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[MOTIVATIONAL MUSIC] - Hi everyone, Steve Adubato.

For the next half hour, we're gonna have a compelling, important, really important conversation with Sahar Aziz, Distinguished Professor of Law at Rutgers University Law School and author of the book, "The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes Religious Freedom."

Professor, good to have you with us.

- It's a pleasure to be here.

- So you wrote an op-ed piece, we're taping this program on the 23rd of April, it will be relevant for a long time.

The issues we'll be talking about are not going away anytime soon.

You wrote an op-ed piece that appeared in several publications.

Do you mind if I just read a small section right from the beginning of it?

'Cause it sets the tone.

And also, I wanna be clear that Professor Aziz is also the director of the Center for Security, Race and Rights at Rutgers University Law School.

This is the beginning of this piece.

"Emotionally draining is how best to describe the past six months for many Muslim-Americans.

Oscillating between outrage, hopelessness, and determination.

Our diverse communities has spent the past six months doing whatever we can to end the senseless murder of over at the time we're taping 33,000 Palestinians including 13,000 children.

We have watched in horror, the Israeli military's mass bombing, systematic starvation and destruction of basic infrastructure in Gaza."

This is on the eve of Eid, what was supposed to be a celebration in your community.

Why did you write this piece and why is the problem of Islamophobia so serious in our country right now?

- Well, I woke up the day of Eid, very much looking forward to celebrating.

It's exactly like what my op-ed said, I am among the many Muslim-Americans and other Americans of various faiths, including of Jewish faith and Christian faith, who have been actively trying to advocate for our government and our president to impose a ceasefire in Gaza.

And that is emotionally draining, to put it mildly.

So when you have a religious holiday, you have a reason and a valid excuse to take a break and to try to just relax and enjoy the holiday and be grateful for all of the blessings that you have.

So on that morning on April 10th, I woke up to the horrific news that the Islamic Center at Rutgers University had been vandalized the night before.

And as you can imagine when you have a house of worship that's vandalized, whose ever house of worship it is, it's particularly traumatizing because it is the one place in the United States that I think everybody agrees whatever their faith is or lack of faith is, that it is supposed to be a safe place.

And to go and vandalize or commit a murder or to commit gun violence in a house of worship is really just going too far.

And the fact that our students were going to that house of worship so that they could celebrate Eid.

Because what we do as Muslims on Eid, we have two holidays over the year, Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha, and that's when we go pray in the morning.

And that is the mandatory prayer, sometime between 8:00 AM to 11:00 AM.

So to do that the night right before Eid is a very threatening statement and act.

And so how could I not write something to at least educate people who may not realize the severity of that kind of a threat and to students much less, And to students who already are dealing with all sorts of emotional trauma, because many of our Rutgers University students are Palestinians with family in Gaza who have been killed.

On the board of the Center for Security, Race and Rights on our board, we have one board member who's Palestinian, who has lost more than 100 members of his family.

They have been killed in less than seven months.

I can't even imagine that kind of pain.

So yeah, this is something that we cannot accept in our society.

We cannot accept houses of worship, wherever they may be, but especially on college campuses, to be vandalized or subjected to any form of violence or criminal activity.

- Professor, you said in this op-ed piece, which I found compelling, and let's make sure people can find this to our producers, let's make sure we put up a way for people to access the piece.

You said this example of what happened at the Center for Islamic Life at Rutgers University, horrific incident, the vandalizing, the stealing of the Palestinian flag, if I'm not mistaken, destroying incredibly religious and important art.

You said it was part of a pattern of Islamophobia, which is at its worst now more than ever, just a few incidents that you talked about here and some others.

Back in October, a 6-year-old Palestinian American boy fatally stabbed 26 times, in Chicago, I believe.

Back in November, a Muslim student struck and hit by a car at UC Berkeley.

Three college students of Palestinian descent shot in Vermont during Thanksgiving.

One is now paraplegic from the waist down.

And a 23-year-old Palestinian American stabbed at UT Austin.

Define Islamophobia and how they're connected to these incidents and other incidents that are not being reported, but are just as significant.

Please, professor.

- Well, the Council on American Islamic Relations just released its annual report that is effectively the counterpart to the ADL, the Anti-Defamation League, that focuses on antisemitism.

