy as a reason to vote for a candidate. While a war overseas may seem far from the daily concerns of American Muslim voters, many see the US role – providing unconditional aid and diplomatic cover to Israel – as complicity in the continued oppression of Palestinians.

The importance of the war in Gaza for Muslim voters was made clear months before we conducted our survey. The Muslim community played a leading role in the Uncommitted National Movement, which urged Democratic voters to vote “uncommitted” in presidential primaries in their states. The initiative managed to get more than 700,000 Democrats to do so, making clear their demand for a change in the Biden administration’s tone and policy on Israel and Palestine.

This dramatic Muslim migration away from Biden is not a wholesale leap to the other side of the aisle, however. Muslim support for Trump inched up from 18 percent in 2020 to 22 percent in 2024 in Georgia, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Overwhelmingly, former Muslim supporters of Biden are moving to third parties or are still undecided. Our study found that nearly a third of Muslim voters will either vote a third-party candidate (27 percent) or write in a candidate (3 percent). About 17 percent of Muslims said they have yet to decide on a candidate compared with 6 percent of the general public.

This means there is still room and time for candidates to win over this vital constituency. And it seems they are trying.

Not only has Biden pulled out of the race, but Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris has signaled she is distancing herself from his unflinching support for Israel’s war on Gaza. In July, the vice president did not attend Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress, said she will not be silent about the suffering in Gaza and made clear her support for a ceasefire.

In August, she picked as her running mate Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, who is widely regarded as more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause than short-listed Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro. This year, Walz praised uncommitted voters in Minnesota, calling them “civically engaged” and saying, “This issue is a humanitarian crisis. They have every right to be heard.”

And while Muslims were cautiously optimistic at best, the Harris campaign’s refusal to allow a Palestinian American to speak at the Democratic National Convention last week has soured this hope.

Third-party candidates Jill Stein and Cornel West have both been vocal in their support for the people of Gaza. West chose Melina Abdullah, a Black Muslim woman as his running mate. Stein chose Muslim activist and academic Rudolph “Butch” Ware.

Even Republican candidate Donald Trump’s campaign is reaching out to Arab American voters – a surprise given the anti-Muslim rhetoric he used when campaigning in 2016. People associated with his campaign have been trying to woo Arab voters in swing states. Trump’s youngest daughter, Tiffany, married the son of a Lebanese American businessman, Massad Boulous, who has been trying to persuade Arabs in Michigan to vote for the former president due to the current administration’s failed policy in Gaza.

The Muslim community’s mobilization on Palestine has come at a heavy cost for many. The Council on American Islamic Relations reported an unprecedented spike in incidents of bias: a 56 percent increase in reports of Islamophobia in 2023. Anti-Palestinian racism has also skyrocketed, a worrying trend reflected in the shooting of three Palestinian students in Vermont who were wearing the keffiyeh scarf. Thousands – many of them Muslim students – were arrested at campus protests, and many were threatened with expulsion or faced criminal charges for their pro-Palestinian activism at colleges and universities across the US.

And yet even with the consequences of taking a public stance on Palestine, Muslim voters appear to be undeterred this time around. Solidarity with the people of Gaza has emerged as the single most important issue for American Muslim voters, a group no candidate can afford to ignore.

Source: Al Jazeera English

Arab Americans, many (though not all) of whom have historically aligned themselves with the Democratic Party, were relieved for another reason. To them, Biden has been the single-biggest cheerleader of Israel’s punishing and relentless assault on Gaza, which has over nearly 10 months claimed the lives of at least 39,000 Palestinians, according to the Hamas-led Gaza Health Ministry, whose figures are considered reliable by the U.S. and the U.N. While the president has shown deep empathy with Israelis since Hamas’s deadly Oct. 7 attack on Israel, which killed some 1,200 people, he has struggled to convey the same level of sympathy towards Palestinians—and, at one point, even cast doubt on the extent of the Palestinian death toll in Gaza.

“I don’t think he was as balanced as he could have been, and that was really hurtful to a lot of people,” says Jasmine El-Gamal, an Arab American and former Middle East adviser at the Pentagon.

While many Arab Americans might have anticipated this from Trump, who’s made no secret of his disdain for Palestinians (he notably used their identity as a slur against Biden during their debate last month), El-Gamal says they expected more from the purported “empath-in-chief.” Biden’s failure to treat rising anti-Semitism and rising anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia with an equal sense of urgency left many feeling particularly deflated. “They’re similar threats, and they should be addressed with similar urgency, and I don’t think that was the impression that was coming out of the Biden administration,” El-Gamal says, noting that it made her and others feel “deprioritized as a human being because of your identity.”

