Four Arab American members of Congress will return to the Capitol to represent their districts in California, Illinois, Minnesota and Michigan, while five were reelected to State House seats in Illinois, Michigan, Colorado and Iowa.

In some places, however, there were allegations of Islamophobia and anti-Arab sentiment as opponents sought to capitalize on voter concerns about terrorism and foreign conflicts.

Suzanne Akhras, a Syrian American Democrat who lost to Republican incumbent Nicole La Ha in the race to represent the 82nd District in the Illinois House of Representatives, said she was targeted by anonymous text messages and phone calls falsely linking her to Islamic terrorism, including claims of ties to Hamas.

“These calls and texts tried to portray me as a danger to the community I love,” she said in a campaign video message to voters in September. “I have lived in Burr Ridge for nearly 20 years. I have been a PTA parent. I have spent my life advocating for vulnerable people and being of service. I founded a very successful non-profit organization.

“I am a proud American. I cherish our shared values of freedom; freedom to express our diverse faiths and freedom to celebrate the diversity of our backgrounds and cultures. Those freedoms I hold dear are under attack in our district. These attacks against me are based on racism, Islamophobia and are xenophobic.”

Akhras, who said she has been recognized as an “upstander” by the Illinois Holocaust Museum for confronting hate speech and crime, said the “disturbing calls and text messages” began shortly after she began campaigning door-to-door. She criticized the Republican Party in the state for failing to denounce the attacks, and accused La Ha of running an “abhorrent and dangerous, xenophobic” smear campaign.

Akhras, who wears a hijab and whose husband, Dr. Zaher Sahloul, helps provide humanitarian medical services to refugees and displaced people in conflict zones, including Gaza, also said that despite winning the Democratic primary in March, she received no support from the Illinois Democratic Party.

Elsewhere, Darrell Issa, who is of Syrian-Lebanese heritage, was reelected to Congress as the representative for California’s 48th district, defeating Democrat Stephen Houlahan with 60.2 percent of the vote.

In Minnesota, Democrat Ilhan Omar, who is of Somali descent, was reelected as the member of the House of Representatives for the 5th District with 75 percent of the vote, easily defeating her Republican rival, Arab American Dalia Al-Aqidi.

Democrat Rashida Tlaib, who is Palestinian American , defeated Republican James Hopper with 69.7 percent of the vote in Michigan’s 12th Congressional District. Republican Darin LaHood, who is of Lebanese heritage, ran unopposed in Illinois’ 16th District.

Two Arab American members of Congress, Democrat Anna Eshoo from California and Republican Garret Graves from Louisiana, did not seek reelection.

At the state level, Democrat Nabeela Syed, who is of Indian heritage, secured a second term in the State House as the representative for the 51st District with 55 percent of the vote, ahead of Republican rival Tosi Ufodike.

In Michigan’s 3rd District, Democrat Alabas Farhat defeated Republican Richard Zeile with 67.9 percent of the vote. Democrat Iman Jodeh was reelected in Colorado’s 41st District, gaining 61 percent of the vote against Republican Robert McKenna.

Palestinian American Abdelnasser Rashid and Syrian American Sami Scheetz, both Democrats, retained their seats without a challenge in Illinois’ 21st District and Iowa’s 78th District respectively.

Source: Arab News

The survey, which polled 950 Indian American Muslims in order to take a “comprehensive look” at how Hindu nationalist ideology, particularly following the rise of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), is “shaping social, professional, and digital interactions”, said that over 80% of respondents experienced “Islamophobic harassment, discrimination, or prejudice from Hindu friends or social contacts over the past decade since Modi’s rise to power.”

It said, 70% of respondents experienced biased treatment from Hindu colleagues, including being passed over from promotions and anti-Muslim remarks at work; 48% of respondents reported facing harassment and discrimination on Facebook, WhatsApp, and LinkedIn, describing these experiences as emotionally exhausting, and contributing to feelings of isolation and hostility; 90% of respondents agreed (73% of them strongly) that Hindu nationalism “is a threat to Muslims in the United States”; and 86% agreed (69% strongly) that Hindu nationalism “is a threat to democracy in the United States.”