And so CAIR just released its report where it reported 8,061 complaints nationwide in 2023, which marked the highest number of complaints that CAIR has ever recorded in its 30 year history, that's even worse than 2001 and 2002 right after 9/11.

And what they have found is many of these hate incidents that are on account of someone's identity as a Muslim or as a Palestinian, oftentimes those two identities, though disparate, are often conflated as the same, that when they advocate for Palestinian human rights, they are attacked.

The least harmful is verbal, but oftentimes it's also physical attacks.

So of those 8,000 complaints, 33% of them were just in the last three months.

Of that high, unprecedented complaint level.

So what we're seeing is people are taking the stereotype that Muslims are terrorists, that they're violent, that they're hateful, and they are attributing to them a threat that is based on their anti-war activism.

I mean, see how perverse that is, is you have people who want to stop a war, people who want to stop the killing of civilians, people who want a ceasefire in Gaza, that is their ultimate objective.

And yet they're being accused of being hateful, they're being accused of being violent, and they're being targeted as legitimate targets for violence themselves.

And oftentimes the allegations of hatefulness are allegations that they are antisemitic, simply because they are critical of the Israeli military's war crimes in Gaza.

If somebody criticizes Hamas' war crimes in Israel on October 7th, 2023, they're not Islamophobic.

Similarly, if somebody criticizes Israel's war crimes since October 8th, they're not antisemitic.

But once you can portray someone, especially if you're a religious minority or racial minority, as someone who's hateful, violent, and dangerous, then you make them fair game for being targeted.

And we're back to the 9/11 paradigm, which it's patriotic to be a Islamophobic.

- So when we have someone on from the ADL, the Anti-Defamation League, who talks specifically about the rise in antisemitism.

And as we do this program at the end of April, a lot going on on college campuses, not only at Rutgers, at Columbia, at Yale, at places, Berkeley, across the country.

So when a prominent rabbi, Elie Buechler, over at Columbia University, as we do this program, tells Jewish students to leave the campus because of the extreme antisemitism going on on campus, how do we differentiate professor, between peaceful, assertive, legal, protesting against the war in Gaza, against the actions of the Israeli government calling for a ceasefire, which all sorts of folks are doing across this country, regardless of their political, ideological, religious affiliation, and what is being defined as extreme antisemitism.

Is there a clear sense for you as to how these protests across the country can take place, including at Rutgers, with Palestinian and Muslim students, arguing for what they're arguing for while having Jewish students feel safe?

Is there any contradiction in that?

- So the first thing we need to establish is there are many Jewish students who are in these protests- - That's right.

- Demanding a ceasefire.

So I think it's a bit disingenuous for people whose true political agenda is to quash criticism of Israel or to impose their own political analysis of what's happening in Gaza and Palestine and Israel under the guise of combating antisemitism.

Many of the students at Columbia that have been arrested are Jewish, many of the students that are being called antisemitic because of their human rights activism are Jewish.

- But excuse me, some Jewish students, I'm sorry for interrupting professor, some Jewish students are saying that outside of the folks you're talking about, have said publicly that they don't feel safe.

What I'm trying to get at is how the heck can these protests not just be allowed, but be supported because it's free speech and that's what supposedly makes America a great country?

- So I think we have to differentiate between, and this is part of the educational process at a university.

and it doesn't matter which student we're talking about, there is a difference between being offended and feeling uncomfortable because you find certain speech, certain ideas to be again, offensive or make you uncomfortable, as opposed to feeling unsafe because you are individually being targeted, you are being individually harassed or in some way, threatened individually by a identifiable person or group of people.

And so what we need to differentiate between is the political protests that are completely legal and that are part of the American tradition.

If you look at during the Vietnam War, or during the Civil Rights Movement, during the Women's Rights Movement, during the LGBTQ Civil Rights Movement, I mean, this is a social movement, during the Black Lives Matter Movement, these are protests and they will chant things and say things that someone who doesn't agree with the social movement's political objective may find offensive or insulting.

But that is very different than threatening a particular person or group of people.

So the question becomes, there's a couple things, first is we cannot conflate criticism of Israel or conflate criticism of the ideology of political Zionism with antisemitism.

