Jonas Du

🚨 Mamdani “Legal Affairs” Pick and CAIR-NY Boss: “You Can’t Seal the Jar Back” on Muslim Power, Blames “Islamophobia” for Everything Afaf Nasher, Executive Director of CAIR-NY and a member of Zohran Mamdani’s Committee on Legal Affairs, boasts that “over 250 approximately Muslims actually ran for some sort of office, and almost 50% of them actually gained those offices.” She tells the audience that “even though we only have a few on the federal level, that’s bound to change as well,” and warns that “once that jar is opened, you’re not going to be able to seal it back.” In the next breath, Nasher insists that “Islamophobia and the stereotypes that feed Islamophobia are found… from the hallways of power in Congress all the way to the hallways of our classrooms. They’re found in our streets. They’re found in our places of work. They’re found at our dinner tables, and they’re found in systemic policies” shaping our social and political life. So the same country where Muslim candidates are winning so often that “you’re not going to be able to seal [the jar] back” is simultaneously portrayed as Islamophobic at every level of existence, from Congress to family dinner? Huh, wonder how that works. Then she rewrites American slavery as a story of stolen Muslim identity. Nasher claims that “the overwhelming majority” of early African Americans, “70 to 80%, had Islamic roots,” that “their identity and their faith was stripped away from them,” and that “a lot have come back to that identity,” ending with the claim that “30% of the Muslim population, at least here, is African American.” There is no acknowledgement of the Arab and Muslim slave systems that helped capture and sell African Muslims long before they ever encountered “Western Islamophobia.” Nasher doesn’t sound like a legal expert here. She sounds like a propagandist, talking up Muslim political power while insisting they’re still too persecuted to face any real criticism. Yet, this is the person Mamdani wants helping shape “Legal Affairs.”

In a February memo, the California Republican Party urged county organizations to tighten vetting procedures to block supporters of podcaster Nick Fuentes from gaining influence in the party. Fuentes has made numerous comments that have generated controversy, including denying the Holocaust, praising the late Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, attacking Vice President JD Vance over his marriage to Usha Vance and praising American adversaries. The Feb. 19 memo from the California Republican Party Engagement Committee, obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation, compared the tactics of Fuentes’ followers, known as “Groypers,” to the Democratic Socialists of America, which has gained influence in the Democratic Party.

Columbia’s student workers union is threatening to strike. Not over pay, healthcare, or workload, but over anti-Israel demands like divestment, academic boycotts, and amnesty for campus takeovers. That raises a bigger question about what this strike is really for.

In February '24, some students asked the union to host a listening forum with Jewish and Israeli student groups besides JVP to address the loss of trust in the union. However, then-union president Julia Bannon called this “agro genocidal rhetoric” and “concern trolling." 8/n