Syracuse University Press describes “Muslims in Milwaukee: Placemaking, Belonging and Activism,” a new book by three University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee professors, as “a nuanced portrait of a growing Muslim community shaping identity, activism and civic life within the complex racial and social landscape of Milwaukee.”

Two Milwaukee Muslims approached the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Office of Development and Alumni Relations in 2010 to discuss initiating the first demographic study of Muslims in Milwaukee. One was the Islamic Society of Milwaukee’s first president, Waheeduddin Ahmed, Ph.D. The other—his son Aamer, a UWM graduate.

Three UWM professors expressed interest, and the Muslim Milwaukee Project began. Now, two decades later, Anna Mansson McGinty, Ph.D., Caroline Seymour-Jorn, Ph.D., and Kristin M. Sziarto, Ph.D., will celebrate the launch of their book, Muslims in Milwaukee: Placemaking, Belonging and Activism, with Milwaukee’s Muslim community.

The Community Book Talkback: Muslims in Milwaukee will be held at the Islamic Resource Center, 5233 S. 27th St., Greenfield, Wednesday, May 20, 7-8:30 p.m. The authors will discuss their research and findings with the audience and a panel of prominent Milwaukee Muslim community leaders, including Dr. Ahmed, who initiated the project. The program is free and open to the public.

The panel includes: Dr. Ahmed, an immigrant from Hyderabad, India, who earned his Ph.D. at the University of London; attorney Othman Atta, ISM’s executive director; artist Amal Azzam; Janan Najeeb, founder of the Muslim Women’s Coalition and the Wisconsin Muslim Civic Alliance; and Will Perry, former executive director of the Milwaukee Islamic Dawah Center and past president of the WMCA. It will be moderated by Fahed Masalkhi, Ph.D., a UWM senior teaching faculty member in the Department of Global Studies.

Publisher Syracuse University Press describes Muslims in Milwaukee: Placemaking, Belonging and Activism as “a nuanced portrait of a growing Muslim community shaping identity, activism and civic life within the complex racial and social landscape of Milwaukee.” It draws on over a decade of ethnographic fieldwork, surveys and extensive interviews with community members, students, artists, activists and leaders. British academic and social geographer Peter Hopkins, a professor at Newcastle University in England, calls it “a must-read for scholars and students across the social sciences and humanities interested in issues of race, religion, migration, identity, belonging, community and activism.”

“A very good discount on our book will be available to all people who attend the talkback event,” Sziarto said. Attendees will be given a postcard with a discount code to use when purchasing the book from the publisher, Syracuse University Press. 

An interview with the authors

Wisconsin Muslim Journal interviewed authors McGinty, Seymour-Jorn and Sziarto this week about their new book and the upcoming talkback with Milwaukee’s Muslim community. Here are the highlights:

What led to your interest in studying Muslims in Milwaukee?

Seymour-Jorn: I got interested in Arabic, especially calligraphy, through a comparative religions class I took in college. I decided I wanted to learn this language. I was so lucky to be in college at a time when there was funding for American students to study abroad, so I went to Jordan and did a summer program, then kept going back for other programs.

I was trained as an anthropologist, and as an anthropologist, I work with creative people, particularly writers. Most of my research before this book was on writers and intellectuals in Egypt and Jordan. 

I was teaching Arabic for my first seven years at UWM. I noticed how many of my students were from the Arab and Muslim community. I did a little research project about what motivated them to learn Arabic. I got interested in the community through these students.

I also volunteered in a group that doesn’t exist in Milwaukee anymore, the Anti-Discrimination Committee. It dealt with fighting discrimination against Arabs, Muslims and other people. That’s where I met Janan (Najeeb), Othman (Atta) and others.

McGinty: I got my Ph.D. in European ethnology, which is very close to cultural anthropology. A lot of my graduate student peers in Sweden were studying immigrants and how Sweden was becoming a multicultural society. My Ph.D. thesis was on Swedish and American women who converted to Islam. I focused on their life stories and their narratives about the change of self and identity related to family and religious beliefs. 