It may be the subjective interpretation of a particular person who self-identifies as Jewish American to say, well, when I hear you say you criticize Israel or you allege that, for example, Israel's committing genocide or that you demand that Palestine be free from the river to the sea, I may interpret that as genocidal.

- We had a very prominent political commentator who happens to be Jewish, and I asked her about this, you can check out our interview with Julie Roginsky.

And I asked her, and I said, what does from the river to the sea mean to you?

And she said, Steve, it's obvious, it means if that were to happen, from the river to the sea, it's the elimination of the Jewish state.

That's not how you- - That's an interpretation, - But that's not how you interpret it.

- I know, but you have to talk to the people who are saying it, okay.

And most of them will argue that it is Jewish security and Palestinian freedom from the river to the sea.

These are young people, these are people that were not alive in the 1950s and the 1960s and the 1970s when you did have violent political movements who openly stated they do not recognize the state of Israel, that is 70 years ago.

The people who are saying that phrase right now are effectively arguing that either we need a two-state solution, where Jews and Palestinians are both secure and free and have self-determination, or we have a one-state solution, where Jews and Palestinians are free and have self-determination, whatever option that is, it is not permanent occupation, it is not genocide, it is not ethnic cleansing.

And I think that's the message that's not getting across in the media is you're only taking one interpretation, which is quite anachronistic based on the '50s, '60s, and '70s, without even asking the students across the country who are saying the phrase and saying, well, what do you mean by that phrase?

And when you ask them, they'll say exactly what I just said.

Now, does that mean that there aren't people in these protests that are in fact hateful people, who hate Jews?

Of course, in any protest, there may be, but those are not the people that are claiming to represent the movement.

When we had the Black Lives Matter social movement, the vast majority of the protests were nonviolent, but sometimes there will be people who are violent, and that doesn't mean that the entire movement is violent.

And that is I think a bad faith attempt to delegitimize a social movement by pointing to one or two or three people.

I just wanna say one more thing is that in any university campus, long before October 7th, these policies have been in place for decades.

If any student is a target of a threat, harassment, intimidation, bullying, there is a complaint process and there is an investigation process.

And those processes are legitimate, and I certainly support students using those processes.

But again, for example, there are many pro-Israeli protests, particularly that occurred right after October 7th.

Muslim, Arab and Palestinian students do not have grounds under this complaint process to go and tell the university, I feel unsafe because these people are supporting Israel, and I believe that what Israel's doing is genocidal, the response to the universities was that's their free speech right.

- You're saying it's a double standard.

If Jewish students and others who believe that October 7th and the attack perpetrated by Hamas, in the eyes of many a terrorist organization, that folks were getting together saying it was horrible what happened, and that the double standard, as I understand this professor, is that Palestinian students, Muslim students and others who argue for a ceasefire because as we speak, 33 plus 1000 people, 13,000 plus children have died in Gaza, not to mention the starvation going on, et cetera, you're saying there's a double standard there- - Well, I'm talking about the- - Both things could be true.

Correct, professor?

- So I'm not talking about the protests that protested Hamas' October 7th war crimes, which I recognize as war crimes.

I'm talking about the protests that happened in the four to six to eight weeks afterwards that supported Israel's collective punishment, that supported Israel's bombing of civilian buildings with 2000 ton bombs, 1000 ton bombs.

In other words, they were protesting in support of Israel for weeks while Israel was committing war crimes on a daily basis.

Many Muslim and Palestinian and Arab students and other students found those protests to be extremely offensive, it made them feel unsafe.

But that's their subjective belief.

I think the university should allow both the pro-Israeli protests to occur and those who are defending the human rights of Palestinians.

And I don't think that students should be able to quash other people's freedom of speech and academic freedom simply because they find those views offensive or make them uncomfortable.

Instead, they can just not go to the protest, they can just avoid the activism.

- What you're saying is so significant on so many levels because someone very close to me when I was telling them I was doing this interview with you and I was reading some of your editorial, your piece, and again, put up the website so people can find out more, it was both on nj.com and on northjersey.com, that's where I read it.

And a very close person to me said, Steve, it's so hard to pick sides.

And I said to this person very close to me, what do you mean pick sides?

What sides are we picking here?

Can't we be both sympathetic and empathetic and care about the horrific increase in Islamophobia and the incidents that we're talking about here, including the 6-year-old boy in Chicago, not to mention what happened on the Rutgers campus with this horrific April 10th vandalization that took place while we're still, sympathetic, empathetic and care about the increase in antisemitism and what happened on October 7th?

