The 47^th American president’s inauguration ceremony saw a group of four Christian clergymen and a Jewish rabbi delivering a benediction to Donald Trump.

Notably absent from the ceremony was Imam Husham Al-Husainy, a Shia Muslim cleric from Dearborn, Michigan, who was set to make history as the first Muslim leader to speak at an American presidential inauguration.

The absence was unexpected, especially considering the fact that Al-Husainy was one of the few Muslim leaders to endorse Trump in the final stretch of the election, when the Muslim electorate was often alienated by the former president’s rhetoric.

This was despite a spokesperson for the inauguration committee having previously confirmed his participation, which was widely viewed as a symbolic gesture, reflecting Donald Trump’s surprising gains among Muslim American voters during the 2024 election.

“I am supporting Donald Trump because he opposes gay marriage and he is the most Christian person in the election,” Al-Husainy stated in a previous interview.

“He will return us to conservative values, and I am a Muslim and I will stand with whoever opposes gay marriage,” he told the Hill.

The inauguration committee has yet to issue a statement explaining why Al-Husainy was removed from the final lineup.

Yet, what is certain is that Al-Husainy’s association with Trump has drawn the ire of some pro-Israel circles.

The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), one of the oldest pro-Israel advocacy organisations in the US, was particularly vocal in opposing his inclusion.

Last week, the ZOA released a statement condemning his planned participation, calling him an “anti-Semite and Hezbollah apologist” and warning that keeping Al-Husainy in the program would “send a terrible message” and stain Trump’s administration.

In a statement, the organization’s president Morton A. Klein cited Al-Husainy’s participation in a 2006 pro-Hezbollah rally in Dearborn, where he allegedly held up a photo of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.

Klein also cited the cleric’s 2007 appearance on the Fox News show “Hannity & Colmes”, in which Al-Husainy allegedly declined to label Hezbollah as a terrorist organization, describing it instead as “a Lebanese organization” and “party of God”.

His statement also pointed to Al-Husainy’s leadership of the Karbalaa Islamic Education Center, which organised a 2015 rally where he reportedly wished “death upon Saudi Arabia” and called the Saudis “agents of the Jews” whose “Zionist planes” brought destruction to Yemen.

“Americans—including unprecedented numbers of American Jews—voted for President Trump in the belief that he will once again make antisemitism unacceptable in America – and have long awaited Donald Trump’s return to the presidency on January 20th,” the statement read.

“Don’t mar that day,” it concluded with a warning.

The ZOA, founded in 1897 as the Federation of American Zionists, played a pivotal role in advocating for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, well before the creation of the State of Israel in 1948.

ZOA has been particularly active in opposing public figures or initiatives it views as hostile to Israel, having called for counter-protests against events critical of Israel’s founding and campaigning against the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

Source: TRT World

Describing the October 7 Hamas attacks as a “watershed moment,” Asim Ijaz Khwaja, the co-chair of Harvard’s task force on combating anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and anti-Palestinian bias, spoke on Monday evening with Aslı Ü. Bâli, a Yale scholar of international and human rights law and president of the Middle East Studies Association, about the profound consequences of the past 13 months on American college campuses and American Muslims. The two painted a sobering picture of renewed negative attention and harassment directed toward people of Middle Eastern descent. They also outlined what they saw as a worrying retreat by university administrators amid political attacks against their students and their mission.

The event was hosted by the Radcliffe Institute, as the second of a two-part discussion about this still-unfolding tumultuous period; earlier this month, Radcliffe dean Tomiko Brown-Nagin talked with Frankfurter professor of law Noah Feldman about his newly published book, To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People.

Hamas’s attack on Israel sparked a war in the Middle East and set off a massive wave of pro-Palestinian protests in the United States, perhaps most visibly by students on college campuses, including Harvard’s. Student activism provoked an intense and powerful backlash: donors at multiple universities, as at Harvard, have rescinded their donations or threatened to stop giving; students involved in protests across the country have been arrested and in some cases charged with crimes, and many have been doxed or seen employment offers withdrawn. Investigations into antisemitic incidents and charges of antisemitism on American campuses have included highly publicized Congressional hearings, with politicians interrogating prominent university presidents; some of those administrators, including former president Claudine Gay, have lost their jobs. In the wake of this backlash, many institutions, including Harvard, are rethinking campus policies regarding speech and protest, adopting new stances of neutrality on global events, and redoubling efforts to facilitate critical inquiry and open dialogue.

In addition to all these consequences, Khwaja, the Sumitomo-FASID professor of international finance and development at the Harvard Kennedy School, noted the heightened focus and suspicion that Muslims and people of Arab descent have faced during the past year. He also noted that it isn’t the first time that’s happened: 9/11 was a similar watershed moment, with monumental and lasting effects, and it is the backdrop, he and Bâli said, for everything that’s happened since October 7.