I came to UWM in 2003 and met Caroline. In 2007, we worked with the Muslim Women’s Coalition on a community-university collaboration project called “Combating Islamophobia.”  

Sziarto: After graduating from college, I spent three or four months in Turkey. I became very interested in the culture and language. I’ve been reading about that part of the world ever since. 

I also teach a class called World Peoples and Regions, and I always teach about the Middle East and North Africa. I’m not an expert on the region, but I need to know a fair amount to teach this class.

All my graduate education is in human geography. When I did my Ph.D. thesis at the University of Minnesota, I was very interested in working-class women of all ethnicities organizing together. I focused on healthcare workers and the unlikely alliances between healthcare workers, unions and religious leaders. One of the shortcomings of my research was that I never managed to get in touch with any Muslim clergy. I felt that was a big gap in that project.

When I arrived at UWM in Fall 2007, I met Caroline and Anna. Like them, one of my preferred research methods is ethnography. 

In 2010, the College of Letters and Science put out a call to research on Milwaukee’s Muslim community. I saw it as a great opportunity to work with Caroline and Anna, and meet the various Muslim community leaders and members. The three of us thought, “We’re a public university and this is a community we care about. Let’s do this!”

Fahed Masalkhi, Ph.D., will moderate a talkback between the authors of “Muslims in Milwaukee,” a panel of Milwaukee’s Muslim community leaders and the audience. 

What are you anticipating at the forum with the Muslim community?

Seymour-Jorn: We have a wonderful moderator, Dr. Fahad Masalkhi, a UWM teaching faculty member and a member of the Muslim community. We met and decided we would introduce the central themes of the book, placemaking and activism, and share some of the basic findings. We want to have time for each of the Muslim leaders on the panel to give their reactions. They might see things that resonate with them. They might push back on other things.

Sziarto: One of the possibilities is that people may point out things the book doesn’t address, ideas for future research, which is useful for us and others as well.

McGinty: I think the topics of social justice and racial justice research will come up, or the recent collaboration within the Muslim community that is really impressive. We also talk about what we call “lived Islam.” It describes the everyday lived experience of embodying a Muslim identity in the context of living in one of the most segregated cities in the country.

We have a diverse group of panelists with a range of perspectives, from Dr. Ahmed in his mid-nineties to the young artist Amal Azzam. We want the focus to be on the panelists’ reactions: What surprised them? Is there something they endorse? Something they resist? 

We also want to have time for a Q & A with the audience.

Your book has been praised as a must-read for academics. Is it also something for general readers? Can it help those who don’t know Muslims overcome some of the stereotypes they hold?

Seymour-Jorn: I would certainly like to think so. Stereotypes are often just based on ignorance. When you start to get to know a person or a community, you realize how complex it is. It offers an opportunity to think about the humanity of people who are often negatively stereotyped and, unfortunately, also dehumanized.

McGinty:  Highlighting everyday lives promotes a sense of familiarity and commonality that speaks against anti-Muslim or anti-Arab racism. You see, they are not only Muslims, but have other identities, too, both religious and non-religious, that resonate with all of us. One way of writing scholarship against Islamophobia is to highlight everyday life, with all its interests and activities, the lives we all live. The sense of familiarity can replace a sense of otherness. 

Community Book Talkback: Muslims in Milwaukee will be held at the Islamic Resource Center, 5233 S. 27th St., Greenfield, Wednesday, May 20, 7-8:30 p.m.

What is unique about this research?

Sziarto: One of the really important things we’re trying to do with this book is have people pay attention to Milwaukee as a place because it’s understudied. Unlike Chicago, which has a huge role in American sociology’s study of the American city and in urban studies, Milwaukee is a medium-sized town. In terms of Muslim communities in the U.S., there’s focus on Chicago, Detroit, New York and Los Angeles because of the sheer numbers of Muslims living there. Milwaukee gets left out. 

Seymour-Jorn: There’s also a lot of research about Arab Americans. Of course, not all Arab Americans are Muslim. Many are Christian. And not all Muslims are Arabs. These are overlapping fields.

McGinty: Muslims in Milwaukee are very diverse. They have a community with a long history.

