Patrick Healy, Deputy Opinion Editor
Lydia, what struck me most about your column on Adeel Abdullah Mangi, who’s President Biden’s nominee to the Court docket of Appeals for the Third Circuit, was the baldness of the Republican smears. What was the worst one?
Lydia Polgreen, Opinion Columnist
The factor from the Senate listening to that was so surprising to me was the informal, nearly computerized Republican assumption that Mangi, as a Muslim, might need suspect views of Oct. 7, 2023, or Sept. 11, 2001, and that asking him about them was respectable. It’s basic guilt by affiliation, and the questioning was so harking back to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist witch hunts.
However even worse was what the right-wing media machine did with these questions and insinuations. Writing in The Washington Times, the right-wing operative Mike Davis referred to as Mangi “Hamas’s favorite judicial nominee.” An illustration superimposes the Hamas flag over his eyes. It’s really sickening stuff.
Patrick Healy
You write: “For all the Democratic talk about a freedom agenda, the party has not really seized religious liberty, one of Mangi’s core areas of pro bono work, as part of its vision of a pluralistic and inclusive society.” Why do you suppose that is the case for Democrats?
Lydia Polgreen
There may be this unlucky Democratic tendency to finish up on protection reasonably than affirmatively spelling out their values in distinction with Republicans. Biden has begun to do that for the reason that State of the Union, nevertheless it appears reasonably late within the sport. Non secular tolerance and freedom are as American as apple pie, and this ought to be a simple story for Democrats to inform. Democrats are the celebration that believes, just like the founders meant, that freedom of worship with out coercion from the state is a bedrock freedom of our nation, and that freedom is being threatened by a Republican Social gathering in thrall to deeply un-American concepts inflected with Christian nationalism.
Patrick Healy
What does it say to you about America in 2024 that placing a extremely certified Muslim American on an appellate court docket bench is such a tough factor to do?
Lydia Polgreen
Islamophobia has been on the rise since Oct. 7, however there’s a lengthy historical past of it. It isn’t shocking that Republicans would use this line of assault on a Muslim judicial nominee; in any case, the celebration’s presidential candidate, Donald Trump, rode to the presidency partly by promising to ban Muslims from coming to the US. Within the early days of the Trump administration, these insurance policies had been met with outrage — bear in mind when individuals went to airports to protest? That looks like one other lifetime in the past.
Muslims in public life are routinely subjected to suspicion, and Democrats have proven an actual willingness to throw their Muslim colleagues to the wolves when they’re accused of antisemitism, because the experiences of Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib illustrate. Republicans within the Trump period train no such scruples. The truth that this tactic may really tank Mangi’s nomination illustrates how Islamophobia stays some of the extensively tolerated types of bigotry.
