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Student activism provoked an intense and powerful backlash: donors at multiple universities, as at Harvard, have rescinded their donations or threatened to stop giving; students involved in protests across the country have been arrested and in some cases charged with crimes, and many have been doxed or seen employment offers withdrawn.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

Nassau County District Attorney Anne Donnelly’s office confirmed it moved to dismiss the charges against Xavier Roa during a court hearing on Long Island.

“The case was investigated extensively and upon conclusion NCDA determined that the allegations could not be proven beyond a reasonable doubt and moved to dismiss the charges,” spokesperson Nicole Turso said in a statement.

Roa’s lawyer Geoffrey Stewart hailed the decision as a “big victory” for his client and “for civil liberties,” but argued the law itself “should be struck from the books.”

“This case shows that the law can, and in all likelihood will be abused by law enforcement because the law is unconstitutionally vague,” he said in an email.

Stewart has maintained that Roa acted respectfully and complied with officers as he peacefully exercised his constitutionally protected free speech rights during a protest outside an orthodox synagogue in September.

The North Bellmore resident was detained under Nassau County’s Mask Transparency Act, which bans people from wearing masks to conceal their identity in public. It includes exemptions for people who wear masks “for health, safety, religious or cultural purposes.”

The county’s Republican-controlled Legislature approved the law in August in response to “antisemitic incidents, often perpetrated by those in masks” since the start of the Israel-Hamas war last year.

Roa, who faced up to a year in jail and a $1,000 fine if convicted of the misdemeanor charge, was the first protester arrested under the ban.

The New York chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations and other groups denounced it at the time as proof that the local law was being used as a “silencing tactic” against Palestinian supporters.

Nassau County police said Roa had been attempting to conceal his identity as he led others in pro-Palestinian chants. They also said he told officers he was wearing the scarf in solidarity with Palestinians and not for exempted medical or religious purposes.

In videos showing some of the arrest, Roa wears the keffiyeh around his neck as he’s led away in handcuffs.

Source: The Associated Press

A group of approximately 50 Black Muslim leaders have signed a statement urging Black and Muslim American voters to shun Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris in her bid for the White House and instead back candidates who support a ceasefire in Gaza and an arms embargo on Israel.

The new statement, first reported by Middle East Eye, is the latest effort from Muslim community leaders – from imams to scholars, to activists to politicians – telling voters not to choose Vice President Harris in the upcoming November election over her unwillingness to commit to policy changes that would hold Israel accountable for its ongoing war on Gaza and now Lebanon, which has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians and Lebanese people.

“Although some Muslim Americans have nevertheless argued that our community must support Vice President Harris because of her positions on domestic issues or their belief that Donald Trump might be even worse on issues like Gaza, we respectfully disagree with their conclusion,” the statement said.

“As Muslims obliged to uphold justice and as Black Americans whose ancestors experienced the worst of crimes, genocide must be our red line.”

It adds that “we simply cannot support a candidate who participated in a genocide and now refuses to lay out any plan to end that genocide”.

The statement comes after a series of different statements and letters from leading figures and organizations in the wider Muslim-American community were published in recent weeks endorsing or shunning candidates for the US 2024 election.

On 20 September, a coalition of leading Muslim organizations in the US released a statement calling on voters to vote for candidates that both support a ceasefire in Gaza and an arms embargo against Israel.

Then, on 30 September, dozens of imams from across the country signed a letter endorsing a call for Muslims to vote third-party in the election, with the goal of sending the Democratic Party a message about their outrage over the Biden-Harris administration’s steadfast support for Israel’s war on Gaza. That letter has more than 130 signatories.

A week later, the Muslim-led Abandon Harris movement endorsed the Green Party’s Jill Stein for president.

“We call on Muslim voters to support only a pro-ceasefire and pro-arms embargo presidential candidate, as well as candidates down the ballot who support other just policies, including economic justice, religious freedom, healthcare for all, humane immigration policy, reforming the criminal justice system, and racial equality,” the statement from Black Muslim leaders said.

Ismahan Abdullahi, a Muslim community leader in San Diego and a signatory of the statement, told Middle East Eye that the effort is an opportunity for Americans to “reflect on our role in regards to sustaining injustices globally”.

“When we look back at the movements that have been successful in asking this country to change course, Black communities have been at the core of that change and were the drivers of that change,” Abdullahi said.

A copy of the statement was shared with MEE and organizers say they plan to share it on the same website hosting the previous letter from leading imams.

So far, 47 people from 17 states and Washington DC have signed the letter, and organizers of the effort say they are working to gather additional signatures.

False narratives

The statement from Black Muslim leaders comes several weeks after NBC News reported earlier this month that around 25 Black Muslims had endorsed Harris for president.

NBC’s reporting, which made no mention of the significantly larger group of imams endorsing third-party candidates, claimed that the 25 Black Muslims supporting Harris was a sign she was winning back Muslims disaffected by her administration’s Gaza policy.