Is the experience of Muslims in Milwaukee typical of American Muslims in mid-sized cities?

Sziarto: We can’t generalize to other places, but we can ask, “So how did you come to have this experience?” We can think through the fact that Milwaukee is one of the most racially segregated cities in the country. Where are they understanding they fit in? 

Seymour-Jorn: One thing we can say, based on our reading of our research and research on other Muslim communities around the country, is that there are a lot of common problems that Muslims experience around the nation. Unfortunately, one of those is a real lack of knowledge from many Americans about Islam and a real fear of Muslims. Examples include the erroneous beliefs that Muslims all oppress women or that they are trying to establish something called sharia law here. 

Another thing we saw in our research is so much change going on between the older and younger generations. Sometimes that creates tension but it is also creating a lot of dynamism, with young people taking up the torch and developing activism in new ways.

McGinty: What really impressed me is, with Milwaukee being a mid-sized city in the Midwest, we can’t talk about “the Muslim community.” We have to talk about “Muslim communities.” And, because Milwaukee is smaller than Chicago or Los Angeles, we’ve witnessed a civic collaboration across the city between different groups, across different neighborhoods. They have been able to collaborate and do institutional building that might be different in a larger city. There is something to be said about this smaller landscape lending itself to a lot of collaboration and effective organizing. Like now, with the detention of (ISM president) Salah Sarsour (who is being held by ICE), the immediacy of the reaction and how the community can mobilize itself so quickly speaks to all these channels of communication the communities have created

Sziarto: I give big credit to the leaders themselves for putting themselves out there all the time and developing all these interactions, for developing relationships with interfaith coalitions and elected officials. Muslim leaders have done the hard work of organizing across different communities and  cultivating leadership across generations.

Sometimes these relationships lead to really productive outcomes, like when the Brookfield branch of ISM was going to be built and there was a neighborhood pushback. An interfaith coalition came together to support the building of the mosque. 

Seymour-Jorn: It’s a small community, but a very active. It’s a community that’s making its mark on Milwaukee and it’s an important community to know about.

May is the month of motherhood in the United States for several reasons, including the celebration of Mother’s Day on the second Sunday of the month. It also falls in the spring, a season that symbolizes rebirth, fertility, and abundance. What many Muslims may not realize is that May is also dedicated to the Virgin Mary in the Catholic tradition.¹ Throughout the month, there are numerous observances that honor Maryam not only as the mother of Jesus, peace be upon him, but also as a spiritual mother to Christians. This understanding of spiritual motherhood is similar to the title given to the wives of the Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, who are known as the “Mothers of the Believers,” even though most of them did not have biological children. 

Allah says in the Quran:

“The Prophet has a stronger affinity to the believers than they do themselves. And his wives are their mothers…” (Quran, 33:6)

Through this verse, Allah establishes that the wives of the Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, are unlawful in marriage to anyone after his death. At the same time, it elevates these women to the status of symbolic “mothers” to the entire body of believers, from that time until the Last Day. This is the origin of the title Ummahat al-Mu’minin, or “Mothers of the Believers.”

Out of all the Mothers of the Believers, only Khadijah bint Khuwaylid bore the Prophet’s children, peace and blessings be upon him.² Others, such as Sawdah bint Zam’ah, Umm Habiba (Ramlah bint Abi Sufyan), and Zaynab bint Khuzayma, had children from previous marriages. The rest, which include Aisha bint Abu Bakr, Hafsa bint Umar, Zaynab bint Jahsh, Juwayriyah bint al-Harith, Safiyya bint Huyayy, and Maymunah bint al-Harith, did not have children at all. Nevertheless, all of these women, may Allah be pleased with them, embodied strength, dignity, and true femininity in Islam. Their lives remind us that our spiritual “mothers” were not defined by childbirth alone. When we honor mothers, we can also recognize and celebrate the fullness of femininity in Islam, making space to value all women for the roles they play in nurturing, guiding, and strengthening the community.