Bâli recalled how, in the days after 9/11, the U.S. government used selective enforcement of immigration laws to sweep up Muslim immigrant men in mass arrests. They were released only after they’d been cleared of suspicion of involvement in the terrorist attacks, “reversing the presumption of innocence.” Other steps soon followed: prohibitions on speech—including pro-Palestinian speech—and coercive re-registration requirements for visa-holders from the Middle East. “There was an exponential increase in mass surveillance,” she said, “with intense scrutiny on Muslim American communities in particular, and government racial profiling practices, which singled out Muslims and people of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and Arab descent,” and led to presumptions of disloyalty and increased criminal punishments. Hate crimes rose, and Muslims, who were now intensely policed, became a racialized community—although one that, ironically, was not entitled to formal protections against racial discrimination, Bâli noted. These events so stigmatized Muslims that in 2017, decades after 9/11, the Trump administration instituted a ban on Muslims entering the country, which was later declared constitutional, albeit in an altered form, by the Supreme Court.

Those reverberations can be seen, Bâli argued, in the current upheavals over Israel and Palestine. Bâli noted the numerous armed conflicts, many with direct U.S. involvement, that have erupted in the broader Middle East in the years since 9/11—in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also Libya, Tunisia, Yemen, Syria—and the “waves of grief and trauma” for the Muslim diaspora watching from abroad, who experience their connection to the region as a source of their own insecurity. “I think part of what explains what’s happening on our campuses is that there’s a growing awareness among Americans of all backgrounds of some of the things that have been truly unjust consequences” of these wars and their effects on American Muslims. “So what we saw in the last year is the broadest, widest mobilization ever in support of Palestinian rights in the United States. And that occurred…because non-Arab, non-Muslim students were making common cause very broadly in solidarity with a community they don’t identify with on any ethnic basis.” It’s important to remember, she added, that today’s students grew up almost entirely in the shadow of 9/11, watching its effects unfold. “There is really a reckoning with the long-term relationship that the United States has had to many of the destabilizing events in these regions, and an understanding that there is some responsibility.”

The punitive response against the Muslim community after the latest watershed moment, when Hamas terrorists killed more than 1,200 people in southern Israel, raped women, and took more than 200 others, including children, hostage, alarmed Bâli in its vehemence. She compared the repression of dissent and protest on American college campuses, which has at times included violent arrests, to “the extreme authoritarian excesses” in the Middle East and North Africa, including in Turkey, her home country. She noted the appearance of “sudden, ad hoc policies that are selectively enforced and viewpoint-specific,” using ostensibly neutral criteria such as trespass laws to exclusively disallow pro-Palestinian protest, as well as harsh disciplinary sanctions for “disfavored political views.” She also decried the “inquisitional” Congressional hearings like the one that toppled Gay’s presidency, and pressure from donors and political actors on universities to crack down on students. Some of the neutrality statements adopted by administrators on numerous campuses strike Bâli as “misguided in the particulars of what they’re going to be neutral about,” and new restrictions on how and where students can assemble now make it nearly impossible, she said, “to engage in meaningful protests in ways that can be heard by one’s fellow campus members.”

Months of these kinds of measures, Bâli worried, have succeeded in shutting down viewpoints and “teaching the lesson that…you are better off being silent or finding ways to accommodate power, because power will crush you—even in campus communities that are designed to be laboratories in which students are supposed to be able to experiment with free inquiry and free expression and association.”

In response, Kwaja asked the question he saw lurking in Bâli’s depiction: “You raise a deeply troubling view of the world,” he said. “Is there a buyer for free discourse? Is there a market where people really value free speech and academic freedom?…Every campus now has a ‘candid conversation something-or-other’”—at Harvard it is the Open Inquiry and Constructive Dialogue Working Group, which Brown-Nagin co-chairs—“but I don’t understand where this demand is to come from. And if it doesn’t, then it worries me even more.”

Bâli answered that producing that market for free speech is the business of universities—including not just wealthy private ones like Harvard, but all institutions of higher learning, many of which are deeply embedded in their communities. She called on administrators and academics to defend democracy, and to defend themselves. “Universities have a role, not just to their internal communities, but also as spokespeople in our democracy.” This has to be true, she said, even when an institution faces financial and reputational risk. “As public intellectuals, we have an obligation to offer that defense constantly.” Importantly, she added, “We have to push back by persuading our fellow citizens. I don’t think there’s a way to imagine out-lawyering, or out-financing…or that we’re going to conquer some group. No, I think we have to persuade.”

She blamed much of the difficulty in maintaining this kind of institutional fortitude and independence on decades of government disinvestment from higher education, which has left universities increasingly beholden to individual donors.

She emphasized the necessity of strengthening universities’ ties to their communities and to their alumni. And she pushed back on the sharp criticism of universities that has consumed the national discussion during the past year. “We should be wary,” she said, of falling for “populist narratives about universities,” which she described as inaccurate and disingenuous. “The notion that we’re just made up of elites in fancy quarters having jargonized conversations with one another…is pretty far from the reality of what the work of higher education is in this country,” she said. “And that work has been the engine of one of the most powerful economies in the world, and has been producing not only leaders among our own citizenry, but globally, [and] has made the last three quarters of a century possible as a period of human flourishing.”

