WASHINGTON: Various organisations and senators have lashed out at three Republican senators for posing hostile questions to President Joe Biden's historic judicial nominee Adeel Mangi during his recent confirmation hearing.

He is the first Muslim-American nominee for the federal appellate court. During the Wednesday hearing by the Senate judiciary body, Senators Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley rudely questioned Adeel Mangi to express his views on the 9/11 World Trade Centre towers attack and the October 7 attack in Israel as well as Tel Aviv's position in the Palestine issue, reported HuffPost.

If confirmed, he will become the first Muslim American appeals court judge and third federal judge. The US president nominated Mangi to the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Philadelphia.

Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) Deputy Director Edward Ahmed Mitchell condemned the senators "for subjecting Mr Mangi to irrelevant, hostile questions about Israel and Palestine".

He said: "Singling out a Muslim judicial nominee and forcing him to answer 'gotcha questions' about the Middle East simply because of faith or because of his tangential connections to Muslims who comment on the Middle East is Islamophobic and un-American. So is raising the hateful trope that presumptively assumes that Muslims are antisemitic."

The CAIR deputy director called on all senators "to reject this nonsense and start assessing Muslim American judicial nominees based on their expertise and qualifications, like all other nominees". To a query, Adeel Mangi replied, "Any act of antisemitism or any bigotry including anti-Muslim bigotry on college campuses is abhorred. My children will be going to universities. I want them to feel safe and I want the children of my Jewish friends and colleagues to feel safe."

Cruz constantly tried to press Mangi to express if he felt any justification for the Hamas attack on Israel, to which the latter repeatedly condemned terrorism.

"I have no patience none for any attempts to justify or defend those events," Mangi said of the October 7 attacks. At one moment, the senator's grilling became so hostile that Senator Dick Durbin, the committee chair, had to intervene.

Published in The Daily National Courier, December, 18 2023

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