Powerful women have been part of our faith tradition since the dawn of humanity, but it was not childbearing that set them apart. Hawwa (Eve) was created from the rib of Adam, peace be upon him, but she was no less human than he. Both were given knowledge, responsibility, and the ability to discern right from wrong, and when they sinned, neither was deemed more blameworthy than the other. Before becoming a biological mother, Hawwa was already a foundational figure in the story of humanity.

Likewise, before the annunciation of the birth of Isa, peace be upon him, Maryam was already known as an exceptional woman of worship. She was modest, truthful, and sincerely devoted to Allah alone. Asiyah, the wife of Pharaoh, was not defined by motherhood, yet her faith elevated her to the ranks of the greatest women. She took the infant Musa, peace be upon him, into her care and raised him with compassion and courage. When he was later commissioned as a prophet, she was among the first to believe, ultimately giving her life in steadfast devotion to the truth.

The Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, once said: 

“There were many men who achieved perfection, but none were perfect among women except Asiyah, the wife of Pharaoh, and Mary, the daughter of Imran. Verily, the virtue of Aisha over other women is like the virtue of a fine stew over all other foods” (Sahih al-Bukhari 3411, Sahih Muslim 2431).

What is especially striking about this hadith is that after mentioning two of the most exemplary women of all time, the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, draws attention to his wife, Aisha, and what distinguished her among the women of her time. He compares her to a dish known as tharid, a hearty meal of bread, broth, and meat that was considered one of the finest foods in Arabia, often reserved for special occasions. Just as this dish was favored above others, Aisha stood out for her exceptional virtues. Her status was not defined by biological motherhood, but by her faith, intellect, and lasting contributions to the Muslim community. 

Unlike Maryam, who was a mother to Isa, peace be upon him, and Asiyah, who cared for Musa, peace be upon him, as a foster mother, Aisha did not become the mother of a prophet. Rather, she was the wife of a prophet and, after his passing, a spiritual mother to an entire community. She was a teacher, a scholar, and one of the greatest narrators of hadith. After the death of the Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, she became a trusted guide, offering knowledge, insight, and counsel to his companions. 

One of the companions, Abu Musa, may Allah be pleased with him, said about Aisha: 

“We never had a problem occur to us, the companions of the Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, but that we would ask Aisha and find that she knew something about it” (Sunan al-Tirmidhi 3883).

Because of her close relationship with the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, Aisha gained deep insight into the religion and the character expected of a believer. The companions relied on her narrations and sought her guidance on religious matters due to her exceptional memory and scholarship. Her role as a spiritual mother extended beyond her own lifetime, nurturing and guiding even later generations of Muslims. Masruq ibn al-Ajda, who was a prominent Tabi’I from the generation after the companions, said: 

“By the one in whose hand is my soul, I saw the learned elders among the companions of Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, ask her about the (spiritual) obligations” (Muṣannaf Ibn Abi Shaybah 30387).

Even to this day, we rely on the wisdom left by our mother, Aisha, preserved in the major hadith collections, drawing from her knowledge and her detailed descriptions of the life of the Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him. Her legacy reminds us that nurturing a community is not limited to raising children, but also includes preserving knowledge, shaping character, and guiding others toward what is right. The lives of Aisha and the other Mothers of the Believers show that femininity is not confined to biological roles but is expressed through faith, service, and contribution to the well-being of the community. In celebrating motherhood this month and beyond, we can expand our understanding to include all women, both those who give life and those who give strength. 

1. https://crosscatholic.org/blogs/2026/02/honoring-mary-in-the-month-of-may/
2. Although Mariya al-Qibtiyya also bore a son, scholars have debated about whether she was a wife of the Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, or a concubine. The majority of scholars believe she was

Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir lobbed the familiar accusation of “antisemitism” at the EU foreign ministers and claimed the bloc had ignored attacks against Israel. Ten Hamas leaders were also named as targets of Monday’s sanctions.

“The reflexive response that ‘the world is against Israel’ grows less credible every time allies impose consequences, like this move by the EU to sanction violent settler groups and extremists,” said the US-based lobby group J Street, which calls itself “pro-Israel” and “pro-peace.”