According to the survey report, the rise of Hindu nationalism in India is directly driving the rise of Islamophobia within the Indian American diaspora, adding, “Hindu nationalism is fostering an environment of intolerance that actively undermines democratic values both in India and within the diaspora community in the U.S.

Indian American Muslims are experiencing the dissolution of longstanding social, workplace, and community bonds” with “their Hindu peers who have absorbed the bigoted ideology of the Modi regime.”

The report further say, social media platforms have been weaponized against the Indian American Muslim community, “which overwhelmingly reported experiences of anxiety, fear, and isolation from Islamophobic posts and groups on international tech platforms.”

It adds, the conflation of the political ideology of Hindu nationalism with the religion of Hinduism has “dangerously allowed the supremacist movement to penetrate U.S. cultural and progressive spaces, further isolating Indian Americans.”

The survey respondents are located throughout the United States but are concentrated in the larger Indian American population centers in New Jersey, New York, Illinois, Texas, and California.
The report emphasizes on the need for enhanced community dialogue, education, and policy interventions to address the growing divide and ensure the inclusion and safety of Indian American Muslims.

Source: Counterview

A 43-year-old man has been killed outside a Philadelphia mosque in an execution-style shooting that’s been condemned by Pennsylvania’s governor.

Officers found the man, later identified as Raheem Jefferson, unresponsive on the ground with multiple gunshot wounds on Tuesday afternoon, July 30, including at least one to his head and multiple to his torso, according to the Philadelphia Police Department. He was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital shortly afterward.

The killer fired at least 17 shots using a large-caliber semi-automatic weapon, police Chief Inspector Scott Small said a news conference on Wednesday, July 31. Security footage reviewed by police shows Jefferson and another man walking to the Al-Aqsa Islamic Society for prayer service when a suspect approaches from behind before opening fire, Small said.

“It’s all caught on camera,” Scott told reporters. “The shooter stands over the victim from just a few feet away and continues firing shots at this 43-year-old victim while he lays on the parking lot. So clearly, an execution-type homicide.”

No arrests have been made in the case and police haven’t determined a motive but Small said it appears Jefferson was the intended target of the crime.

The shooter was seen getting into a vehicle and fleeing the parking lot while wearing dark-colored clothing, Small said.

A $20,000 reward has been offered for anyone with information that leads to the arrest and conviction of the suspect.

The shooting happened at the Al-Aqsa Islamic Society mosque, established in 1989 in the lower northeast neighborhood of Kensington. Its goal is to “maintain the Islamic Identity and to protect and sustain the Islamic Community in Philadelphia,” according to its website.

Democratic Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro condemned the incident on X and shared his condolences.

“Violence outside of a house of worship is deeply painful and traumatizing for those simply showing up to worship and practice their faith,” Shapiro wrote. “As an investigation into this killing proceeds, I’m praying for Philadelphia’s Al-Aqsa Islamic Society community, a place I’ve been several times, and hoping they find peace in each other and in their faith.”

Source: USA Today

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

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

She said more than 90,000 Muslim are living in Alameda County and have made innumerable contributions to the cultural, political and economic fabric and wellbeing of California and the United States. She slammed U.S. President Donald Trump’s immigration policy that places more restrictions on Muslim immigrants who are seeking their dreams in the United States.

Faheem Shuaibe, resident Imam of Masjidul Waritheen, said Schaaf’s visit to the event to celebrate with the Muslim community is “very special.”