That feeling had a tangible impact: Within the first month of the war, Arab American support for Biden and the Democratic Party dropped to the lowest levels ever recorded. Michigan, a critical battleground state that boasts one of the largest Arab American populations in the country, appeared all but lost.

With Biden out of the race, the prevailing question now is: Can Harris win them back? So far, there seems to be a guarded optimism. Several Arab American activists and analysts who spoke with TIME say that their community is still waiting to see what changes, if any, the presumed Democratic nominee will pledge to bring to U.S.’s policy on Gaza should she win in November. Most all of them recognize that Harris has the potential to have a better relationship with Arab Americans than her predecessor—a relatively low bar that shouldn’t be too difficult for Harris to clear. But they don’t want her to take their support for granted, either.

“There’s a sense of hope,” James Zogby, the founder and president of the Arab American Institute, tells TIME of Biden’s decision to end his reelection bid. His organization’s latest nationwide poll of Arab Americans, conducted in May, found that an overwhelming majority (79%) have an unfavorable view of the president. Although AAI doesn’t yet have polling on views towards Harris, Zogby says that she has largely been seen as more empathetic. “She’s reached out to the community and individuals in different ways to let them know of her concern and her staff have been responsive,” he says, “which is far different than the White House.”

For those who couldn’t countenance a vote for Biden but regard Trump as a threat to the country, the vice president’s candidacy offers a much-needed reprieve. Despite the deep animosity towards Biden, Zogby says AAI’s polling has shown that the Democrats could win back much of support they lost among Arab American voters—many of whom joined the “uncommitted” campaign in a bid to pressure Biden to change tack on Gaza—if there’s a meaningful policy shift.

In the aforementioned poll, 60% of those surveyed said they’d be more likely to vote for Biden in November if he were to demand an immediate ceasefire and unimpeded humanitarian aid into Gaza or if he were to suspend diplomatic support and arms shipments to Israel until they implement a ceasefire and withdraw forces from Gaza. While Biden has unveiled a proposal to end the war that would involve a six-week ceasefire and an Israeli withdrawal from populated areas of Gaza, he has been less willing to withhold military aid to Israel, save for only the largest of munitions.

While Harris hasn’t articulated any major policy deviations from Biden when it comes to Gaza—like the president, she has repeatedly pledged support for Israel’s security and self-defense—she hasn’t been seen as driving the administration’s policies on this issue either. Instead, she has offered Americans a rhetorically different approach. In March, she became the first senior administration official to call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. She was also quicker than Biden to sound the alarm about the humanitarian catastrophe in the besieged enclave, where scores of Palestinians have been forced to live in inhumane, famine-like conditions, and explicitly laid blame on the Israeli government for its part in creating the crisis.

Unlike Biden, whose longtime devolution to the Jewish state has earned him the reputation of being perhaps most pro-Israel American president in history, Harris has long been regarded as being more evenly empathetic when it comes to Israelis and Palestinians. Hala Rharrit, a former American diplomat and Arabic language spokesperson in the U.S. government who resigned earlier this year in protest of the Biden administration’s Gaza policy, tells TIME that the State Department often relied on her speeches when communicating to the Arab world for this reason.

Some Arab Americans are hopeful that this record could make Harris uniquely suited to mending the divide within the Democratic Party as a result of the war on Gaza. “I think she’s the only one who can unite us,” says Sami Khalidi, the president of the Dearborn Democratic Club and a former 2020 Biden delegate who is due to reprise his role at the upcoming Democratic convention in Chicago. He notes that while Arab Americans in his community still want to wait and see who Harris might pick as her running mate, “they favor her over Trump.”