“This is not about delegitimizing Israel. It’s about what the Netanyahu government is enabling in the West Bank,” said J Street, calling on Congress to pass a law to codify similar sanctions, which were canceled by President Donald Trump last year.

Officials in France and Sweden are calling for the EU go further than sanctions on individuals and groups by imposing restrictions on trade with settlements, and human rights groups in recent weeks have demanded a suspension of the EU-Israel Association Agreement to hold Israel accountable for its attacks on Gaza and the West Bank and its passage of a law requiring the death penalty for Palestinians found guilty of violent attacks on Israelis.

“We had discussions on the trade issues, limiting trade with the illegal Israeli settlements,” Kallas said after the meeting. “There was a call by many member states to take this forward, so we will continue to work with the commission on presenting proposals.”

Author Adam H. Johnson will discuss “How to Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza” with Wisconsin Coalition for Justice in Palestine co-chairs Rachel Ida Buff, Ph.D., and Janan Najeeb, Wednesday at Haraz Coffee Shop in Oak Creek.

Many of us knew intuitively something was wrong with the media’s coverage of the genocide in Gaza; media analyst Adam H. Johnson confirms it, says Speaking Out of Place host and Stanford University Professor David Palumbo-Liu. 

In his new book How to Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza, Johnson not only explains “just how bad the media coverage of the genocide in Gaza and beyond was—not just in the right-wing media, but also in the center-left media. Adam Johnson scoured thousands of stories, articles, news programs, cable shows and social media posts to not only confirm our worst suspicions, but also, and critically, to fit them into an analytical framework to show the myriad tactics, rhetorical strategies and instances of journalistic malpractice that not only sold a genocide, but also facilitated it,” Palumbo-Liu wrote.

As Johnson puts it in his book’s introduction, he shows “a direct line between the subjugation and slow deaths (of Palestinians) buried under rubble, and American media’s decision to incite against them, dehumanize them, ignore them, strip them of their history and their narratives, and prioritize domestic political convenience and crude chauvinist narratives over doing what news media’s job ostensibly is: to tell the truth.”

Johnson is a media analyst and co-host of Citations Needed, a podcast about the intersection of media, public relations and power. Johnson’s Substack, The Column, presents his media criticism and political analysis. His writing has been featured in The Nation, In These Times, The Intercept, Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle.

How to Sell a Genocide is based on Johnson’s analysis of 12,000 articles and 5,000 clips from both network and cable TV of “Center-Left, liberal, legacy or even mainstream media,” as he calls them, and anonymous interviews with a range of journalists. He explains in his introduction that he saw no point in assessing the “conservative or Maga media” like “Fox News, Daily Wire, right-wing AM radio, Sinclair News and the pages of the Wall Street Journal.” They are, he wrote, “for the most part, openly genocidal against the Palestinians and make no pretense otherwise.”

Johnson will be in Oak Creek Wednesday for an author talk that features a conversation with local leaders from the Wisconsin Coalition for Justice in Palestine, Rachel Ida Buff, Ph.D., and Janan Najeeb, about the role of corporate media in the devastation of Gaza. Buff is a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and co-founder of the Milwaukee Chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace. Najeeb is the founder and executive director of the Muslim Women’s Coalition, the publisher of the Wisconsin Muslim Journal.

MWC, in partnership with Boswell Books, presents Author Talk with Adam H. Johnson, Wednesday, May 13, 7 – 8:30 p.m., at Haraz Coffee House, 6840 S. 27th St., Oak Creek. The event is free and open to the public. Registration is required. 

An interview with Adam H. Johnson

Wisconsin Muslim Journal interviewed Johnson just before he launched his book tour for How to Sell a Genocide. The Texas native and Chicago resident is in New York City now. Milwaukee is his next stop, then Chicago. From here, he’ll go to Baltimore and Washington, D.C.

We’ll save the discussion about his findings on the U.S. media’s complicity in the genocide of Palestinians for his conversation with Buff and Najeeb. Rather, we chatted about his work and what he sees the future holds for the Palestinians and U.S. politics.

Here are the highlights.

What is a media analyst? How does it differ from a journalist reporting on the news?