The endorsement reported by NBC was also organized by a current Biden administration appointee, which was not mentioned in the report.

Abdullahi said she and other organizers in the Black Muslim community “might not have access to the mainstream media as others might”, but added that she hopes this new statement will highlight the “interconnectedness between the Black and Palestinian struggle and how undeniable that interconnection is”.

While some Black Muslim leaders have expressed support for Harris, recent polling by the Yaqeen Institute has shown that only 32 percent of Black Muslims plan on voting for her in this upcoming election.

“There’s a false narrative that is being pushed that the majority of Muslims who are Black are Kamala Harris supporters,” Imam Dawud Walid, a community and faith leader in the state of Michigan, told MEE.

Walid is also a signatory to the initial letter where imams endorsed the third-party vote but felt the need to also join this effort to show many Black Muslim leaders are against a Harris presidency.

“There’s this narrative that is trying to divide the community to say that the majority of Muslims who aren’t Black are supporting third party, but the majority of Muslims who are Black are somehow divided from the rest of the community, and that’s not true,” Walid said.

“It’s sowing racial division amongst American Muslims during a genocide of our brothers and sisters in Gaza.”

Organizers of the letter of this group of Black Muslims say it is the latest effort in what is a long and deep-rooted history of Black-Palestinian solidarity.

“Black communities have fought tirelessly against slavery, against segregation, against racial violence, so it recognizes the Palestinian struggle is the same fight for freedom, for dignity and the right to self-determination,” Abdullahi said.

“Just as Jim Crow saw a South try to keep the Black community subjugated, we’re seeing Palestinians undergoing that, Israel using their apartheid system to strip them of their land, of their rights. It goes beyond solidarity.”

Many leading Black American activists and intellectuals throughout the past several decades have supported Palestinian rights and spoken against Zionism and US support for Israel, including Malcolm X, Kwame Ture, James Baldwin, and Angela Davis.

In 2015, when residents of Ferguson, Missouri, came out to protest on the streets after the police killing of Michael Brown, a young unarmed Black teenager, Palestinians living under Israeli occupation and those in the diaspora signed a statement of solidarity, and some Palestinians also sent tips via social media on the best ways to deal with the militarised tactics used by Israeli and American police forces.

“We are rooted in our shared experience of resilience and resistance and hope for a better world,” said Abdullahi.

A major shift

Current polls show that Harris and Trump are neck and neck, with both candidates making efforts to draw support from Muslim and Arab Americans who say that they could decide the presidency in swing states like Michigan.

The November election is shaping up to be a major shift in the voting patterns of Muslim Americans.

Over the past few months, there has been a large departure in the Muslim-American community away from the Democratic Party as a result of US support for the war on Gaza.

So far, Israeli forces have killed over 42,000 Palestinians in Gaza, according to the official death toll released by the health ministry in Gaza.

However, Israel’s military has destroyed much of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure, including Gaza’s hospitals where deaths are officially registered. Other estimates by experts have the death toll near 200,000 Palestinians, which is about one percent of the total population in Gaza.

Israeli forces have targeted schools, mosques, UN shelters, and in addition to killing civilians, Israeli soldiers have killed medical workers, foreign aid workers, and journalists throughout this conflict.

Throughout the war, the Biden-Harris administration has supported Israel with diplomatic cover and military aid.

While media reports have said Harris has shown greater sympathy to Palestinians than President Biden, Harris advisors recently told The New York Times that any sympathy shouldn’t be confused with a break from US foreign policy towards Israel.

For two decades, a majority of the faith community voted Democrat in presidential elections.

In 2020, 69 percent of Muslims voted for Biden over Trump. However, polling from the Council on American Islamic Relations showed that this past summer, Stein, the Green Party’s presidential candidate, was tied with Harris among Muslim voters.

Yaqeen Institute’s polling conducted between 27 August to 8 September found that more than 50 percent of Muslims were voting for someone other than Harris or Trump. In that poll, Harris only received 14 percent of Muslim voters, while Trump got four percent.

the Biden-Harris administration’s active support of genocide will cause a significant percentage of American Muslims to abandon the Democratic Party for a generation,”

Earlier this month, the Abandon Harris movement, a Muslim-led organization aimed at electorally punishing the Democrats for their Gaza policies, announced they were endorsing Stein and her running-mate, Butch Ware, for the presidential ticket.

“I believe that this is going to be a generational shift in the American Muslim community toward not giving blind allegiance to the Democratic Party,” Walid said.

Walid noted that the majority of Muslim Americans voted for George W Bush prior to the 9/11 attacks, but “after the bloodshed in Iraq and the draconian policies that were signed into law by President Bush”, Muslims in large part shifted towards the Democrats, “even though the majority of Democrats supported those same domestic policies”.

“I believe that besides some failed domestic policies, the Biden-Harris administration’s active support of genocide will cause a significant percentage of American Muslims to abandon the Democratic Party for a generation,” Walid said.

Source: Middle East Eye