Says Judicial Nominee Adeel Mango during hearing, “On 9/11 I was in New York. I saw what happened. It was my city that was attacked.“
The Huffington Post reports, “The Council on American-Islamic Relations, the largest Muslim civil rights organization in the country, on Friday denounced three Republican senators for their treatment of President Joe Biden’s historic judicial nominee Adeel Mangi during his recent confirmation hearing.
GOP Sens. Ted Cruz (Texas), Tom Cotton (Ark.) and Josh Hawley (Mo.) berated and interrupted Mangi in his Wednesday hearing in the Senate judiciary committee, demanding that Mangi, who is Muslim, share his personal views on the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the Oct. 7 terrorist attack in Israel and the Israeli-Hamas conflict in general.
Cruz also tried to tie Mangi to a professor at Rutgers Law School who signed on to a 2021 pro-Palestinian letter denouncing the “colonial conditions” that Palestinians live under. That professor was associated with a center at the university, the Center for Security, Race and Rights. At the time, Mangi served on an advisory panel that met once a year to presents idea for academic research at Rutgers Law School.
“Cruz’s questioning became so hostile that Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), the committee chair, banged his gavel several times to tell Cruz to knock it off.
Cotton similarly tried to tie Mangi to a speaker at one of the center’s 2021 events who claimed that Jewish people are “colonial settlers” in Israel.
Mangi said, again, that his only connection to the university was his role on the annual advisory panel for the law school, the purpose of which was to advise and develop academic curricula to assist in instruction in religious based bigotry; and that he didn’t know anything about the center’s event or its speakers as he was on an advisory board, not part of the center at large. He reiterated that he was born in Pakistan and as a jurist didn’t address setting policy for the Middle East..
That didn’t stop Hawley from using his time, too, to press Mangi on his views on Israel. He asked Mangi if believes that Israel is a colonial state. Mangi reiterated that he is not an expert on the Middle East, and that policy questions about this weren’t relevant to why he was there that day. “I have no basis as a judicial nominee to cast a view on the Middle East,” Mangi said.
Mitch McConnell repeats on the floor the same misinformation, parrots the same talking points about Mangi’s activities and also disrespectfully mispronounces the the nominee’s name calling him “Undee Mojee.”