In my view, a journalist is someone who reveals new information. I don’t call myself a journalist. There’s actually quite a bit of reporting in this book done by my partner, who is a journalist at Workday Magazine, a labor magazine in Minnesota.

I do media analysis. I do original research and dig up history. I sometimes call myself a “pundit.” It is kind of pejorative, but I think it is a perfectly fine thing to call oneself. (The definition of pundit in the Cambridge Dictionary is “a person who knows a lot about a particular subject and is therefore often asked to give an opinion about it.”

How did you decide to be a media analyst? 

It’s a weird job. Very few people do it. Obviously, if you criticize the media all day, you are foreclosing working at any big media outlet. Like the New York Times, it’s never going to review my book, much less hire me, because my book accuses the New York Times of incitement to genocide. So you have to exist outside the mainstream.

It’s also real work and not everyone wants to do it. You have to be obsessive and read a lot. I think you have to have some ideological disposition to make the writing interesting. I got into it as a gateway to broader ideological issues that are very pressing.

What does a media analyst do all day?

Mostly I yell at people on Twitter, but a lot of it is doing text analysis and trying to compare what’s being reported to what the underlying reality is and whether they match up. 

Typically, you try to suss out spin or public relations messaging and various messaging influence operations. You discover what is misleading or pandering to certain racist notions by comparing it to other reporting.

How have you succeeded in this field?

I have no formal training, other than film school 20 years ago. I have no authority other than my output, I suppose. I’m a freelance writer with a sufficient amount of following to make a living out of it.

Why did you focus on Gaza?

Well, certainly it was the biggest scandal of the last three years. The reporting was obviously atrocious, and consistently so, and I was writing about it all the time. I decided to really crunch the numbers, do a quantitative analysis and put it in a book. The situation is quantitatively provable. 

And because my country was arming and funding the killing of tens of thousands of people, I think it’s a very urgent priority. Anyone who cares about the future of humanity needs to try to stop it.

You focus your analysis on Center-Left media. Why?  

The media’s role in dehumanizing the Palestinians is worse than the War in Iraq when they sold a bunch of lies. Lies told about Gaza paved the way for the killing and dispossession of the people in Palestine.

In spite of the ostensibly liberal disposition of the U.S. media, when it comes to Palestine, it is consistently illiberal and engages in dehumanization. There’s been so much focus on right wing media. I think it’s bias is obvious. What’s interesting is the highly sophisticated ways in which the Center-Left media also helps advance a genocide. 

 What do you hope comes out of your book tour?

Book tours are about promoting a broader argument you make in the book. They are also about getting feedback from individuals, organizations and communities. Engaging with them is really helpful to me.

It’s a useful exchange of ideas. I’m excited to go to Milwaukee to talk to my co-panelists and others who attend. 

Weirdly enough, half the book was written in Milwaukee. I’d take writing retreats to knock out whole chapters. When you live in Chicago and you need to leave the city, there’s only one place to go and that’s Milwaukee. So, I’d take the train to Milwaukee, get a hotel and find a co-working space to write for three or four days. I did that three or four times. 

In the conclusion, you mention you don’t think things will change. Are you pessimistic about the future?

Well, there’s an important qualifier there. The important qualifier is, and I believe I’m quoting myself directly, “unless something radically changes in our politics.” The status quo, with the media ownership and political people in power in both parties, I don’t see why some of the underlying dynamics would really change much. 

There’s definitely alternative media and that’s one of the reasons there has been such a shift in polling. But how that shift manifests politically is a different question. The issue is less of preserving the image of Israel; that ship has sailed. You can’t kill 80,000 to 100,000 people and use pr to hide it.

What the Democrats have done is create systems to distance themselves from that reality while still maintaining the status quo. Their goal was not so much to argue on principles or even to defend Israel. It was just to buy time. And they bought themselves all the time they needed.

I put that qualifier in there as a call to action. There needs to be more engagement on the fundamental elements of the erasure of Palestinians and Zionism, and how to transition away from an ethno-supremacist worldview that’s obviously caused untold violence and harm.

