How would Democrats react if a GOP nominee for a lifetime appointment to the federal bench had not only served on an advisory board of an antisemitic organization but also donated thousands of dollars to its cause? What if that nominee also served on the board of an organization founded by a cop killer? And what if that person then conveniently forgot to inform the U.S. Senate about this association?
Well, meet Adeel Mangi, Joe Biden’s nominee for the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. He is guilty of all the above. And a number of Democrats are concerned. So, in The New York Times this week, columnist Lydia Polgreen defended Magi in an exceptionally misleading piece headlined “The Islamophobic Smear Campaign Dividing Democrats.”
The late Christopher Hitchens once correctly called “Islamophobia” a “stupid neologism” that “aims to promote criticism of Islam to the gallery of special offenses associated with racism.” These days, merely pointing out factual, if inconvenient, truths about a Muslim person will be cynically cast as Islamophobia.
Which brings me back to Polgreen, who notes that Magi has a “sterling legal education” and a “distinguished career at a high-profile private firm mixing corporate litigation with important pro bono work.” She goes on to argue that Magi has the “classic American story” of a man who grew up “in a poor country dreaming of a career as a lawyer and immigrated to the United States, where he ascended to the heights of his profession.”
Indeed, all of that seems to be true. Magi is quite the success story. The problem is he also dabbled in some other areas.
Here is Polgreen:
“Do you condemn the atrocities of Hamas terrorists?” Senator Ted Cruz of Texas demanded of Mangi, a Pakistani American with no connection to Hamas or Palestine other than the fact that he is Muslim, along with 1.8 billion people across the globe.
This statement is a lie. Cruz asked Mangi about Hamas because the nominee not only donated $6,500 to Rutgers’ Law School Center for Security, Race and Rights — an antisemitic academic group — but also sat on its advisory board for years. His firm, Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler, donated at least another $13,000.
This is not a group, incidentally, that merely hosts those “critical of Israel.” Nor is it, as Polgreen risibly contends, a place that hosts “provocative speakers, in service of fostering dialogue on complex and sometimes difficult subjects.” The group often hosts speakers who justify (and, sometimes, materially support) violence against Jewish civilians.
The group features former PLO spokesperson Rashid Khalidi and other people in a similar vein. In 2021, when Magi was on the board, the group sponsored an event commemorating 9/11 by featuring Sami Al-Arian, an academic who pled guilty to lending help to the Islamic Jihad — a U.S.-designated terror group that participated in the Oct. 7 massacre.
In 2020, when Magi was on the board, the group featured speaker Noura Erakat, an antisemitic quack who had previously participated in a workshop with senior Hamas bigwig Ghazi Hamad — a man who has prayed for the “annihilation” and “paralysis” of the “filthy animals” known as Jews.
You know, they’re just fostering some dialogue.
Magi also moderated a 2022 panel at a conference for the National Association of Muslim Lawyers sponsored by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), unindicted co-conspirators in a Hamas money-laundering case. If, for some reason, you feel this is an unfair characterization of CAIR, please recall that only recently, Nihad Awad, the executive director, said he “was happy to see” the sexual torture, murder, and kidnapping of civilians on Oct. 7.
Now, perhaps Polgreen believes this brand of “dialogue” is useful. That’s her prerogative. And Magi is free to hold whatever positions and support any speakers he chooses. Senators, however, have a right, a duty, to wonder if someone who is associated with this vile institution belongs on a federal bench.
And if it is true that Magi implausibly lent his name to these extremist groups but was completely unaware of what was going on, then he clearly doesn’t have the requisite awareness to be on a federal bench.
There is, of course, more that Polgreen didn’t even bother to justify. Magi failed to tell the Senate, for example, that he serves as an advisory board member of the hard-left Alliance of Families for Justice, an organization founded by the late Marxist terrorist Kathy Boudin that has honored Mumia Abu Jamal and five other cop murderers as “freedom fighters.” A convicted murderer, Boudin served 23 years in prison after playing decoy during an armored truck robbery that resulted in the murder of two cops.
Make of that what you will.
Or, perhaps, think about it this way: Clarence Thomas has been a victim of a smear campaign for vacationing with a rich person by the same people who defend Magi even though the latter pals around with terrorist apologists.
Now, Biden needs a diversity hire. Surely, there are numerous qualified far-left Muslim candidates who have never associated with these kinds of revolting groups. It is, dare I say, “Islamophobic” to act as if Magi is the norm.
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