Not all Arab Americans share this view. Indeed, many will be of the belief that Harris’s record, as Biden’s vice president, is inextricable from current U.S. policy. “There’s a genuine and really deep-seated anger and hurt that the Arab American community and the Palestinian American community, in particular, has felt,” Tariq Kenney-Shawa, a U.S. policy fellow at Al-Shabaka, a Palestinian think tank and policy network, tells TIME, noting that while these communities may be able to engage with Harris in the way they were unable to with Biden, “There’s still going to be a lot of Palestinian Americans and progressive Americans who are like, ‘That’s it, I’ve had enough of the establishment Democratic Party,’ and this kind of ties into a deeper resentment around electoral politics.” Some “uncommitted” delegates have already signaled that they will withhold their endorsement unless Harris commits to big policy shifts, such as ending military aid to Israel.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to Washington offers an early test of how Harris will approach the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should she win the presidency. Many Arab Americans and progressive Democrats perturbed by Israel’s conduct in Gaza were cheered by Harris’s decision not to preside over Netanyahu’s speech to Congress—a scheduling conflict, her team said, that many nonetheless regarded as a clear snub. But perhaps the clearest sign of her strategy will be revealed following her meeting with the Israeli premier later today, in which she will reportedly tell him that “it is time for the war to end.”

“I don’t think anyone expects her to drastically announce a shift from Biden, especially when she is running [for the presidential nomination],” Matt Duss, the executive vice president of the Center for International Policy and a former chief foreign policy advisor to Sen. Bernie Sanders, tells TIME. “But I think there are things she can say that will indicate a different path.” One option championed by several of Democratic lawmakers is to consistently apply U.S. laws to future military aid to Israel, which prohibits American tax dollars from going to foreign military units suspected of committing human rights violations.

“I’m optimistic, but I’m waiting,” says Tariq Habash, a Palestinian American who earlier this year became the second political appointee to resign over the Biden administration’s Gaza policy. He and others tell TIME that while they are realistic about what is possible when it comes to U.S. policy in the Middle East, they also believe that there is leeway for change. “It is past time for talking points,” Habash says. “You also have to back it up with action.” If Harris does, he says, maybe Arab Americans will too.

Source: Time Magazine

Zaynab Mohamed became the winner in the race to represent State Senate District 63, making history as the youngest woman and one of the first Black women elected to the Minnesota Senate.

In Illinois, Democrats Abdelnasser Rashid won the race to represent State House Districts 21, receiving more than 65% of the votes.

Nabeela Syed also won the race to represent State House Districts 51. They both became the first Muslims elected to the Illinois State Legislature.

Nabilah Islam who prevailed in the race to represent Georgia State Senate District 7, joined incumbent State Senator Sheikh Rahman, the lone Muslim in the State Legislature, who didn’t have a challenger for the District 5 seat.

Nabilah Islam is the first Muslim woman elected to the State Senate while Romman is the first Muslim woman elected to the State House of Representatives and became the winner to represent District 97.

Democrat Munira Abdullahi, who didn’t have a challenger in the general election for Ohio State House District 9, became the first Muslim elected to the Ohio State Legislature.

Abdullahi, a 26-year-old youth director, is also the first Muslim woman to win a seat in the Ohio Legislature.

Ismail Mohamed, one of the city’s first Somali-born attorneys licensed to practice in the state, defeated his opponent Republican J. Josiah Lanning, winning 80% to 20% of the vote.

Democrat 26-year-old Mana Abdi made history in Maine when she was elected to represent State House District 95.

Abdi was unopposed in the general election after her Republican challenger withdrew from the race after posting on Facebook that Muslims “should not be allowed to hold public office.”

South Portland Mayor Deqa Dhalac joined her in the State House of Representatives after getting elected to represent the Maine House of Representatives District 120.

Source: AboutIslam.net

A source close to the drafters said that the government’s antisemitism monitor, a position created in 2004, was a model for the proposal. The name proposed in the letter, Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combatting Islamophobia, is a precise echo of the existing office, Special Envoy To Monitor and Combat Antisemitism.

“In recent years, we have seen a dramatic increase in violent Islamophobia and the persecution of Muslims manifesting itself around the world,” said the letter, which cites ongoing persecution of Uyghur Muslims in China and Rohingya Muslims in Burma, as well as a mass casualty attack on a New Zealand mosque in 2019 and a recent deadly attack on a Muslim family in London, Ontario.

Among the 23 Democrats signing are the House’s two other Muslims, Andre Carson of Indiana and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, and seven of the 25 Jewish Democrats in the House.

Source: Jewish Telegraphic Agency

A White House event meant to mark a Muslim holiday attracted condemnation and boycotts from some Democrats and American Muslim groups in the context of growing violence in the Middle East. The White House hosted a virtual celebration on Sunday (May 16) to mark Eid al-Fitr, an important holiday that marks the end of Ramadan, the month of fasting. The world’s Muslims observed the holiday on Thursday. “We also believe that Palestinians and Israelis equally deserve to live in safety and security,” President Joe Biden said during the video address released Sunday, in which he and first lady Jill Biden sent warm wishes to the world’s 1.8 billion Muslims.