What's this choosing professor?

- I agree, it's a zero sum frame that is false.

Because it's conflating political dissent and political disputes with true threats to the safety of minority groups, whether that minority group may be Jewish or Muslim or Palestinian.

And I think there's a lot of bad faith actions going on by those who are openly, self-described, unconditional supporters of Israel.

I think that they are intentionally conflating criticism of Israel and criticism of Zionism as a political ideology, with true threats to the physical safety of Jews, those are two different things.

Again, if there is political activity where an individual Jewish student, for example, is directly threatened, directly harmed, that student absolutely has a basis for a complaint.

Whether it's an administrative complaint within the university or a criminal complaint, and I would say the same thing to any student, but that's not the evidence we're seeing.

We want the evidence, I mean, in many ways people are looking to see where is the violence that they're talking about?

Because the worst thing you're seeing is shouting matches between students and they're all shouting when they actually try to engage.

- This case, the situation involving, Adeel Mangi, I want to get, is it correct?

- Yeah.

- A highly respected lawyer who has been nominated by President Biden to serve on the United States Circuit Court of Appeals, Third Circuit, he would be the first Muslim appellate judge.

A whole range of organizations, including 15 Jewish organizations, the Anti-Defamation League and others, bar associations, a whole range of folks, are supportive of him, he's a qualified jurist in the eyes of many, it didn't happen, it's not happening.

There are many, disproportionately Republican members of Congress, who are fighting it, an example of Islamophobia?

- [Sahar] Well, I certainly think so.

The people who were opposing him are also the people who supported the Muslim ban.

They're also the people who supported Trump and his openly Islamophobic political platform that he ran on in 2016.

- Banning Muslims in the country?

- Well, the Muslim ban of 2017, the very first executive order that Trump issued was effectively banning tens of millions of Muslims from entering the United States.

And he made exceptions only for the Muslim majority states with whom he had personal business contacts with or for national security reasons he needed to keep a good relationship with such as Saudi Arabia.

- I'm sorry for taking you there, professor, my bad.

I wanna talk about Mr. Mangi and why it's so important and why this case, why what's happening to him and about him is so significant, not just to the Muslim community, but for our nation, who needs good judges, go ahead, I'm sorry.

- Well, I think his record is very clear, that he is one of the most accomplished litigators in the country, certainly in New Jersey.

And the fact that the Republicans are using the Center for Security, Race and Rights at Rutgers Law School, which is one of 14 academic centers at our law school as the pretext for trying to hide their Islamophobia is quite obvious.

- What's the rationale?

But what's their rationale, that he's Muslim?

- I think that is ultimately what they want to say, but they can't say that.

So they point to speakers that the Center for Security, Race and Rights has invited.

We've invited 90 different speakers and these Republicans have only singled out the Palestinian academics, these are professors, and said that because of what they presented, which was their books, that that's antisemitic.

And as a result, anyone on the board of advisors, which by the way meets only once a year and has absolutely no role in the operation of the center, then they are guilty of what the Republicans believe is antisemitism, when in fact the Republicans don't want this Muslim on the appellate court and they don't want the Center for Security, Race and Rights to ever host any Palestinian experts, even if we're talking about the Palestine-Israel conflict.

- Professor, first of all, thank you, thank you for taking the time to write this piece, to join us, to be a part of a very difficult, complex conversation that cannot, that should not be ignored.

I'm not gonna get on my soapbox, it's not my place, but picking sides, that's not what this is about, it's about having an honest discussion that may be difficult but important.

Professor Sahar Aziz.

- So lemme just say one thing.

There is a side that we can all pick and agree on, the side is the side of human rights and human dignity.

And I believe that all of us can support the human rights of both Palestinians and Israelis and the human dignity and safety of both Jews and Muslims in America.

And I think we need to be looking to how people behave rather than imputing upon them, our subjective fears and stereotypes that we've internalized and trying to believe before we start hurling ad hominem attacks and defaming other groups.

- Thank you, professor, we appreciate you taking the time to be with us.

- Thank you.

- Thank you, all the best.

I'm Steve Adubato, that's Professor Aziz.

We'll see you next time.

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