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(Hadalsame) 13 Dis 2018<\/strong><\/span> – Ever since the midterm election, conservative media in the United States have targeted with special zeal Ilhan Omar, an incoming Somali-American Democratic congresswoman and a devout Muslim who wears hijab. In response to Democrats\u2019 push to remove a headwear ban on the House floor to accommodate Omar, conservative commentator and pastor E.W. Jackson complained on a radio show that Muslims were transforming Congress into an \u201cIslamic republic.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Democratic Party has several rising political stars with Arab or Muslim backgrounds, all of whom have become objects of such conspiracy theories. But it\u2019s not only American conservatives who have been indulging in this culture war. The organized attacks have also been coming from abroad \u2014 specifically, from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.<\/p>\n

\n

”Gulf Arab monarchies are using racism, bigotry, and fake news to denounce Washington’s newest history-making politicians.”<\/h2>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The midterm elections have amplified an existing suspicion in Middle Eastern media of Muslim political activism in the United States. Academics, media outlets, and commentators close to Persian Gulf governments have repeatedly accused Omar, Rashida Tlaib (another newly elected Muslim congresswoman), and Abdul El-Sayed (who made a failed bid to become governor of Michigan) of being secret members of the Muslim Brotherhood who are hostile to the governments of Saudi Arabia and the UAE.<\/p>\n

On Sunday, Saudi-owned Al Arabiya\u00a0published<\/a>\u00a0a feature insinuating that Omar and Tlaib were part of an alliance between the Democratic Party and Islamist groups to control Congress. The article accused the two of being \u201canti-Trump and his political team and options, especially his foreign policy starting from the sanctions on Iran to the isolation of the Muslim Brotherhood and all movements of political Islam.\u201d<\/p>\n

In another example, a talk\u00a0show<\/a>\u00a0on Saudi-owned station MBC discussed the Muslim congresswomen and more broadly the implications of Democrats taking the House. Prominent Arab anchor Amr Adib debated the matter with Egyptian political scientist Moataz Fattah, who suggested that Trump\u2019s successful combating of Islamists would be undermined by the Democrats\u2019 victory. The attacks have become so ubiquitous in the Persian Gulf that the trend itself is the subject of debate, both online and on television.<\/p>\n

Occasionally these attacks have been made by officials of those governments, in apparent anxiety that their countries\u2019 expensive public relations and lobbying efforts might be undermined. Just hours after Omar won her election, for example, a staffer at the Saudi Embassy in the United States accused her of following the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood, which he said has permeated the Democratic Party.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe will be hostile to the Gulf and a supporter of the political Islam represented in the Brotherhood in the Middle East,\u201d tweeted<\/a> Faisal al-Shammeri, a cultural advisor at the Saudi Arabian Cultural Mission to the United States, which is part of the embassy, and a writer for Al Arabiya.<\/p>\n

El-Sayed, an American born to Egyptian immigrants, noticed the attacks from the region during his campaign. Media in the Middle East amplified accusations by a Republican candidate for governor, Patrick Colbeck, that El-Sayed had links to the Brotherhood. Egyptian newspaper Youm7, for instance, reported\u00a0that El-Sayed likely lost the election to his link to the \u201cradical\u201d Nation of Islam, and his relationship with Muslim-American activist Linda Sarsour, \u201cknown for her radical views.\u201d<\/p>\n

El-Sayed told me that political elites in places like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE felt threatened by American politicians who are also Muslim. For average Middle Easterners, his story is inspiring. (The clearest instance of Middle Easterners drawing such inspiration, ironically, was the first presidential election victory of Barack Obama, who faced false accusations of being a Muslim.)<\/p>\n

The rise of politicians like El-Sayed, Omar, and Tlaib also undermines a core argument advanced by dictators in the Middle East: that their people are not ready for democracy. \u201cPeople would not have access to power in their countries but they would if they leave; this destroys the argument by Sisi or bin Salman,\u201d El-Sayed said, referring to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. \u201cWhat\u2019s ironic is there is no way I would aspire to be in leadership in Egypt, the place of my fathers.\u201d<\/p>\n

American allies in the region also fear that the Democratic Party\u2019s new Arab leaders will advocate for political change in their countries. Having spent millions of dollars for public relations campaigns in Western capitals, the Persian Gulf countries feel threatened by any policymakers with an independent interest in and knowledge of the region.<\/p>\n

They have thus framed these officials\u2019 principled objections to regional violations of human rights and democratic norms as matters of personal bias. One commentator, who is known to echo government talking points and is frequently retweeted by government officials, recently\u00a0spread<\/a>\u00a0the rumor that Omar is a descendent of a \u201cHouthi Yemeni\u201d to undermine her attacks on the Saudi-led war on Yemen.<\/p>\n

The most common attack online by the Saudi-led bloc on the Muslim-American Democrats has been to label them as members of the Muslim Brotherhood, or more generally as ikhwanji<\/em>, an extremist catch-all term. These attacks started long before this year\u2019s elections. In 2014, the UAE even announced a terror list that included<\/a>\u00a0the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) for its alleged links to the Muslim Brotherhood.<\/p>\n

The attacks attempting to tie Omar and Tlaib to the Muslim Brotherhood started in earnest after CAIR publicly\u00a0welcomed<\/a>\u00a0their election to Congress. One UAE-based academic, Najat al-Saeed,\u00a0criticized<\/a>\u00a0Arabic media for celebrating the two Muslim women\u2019s victories at the midterms, and pointed to CAIR\u2019s support for them as evidence of their ties to the Brotherhood.<\/p>\n

Source: Foriegn Policy<\/p>\n

Hadalsame Media<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(Hadalsame) 13 Dis 2018 – Ever since the midterm election, conservative media in the United States have targeted with special zeal Ilhan Omar, an incoming Somali-American Democratic congresswoman and a devout Muslim who wears hijab. In response to Democrats\u2019 push to remove a headwear ban on the House floor to accommodate Omar, conservative commentator and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":16086,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.hadalsame.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/b-73.jpg?fit=1536%2C1024&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9Xl2P-4br","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hadalsame.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16085"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hadalsame.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hadalsame.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hadalsame.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hadalsame.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16085"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.hadalsame.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16085\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16087,"href":"https:\/\/www.hadalsame.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16085\/revisions\/16087"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hadalsame.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16086"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hadalsame.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16085"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hadalsame.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16085"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hadalsame.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16085"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}