But an open letter from the Muslim Delegates and Allies Coalition, signed by some 60 members of the Democratic Party, pushed back against the timing and fanfare of the event. “In lieu of flowers or condolences for martyred Palestinian children, or even a White House Eid celebration, we request the United States recognize dignity rights worldwide. A first step in recognizing our humanity would be to not allow a policy of mass slaughter in the sacred Islamic month of Ramadan.”

A number of other Muslim leaders and organizations, such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations, boycotted the event.

Source: Religion News Service (RNS)

Now, however, with anti-Muslim sentiment ablaze among supporters of Donald Trump, and the president hardly discouraging it, that love-in is a distant memory. American Muslims are gaining political visibility, but only on the far left of the spectrum. Symptomatic of this shift is the election to the House of Representatives of two Muslim women (Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar) who along with two female colleagues, also left-wing Democrats, have been taunted by Mr. Trump and his supporters.

A huge change in Muslim sentiment was clear in the 2004 presidential race and confirmed by the 2008 contest won by Barack Obama. By 2007 some 63% of American Muslims at least “leaned towards” the Democrats, against only 11% for the Republicans. These figures have not changed very much since, according to Pew Research, a pollster. Among Muslims who voted in the 2016 presidential race, only 8% said they opted for Mr Trump (who had declared that “Islam hates us”) and 78% for Hillary Clinton…

Continue reading at: The Economist

The ruling center-right Liberal Party and the opposition Social Democrats both say a tough stance in immigration is needed to protect Denmark’s cherished welfare system and to integrate the migrants and refugees already in the country. The number of immigrants from non-Western countries and their descendants who have experienced discrimination because of their ethnic background rose to 48% last year from 43% two years earlier, according to the National Integration Barometer.

The number of racially or religiously motivated hate crimes registered by Danish police jumped to 365 in 2017 from 228 the year before. That could be higher as not all cases are reported…The Danish Institute for Human Rights has urged politicians to draw up plans to combat racism and hate crimes, especially against Muslims and Jews.

Denmark’s 320,000 Muslims are about 5.5 percent of the population, a slightly higher proportion than in the rest of Europe, according to Danish and U.S. estimates. The shift to the right by Denmark’s mainstream parties runs counter to outsiders’ traditional views of liberal Scandinavia, but has its parallels elsewhere in Europe, particularly since large numbers of migrants arrived there in 2015.

Continue reading at: Reuters

Something remarkable has happened in the middle of an American presidential campaign noted for its inflammatory rhetoric about Islam and Muslims, and marred by horrific mass violence perpetrated on American soil in the name of Islam: American public attitudeths toward the Muslim people and the Muslim religion have not worsened—in fact they have become progressively more favorable, even after the Orlando shooting. That’s what two new polls show, one taken two weeks before Orlando, the other two weeks after, which released at the Brookings Institution on Monday, July 11, 2016.

Comparing the results of three University of Maryland national polls—all fielded by Neilson Scarborough—taken in November 2015, in May 2016 and in June 2016 (after the June 12th Orlando shooting), the trends are surprising. Asked about their views of the Muslim people, respondents who expressed favorable views went from 53 percent in November 2015, to 58 percent in May 2016, to 62 percent in June 2016. At the same time, favorable views of Islam went from 37 percent, to 42 percent, to 44 percent over the same period—still under half, but with marked improvement over a period of seven months. (See the survey methodology here.)

In parallel, a “clash of civilization” question, asking about the compatibility of Islamic and Western religious and social traditions, showed similar trends. The percentage of those who said the two were compatible went up from 57 percent, to 61 percent, to 64 percent over the three polls.

On all three issues, Republican views remained relatively fixed over the three polls. The change occurred among Democrats and Independents. For example, among Democrats, favorable views of the Muslim people rose 12 points. Among independents, that number rose 17 points.

How does one account for these results? Four factors may provide some context for why, despite heated campaign rhetoric and the worst mass shooting in American history, views of Islam and Muslims have not worsened and have instead, in some measurable cases, improved…

 Click here to see the full results of the poll and here to see more key findings.

Continue reading at: Politico Magazine