Khwaja asked Bâli where she saw reason for hope, both for free inquiry in institutions, and for the future of the American Muslim community. In students, she answered. “There are real problems” she said, of anti-democratic harassment and repression and even violence, “but the fact is that this debate [over free speech and public policies affecting Muslim life] has become such a much broader set of questions.

Source: Harvard Magazine

Harris’ national security adviser, Phil Gordon, told the community leaders in the virtual meeting that the administration supports a ceasefire in Gaza, diplomacy in Lebanon and stability in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, the vice president’s office said.

Ali Dagher, a Lebanese-American attorney and community leader, said the outreach from Harris’ office was not enough. “It’s too little, too late,” said Dagher, who did not participate in the meeting.

Harris, a Democrat, faces Republican former President Donald Trump on Nov. 5 in what polls show to be a tight presidential race.

President Joe Biden won most of the 2020 Muslim and Arab votes, but their backing of Democrats has fallen sharply during nearly a year that Israel has been fighting Hamas in Gaza. Activists say Biden and Harris have done too little to stop Israel’s military campaign in the Palestinian enclave.

The Israeli military offensive in Gaza has killed more than 41,000 Palestinians, Palestinian health authorities say. Israel was responding to an Oct. 7, 2023 incursion by Hamas gunmen, who Israel says killed around 1,200 people and abducted about 250 hostages. Gaza has suffered a humanitarian crisis with nearly all its 2 million people displaced and widespread hunger in the enclave.

In Lebanon more than 1,900 people have been killed and 9,000 wounded during almost a year of cross-border fighting between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah, with most of the deaths in the past two weeks, according to Lebanese government statistics.

Emgage, a Muslim American advocacy group, recently endorsed Harris, while others have urged supporters to shun her. While they have not supported Trump, their choice not to vote or to vote for third-party candidates could hurt Harris, analysts say.

U.S. support for Israel has led to large protests, especially in hotly contested swing states like Michigan that could decide the election. Harris has offered no substantive policy differences on Israel from Biden, who stepped aside as presidential candidate in July.

Source: Reuters

The cartoon art was portrayed in National Review, a publication that has existed for far-right individuals ever since the 1950s. The publication accepts opinion, editorial and commentary pieces that anyone can submit. The cartoon was published last Thursday depicting Tlaib sitting near an exploding pager with Tlaib depicted saying ‘ODD MY PAGER JUST EXPLODED.’

Several pagers exploded in Lebanon last Tuesday, Sept. 17, 2024. The next day following the event several hand-held radios also erupted. The attacks killed several civilians and wounded many others in the region impacted by the explosion.

The attack was allegedly done by Israel, according to local security authorities in the region.
The Israeli military has killed over 40,0000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and injured several other citizens in the region ever since the Israel-Hamas conflict began.

Tlaib has continued to show her solidarity with Palestine. She has continued to be a harsh critic of Israel and its treatment of Palestinians. The ongoing war ever since Oct. 7, 2023, has stirred controversy among several people and their viewpoints on the situation.

The racist cartoon was submitted by Henry Payne, associated with the Detroit News. The Detroit News publicly distanced itself from the artwork in a statement to media outlets confirming that it did not choose to publish the work in its publication.

Tlaib responded to the cartoon artwork on social media citing division and racism with her being at the forefront.

“Our community is already in so much pain right now. This racism will incite more hate + violence against our Arab & Muslim communities,” Tlaib said on Twitter. “And it makes everyone less safe. It’s disgraceful that the media continues to normalize this racism.”

Several other organizations have said the artwork overstepped the local leader’s professionalism and called the artwork Islamophobic. It has sparked major backlash from Engage Action, a nonpartisan advocacy group helping Muslims in politics, and helping Muslim citizens with voting.

The group took to their Instagram platform to write their views regarding the cartoon artwork.

“Language like this fuels hate, leading to an increase in violence and hate crimes, which we’re already witnessing across the country. It’s beyond offensive to joke about this and we demand a public apology,” wrote Emgage Action on Instagram.

Lawmakers and local Michigan leaders condemn the cartoon artwork. Some of the leaders stated it could sanction violence against a sitting U.S. Congresswoman and attacks Tlaib’s professionalism. Many individuals also noted Tlaib’s background as a Palestinian-American, and called the artwork “anti-Arab.”

“Pay attention to who condemns this,” said Democrat State Representative Abraham Aiyash, who is the Michigan House Floor leader. “And then recognize the different standards Arab and Muslim politicians are held by. When I was doxed by the far right and had threats made against me and my family, party leaders told me ‘I shouldn’t have said’ things to ‘stoke anger’ ( I was calling out the racist attempt to not certify the election in Detroit). This normalization of hate will induce violence against Rashida, but somehow that’s not worthy of fierce condemnation.”

Tlaib has continued to fight for a ceasefire in Palestine. When Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited the United States and spoke to Congress she held a sign that read ‘war criminal’ during his entire speech.

She has been criticized by several individuals as being a Palestinian-American and staying firm on her personal views of the war happening overseas.

Source: Reuters