However what’s far more worrying is that these techniques may work on some Senate Democrats. Proper-wing judicial activists have been operating a smear campaign in opposition to Mangi, together with advertisements geared toward Senate Democrats like Jon Tester of Montana and Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, who’re battling for re-election. The campaigns describe Mangi, with no proof, as an antisemite and try to hyperlink him to Hamas and different terror teams. Because of this Democrats who run the danger of dropping their seats come November may even see defending Mangi’s nomination as a possible danger to their probabilities at re-election. The marketing campaign appears to be working. Over the previous few days, CNN and HuffPost have reported that there might not be sufficient Democratic votes to verify Mangi.
That is an outrage. The assaults on Mangi are totally disingenuous. Main Jewish organizations, together with the Anti-Defamation League, have made statements of help for Mangi, whose professional bono authorized work has centered partially on combating for spiritual liberty and in opposition to spiritual bias throughout a number of faiths. The American Jewish Committee, which has joined a number of amicus briefs to the Supreme Courtroom led by Mangi, described him as “a person of integrity, champion of pluralism, and adversary of discrimination against any group.”
Abandoning Mangi’s nomination could be an unconscionable act at any time, however particularly perilous for Democrats within the present political local weather, when tens of hundreds of Democratic major voters in key states are expressing their outrage at Biden’s coverage in Gaza by voting “uncommitted.” In the meantime, the precise is utilizing the assaults on Oct. 7 and the following warfare in Gaza as a way to indicate that any Muslim might be pro-Hamas or antisemitic. If Democrats acquiesce, they may set a harmful precedent.
In fact, the essential background for the assaults on Mangi is the wave of Islamophobia that has swept the nation over the previous six months. The Council on American-Islamic Relations reported on the finish of 2023 that it had seen a 216 percent increase in stories of bias and requests for help from the earlier 12 months. A 6-year-old boy was stabbed to loss of life in what investigators are calling a hate crime days after the Oct. 7 Hamas assaults, and three faculty college students of Palestinian origin have been shot in Burlington, Vt., final Thanksgiving weekend, gorgeous that small, progressive metropolis.
However this goes past Islamophobia, as heinous as it’s, and past Israel and Gaza. The essential beliefs of the Democratic Occasion, together with the ethical and authorized obligation to offer asylum to these fleeing persecution, appear up for grabs. On immigration extra broadly, the occasion has acquiesced to right-wing speaking factors, failing to forestall and even serving to the agency shove of the Overton window to the precise. For all of the Democratic speak about a freedom agenda, the occasion has not likely seized spiritual liberty, one in all Mangi’s core areas of professional bono work, as a part of its imaginative and prescient of a pluralistic and inclusive society.
