Islamophobia and anti Muslim Hate Now Comes With a Presidential Seal

A few days ago, the sitting United States president posted an image online.

It showed three Muslim Americans. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, both elected members of Congress, sworn to serve under the same Constitution the president himself swore to protect. Alongside them, Abdul El Sayed of Michigan, a leading Democratic candidate for the United States Senate, chosen by voters in his primary just weeks earlier. Arrows pointed to their home states like coordinates on a target. Above their faces, one word in bold red letters: Jihadists.

This was not an offhand remark, forgotten by morning. Trump warned that “jihadists” are being elected “all over the place,” and he later said a friend had told him to use that word. He did not name the friend, and no reporter has since identified who it was.

Sit with that for a moment. The highest office in this country stamped a slur onto three fellow Muslim Americans politicians, two of them sitting lawmakers, one a candidate asking voters to send him to the United States Senate.

This time it was elected officials and a candidate who happen to be Muslim, which means it was Muslims everywhere, watching their own government brand them as threats and danger. This is dehumanization broadcast from the highest office in the land, and every American citizen should recognize the danger in that.

Consider the word chosen for this attack. Language is never accidental, and this word has been gutted and refilled with menace.

In classical Arabic, jihad carries no meaning of holy war. It signifies struggle, above all an inward struggle, against selfishness, against cruelty, against the lesser parts of one’s own character. Nearly every spiritual tradition on earth speaks of this same inner battle.

Yet this word has been weaponized, drained of its meaning, and reissued as a synonym for terror. Close to two billion people hold this faith. To reduce jihad to a threat is not carelessness. It is a deliberate erasure of centuries of thought.

What unsettles me most is how gradually many in this nation has drifted toward treating an entire faith community as permanently suspect. This did not arrive suddenly. It accumulated slowly, post by post, remark by remark, until casual scorn barely registers as newsworthy anymore.

It appears in classrooms, where students learn almost nothing of the centuries of towering achievements of Muslim scholars, physicians, mathematicians, philosophers, explorers, poets and astronomers who shaped human knowledge. Few are taught how learning centers in Muslim Spain helped kindle the European Renaissance. Fewer still learn that Morocco, a Muslim nation was the first nation on earth to recognize the fledgling United States as independent. That history sits absent from the record. Into its empty space, suspicion and caricature have rushed to settle.

And still I search for outrage and find too little of it. I search within my own community and hear mostly quiet. I search among officials elected to represent me and find silence dressed up as caution.

Every person who stands behind a pulpit today carries a choice, whether to speak plainly against this cruelty or let it pass unremarked. Given what I have witnessed over the years, I fear most pulpits will remain silent. So much, then, for teachings of love toward one’s neighbor.

This same corrosive pattern reaches beyond our borders too. Those who raise their voices for Palestinian lives and genocide being committed by Israel, the great majority of them Muslim though many are Christian as well, are routinely branded as antisemites, their conscience twisted into bigotry. We watched this against Zohran Mamdani. We watched it against Abdul El Sayed.

Genuine hatred of Muslims is real and it is a grave danger. It is precisely because that danger is real that turning the accusation into a blunt political weapon cheapens its meaning and leaves communities more vulnerable, teaching people to dismiss every warning as simply another tactic.

So what do we as Muslims do with this fury, this grief, this exhaustion? We stop waiting to be rescued, because rescue has never come and will not begin now.

Strength that is not built by our own hands is strength that can be withdrawn at someone else’s convenience. American Muslims must pour their energy into their own civic power, their own institutions, their own seats at every table where decisions are made. This is not a call toward separation. It is a call to plant roots so deep into the foundations of this democracy that no one can again circle our faces in red and mock us from behind a podium or a desk.

Here is what I ask of every reader today, whatever your faith, gender or background. Share this image and this account with your representatives before the week has passed. Ask your senators plainly whether they condemn this. Ask them to state, without qualification, that they stand beside their fellow Americans. Should they refuse to answer, remember that silence is itself a reply. Carry that knowledge with you to the next ballot. That goes for Democrats as well.

I urge Muslim parents everywhere to sit down with their children tonight and speak with them plainly about what this moment means. Speak with them about being steadfast and strong in their character, pride in their faith, pride in their civilization, pride in an identity that no one has the power to diminish. Do not let yourselves be cowed by a president whose ignorance and hostility toward Muslims are plain for the world to see, nor by the followers who echo him. Continue the good work even while you carry hurt, even while anger sits heavy in your chest, even while the pain of watching your faith attacked feels unbearable. We must grow sturdier still.

Muslims have weathered trials like this for centuries. From the earliest days of the faith, the Prophet, peace be upon him, faced towering hatred and bigotry, and still the message endured. We shall overcome this too, without a doubt. We need only continue the good work, continue speaking the truth without flinching, and refuse to let ourselves be buried beneath foolish, ignorant, and hateful falsehood.