Sameena Usman, government relations coordinator of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) California, the largest Muslim civil liberties and advocacy organization in the country, told Xinhua that the celebration aims to show that Muslims have been part of this country since even before its founding…

Source: Xinhua

The survey finds that Americans’ levels of religious knowledge vary depending not only on what questions are being asked, but also on who is answering. Jews, atheists, agnostics and evangelical Protestants, as well as highly educated people and those who have religiously diverse social networks, show higher levels of religious knowledge, while young adults and racial and ethnic minorities tend to know somewhat less about religion than the average respondent does.

Continue reading at: Pew Research Center

Currently, 55% of U.S. adults say they celebrate Christmas as a religious holiday, including 46% who see it as more of a religious holiday than a cultural holiday and 9% who celebrate Christmas as both a religious and a cultural occasion. In 2013, 59% of Americans said they celebrated Christmas as a religious holiday, including 51% who saw it as more religious than cultural and 7% who marked the day as both a religious and a cultural holiday.

To be sure, while the public’s commemoration of Christmas may have less of a religious component now than in the past, the share of Americans who say they celebrate Christmas in some way has hardly budged at all. Nine-in-ten U.S. adults say they celebrate the holiday, which is nearly identical to the share who said this in 2013. About eight-in-ten will gather with family and friends. And half say they plan to attend church on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, little changed since 2013, the last time Pew Research Center asked the question.

Source: Pew Research Center

Université du Québec à Montréal political science professor Allison Harell presented a raft of results from a recent online survey of 1,600 Canadians and 1,800 Americans that tried to probe views related to the upswing of populism in the U.S., including attitudes towards the powers of government and the rights of minorities.

Perhaps not surprisingly, she found the familiar national traits of Canadian deference to public institutions and American suspicion of them borne out overall. “In general Americans are a little bit more fearful of government surveillance, they are a little bit more supportive of free-speech rights, regardless of the group, than Canadians are,” Harell said in an interview.

For instance, she found that 73 per cent of Canadians agree that “it should be illegal to say hateful things publicly about racial, ethnic and religious groups,” whereas only 55 per cent of Americans accepted limiting free speech when it turns hateful. Canadians are more inclined to accept the notion that career politicians, rather than “the people,” should make important policy decisions.

When it comes to issues around personal privacy and government surveillance, Harell’s research found that by far the majority of both Canadians and Americans don’t like the ideas of property being searched or telephone calls tapped without a warrant. But interestingly, and perhaps troublingly for a lot of Canadians, differences arise when it comes to opinion on policies directed at Muslims.

Among Canadians, 47 per cent would ban Muslim head scarfs in public, compared with just 30 per cent of Americans. As well, 51 per cent of Canadians like the idea of monitoring what happens in mosques, compared with 46 per cent of Americans.

Source: Maclean’s

1. While U.S. Muslims overall are largely an immigrant population (58%), Muslim Millennials are somewhat less likely to have been born abroad than are older Muslim adults (52% versus 64%), according to a 2017 Pew Research Center survey. (Within the general public, 15% of all Millennials are immigrants.) Racially and ethnically, 40% of Muslim Millennials identify as white (including Arabs and people of Middle Eastern ancestry), 29% as Asian (including people of Pakistani or Indian descent), 17% as black and 11% as Hispanic.

2. Muslim Millennials are as likely as older Muslim adults to say religion is “very important” in their lives and that they attend religious services at least weekly. This differs from the generational dynamic in some larger U.S. religious groups. Among Catholics, mainline Protestants and members of the historically black Protestant tradition, for example, Millennials are significantly less likely than their respective elders to say religion is very important to them, or that they attend religious services weekly.

3. Muslim Millennials are more likely than older American Muslims to say homosexuality should be accepted by society (60% versus 44%).

4. Muslim Millennials, like older Muslims, lean heavily Democratic (69%) – more so than Christian Millennials (47%) and the U.S. Millennial population as a whole (56%).

5. Muslim Millennials are less likely than older Muslim adults to say the American people are “generally friendly” toward Muslims in the U.S. (45% versus 65%). This does not mean that most Muslim Millennials find the American people unfriendly toward U.S. Muslims, however.

Source: Pew Research Center