Juan Cole Informed Comment
The ugly tactics of the Republican Party in Michigan, targeting Abdul El-Sayed for his Muslim faith, were not unprecedented in American history. Catholics, Jews and other minorities have been dragged through the mud for not being white Protestants. Bigots warned that Jack Kennedy would be a tool of the papacy. American Jews were accused of being greedy bankers and dangerous Communists, often in the same breath. Hatred doesn’t need to be logical or consistent. Indeed, the haze of hatred allows people to believe in dozens of impossible things before breakfast. In the case of El-Sayed, this exemplary American citizen, born in Rochester Hills, raised by an Egyptian Muslim father and a white Christian step-mother, became a physician, taught medicine at Columbia University, and ran health services in Wayne County, Michigan. He was nevertheless configured by Donald Trump and Mike Rogers, both of whom have committed state terrorism against thousands of victims, as a terrorist sympathizer. Rogers who when he was a congressan was a cheerleader for the Muslim Brotherhood government of President Mohammad Morsi in Egypt, had the nerve to accuse El-Sayed of being a Muslim Brother or receiving support from them. Muslim Brotherhood fundamentalists do not, however, support LGBTQ rights, as El-Sayed does. El-Sayed, a convinced capitalist, was accused of being a Communist, though Communists are typically atheists, so you can’t be both a Communist and a Muslim Brother. It is very like the contradictory charges launched at Jews by antisemites like Henry Ford, Elon Musk’s predecessor.
El-Sayed won a majority of Michigan Jews, who did not buy the GOP smear, perhaps having been sensitized to these sleazy tactics by seeing them deployed by Christian white nationalists against their own community. It has to be admitted, however, that right wing Zionists were among the prominent purveyors of bigoted talking points. The plummeting power of the latter, however, was clearly demonstrated by the bath their candidates took almost across the board. Attempts were made to imply that African-American support for El-Sayed in Detroit and Flint was lukewarm, but it was that vote that will put him over, and in majority-Black precincts he did better than Kamala Harris had.
El-Sayed’s defeat of this sleazy prejudice is the most American thing in the world. I have gone blue in the face pointing out that the Founding Fathers explicitly recognized freedom of religion and conscience for Muslims, as well as for Jews, Catholics and others.
I wrote:
The Founding Fathers explicitly mentioned Islam when they spoke of religious freedom:
‘George Washington asked in a March 24, 1784, letter to his aide Tench Tilghman that some craftsmen be hired for him: “If they are good workmen, they may be of Assia, [sic] Africa, or Europe. They may be Mahometans, [Muslims] Jews, or Christian of any Sect – or they may be Atheists …”
In his letter to the Jewish congregation of Newport, RI, Washington pledged that the “Children of Abraham” would not be made afraid in the United States (implicitly contrasting the new nation’s liberties and personal security with the pogroms of the Old World). It should be noted that Arab Muslims consider themselves, as well, descendants of Abraham through Ishmael:
Washington underlined that in the new social experiment that is the United States, toleration is not merely the indulgence of one group of people by a dominant elite. It is a right, which requires only that the individual be an upright citizen of the new country, which “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”
Ben Franklin, the founding father of many important institutions in Philadelphia, a key diplomat and a framer of the US Constitution, wrote in his Autobiography concerning a non-denominational place of public preaching he helped found “so that even if the Mufti of Constantinople were to send a missionary to preach Mohammedanism to us, he would find a pulpit at his service.” Here is the whole quote:
Not only did Ben Franklin not want to ban Muslims from coming to the United States, he wanted to invited them!
Thomas Jefferson wrote in his 1777 Draft of a Bill for Religious Freedom:
The idea of religious liberty enshrined in the First Amendment was based on an act passed in 1786 by the Virginia state legislature that had been authored by Thomas Jefferson, and which said in part:
“Be it enacted by the General Assembly, that no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinion in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.”
One of the arguments raised against this act in the Virginia legislature was precisely that it would allow the free practice of Islam in the Commonwealth. Jefferson’s opponents tried to limit religious freedom to Christianity. Jefferson battled back and won.
James E. Hutson explains:
Jefferson was ambassador in Paris in 1787 when the Constitution was being drafted, but he corresponded with Madison and strongly urged him to draft a bill of rights that would address religious liberty. Madison was influenced by the 1786 Virginia statute.
That is, the legislative history of the First Amendment demonstrates conclusively that it is rooted in Enlightenment conceptions of religion that saw Christianity, Judaism, Islam and Hinduism as all constituting “religions,” belief in which is a matter of conscience over which civil magistrates should have no control. So I would say that the Constitution implicitly recognizes Islam as a religion, even for an originalist who reads it through eighteenth-century eyes.
Here is Jefferson again: “The most sacred of the duties of a government [is] to do equal and impartial justice to all its citizens.”
– Thomas Jefferson, note in Destutt de Tracy, “Political Economy,” 1816.
Or: “The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”
– Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 1781-82
The US Senate, full of founding fathers, and the Adams government, approved the Treaty with Tripoli (now Libya) of 1797, which included this language:
“As the Government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Musselmen; and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.”
The treaty is important for showing the mindset of the fashioners of the American system.
The second Trump administration has been the most corrupt and crime-ridden in American history. The Trump family has made billions from nepotism and favoritism. He allowed Stephen Miller to reconfigure ICE to illegally assault and detain hundreds of American citizens, to murder American citizens in the street, to engage in racial profiling, and to parade cruelty and sadism before the public. The US military has been misused to murder Latin American and Caribbean fishermen. Trump has launched wars without seeking Congressional approval, which have severely weakened the country’s security posture. Trump has illegally tinkered with tariffs, a Congressional sphere of responsibility, even after the Supreme Court found against him. He has plunged the country into a severe energy crisis from which there is not obvious way to extract it. Trump has also arranged for his political allies to take over major US media, with the Ellisons of Oracle and Skydance fame getting their hands on the throats of CBS News, CNN and TikTok. This is the way that Turkiye’s Tayyip Erdogan tamed Turkish media, by having his cronies take over the major companies. In 2013 when there were street protests in Istanbul, CNN Turk showed documentaries on penguins. We can expect a similar gutting of investigative journalism in the US, with a concomitant nuking of democracy.
The blue tsunami is welcome, but Democrats have to restore the rule of law and reclaim the power of the purse. Trump administration officials who diverted congressionally mandated monies and declined to spend money on the things Congress mandated they be spent on, must be punished. The new big pro-Trump media monopolies have to be broken up. Comity is all very well, but we don’t need fascists to love us, we need them to fear us.
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