Speaking to the New Jersey Globe, a spokesperson for the university cited a specific post that Elghandour wrote in April on the social media platform X, saying that Israel has “committed genocide” and is “running dungeons where they train dogs to sexually assault prisoners.”

“Weapons embargo is the absolute minimum,” said Elghandour. “Sanctions and diplomatic isolation are beyond justified.”

Leading human rights organizations and Holocaust scholars are among those who have called Israel’s assault on Gaza, which began in October 2023 in retaliation for a Hamas-led attack and has killed more than 72,000 Palestinians, a genocide.

Calls for the US to suspend military aid to Israel in light of the war are hardly a fringe view in the US; a Quinnipiac University poll released last August found that 60% of voters across all parties supported a suspension of aid.

Middle East Eye reported in December on Palestinian detainees’ allegations that Israeli guards had used dogs to sexually assault them. Rights organizations including the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) have also collected testimonies alleging such abuse.

Rutgers spokesperson Dory Devlin told the Globe that some students had accused Elghandour of making an “inflammatory claim” when they said they would not attend the graduation if he spoke.

“Rutgers chose me in part because of my humanitarian work,” said Elghandour in his statement. “They put my role as an executive producer for the Oscar-nominated The Voice of Hind Rajab front and center. They led with my social justice advocacy. Until it was inconvenient. That’s the difference between virtue signaling and principles. One withstands challenge. The other wilts in the slightest breeze.”

“The message Rutgers is sending to this class and everyone around the country is alarming,” he added. “Don’t dare stand for anything. Don’t dare speak up.”

He said he plans to record the speech he had been scheduled to give and post it online so students can still hear it.

Hank Kalet, a journalism professor at the school who serves as vice president of the Rutgers Adjunct Faculty Union, told the Globe that the university’s actions met “the definition of viewpoint censorship.”

“We have somebody who is offering, in a public way on X, some opinions about genocide in Gaza and being retaliated against because of the opinions that he has,” said Kalet, who is Jewish. He told the outlet that he did not believe Elghandour to be antisemitic.

Naureen Akhter, public affairs director for CAIR-New Jersey, noted that Rutgers had recently hosted Israel Defense Forces soldiers on its campus as part of a national tour called “Triggered: The Ceaseless Tour.”

“It is unconscionable that Rutgers rolls out the red carpet to soldiers engaged in genocide yet finds expression of pro-Palestine solidarity from one of their distinguished alumni so objectionable, they refuse to have him address graduates,” said Akhter. “We call on Rutgers School of Engineering to reinstate Rami Elghandour as commencement speaker and approach issues of student safety and freedom of expression with more care.”

The Rutgers student body is no stranger to advocacy for Palestinian rights. As on other college campuses across the US, students held a sustained protest in the spring of 2024, demanding the school divest from companies that do business with Israel, terminate its relationship with Tel Aviv University, and take other steps to demonstrate solidarity with Palestinians.

Rutgers-Newark also defended its decision to host pro-Palestinian comedian Ramy Youssef at its 2025 commencement after a state lawmaker claimed his involvement would alienate Jewish students at the university.

The decision to cancel Elghandour’s speech came days after the University of Michigan publicly apologized for a graduation speech by Professor Derek Peterson, who had applauded students who spoke out for Palestinian rights in campus protests, saying they exemplified the school’s long history of social activism.

“I think [Palestine] is the moral issue of our time, and I believe it’s been used to undermine democratic institutions in the US,” Elghandour told The Guardian on Wednesday.

Bajwa said on social media that “everyone says they’d have stood against slavery, the Holocaust, segregation, and more.”

“Easy to be righteous about the past,” he said. “But what about now? What moral tests are you failing in your own time? That’s the real test of courage.”

Amazon’s AI shopping assistant, Rufus, on a computer monitor on Dec. 1, 2024, in New York. Company apps, including Rufus, may make it easier to shop, but consumers might balk at giving up too much of the shopping experience. AP Photo/Peter Morgan

Americans spend a remarkable amount of time shopping – more than on education, volunteering or even talking on the phone. But the way they shop is shifting dramatically, as major platforms and retailers are racing to automate commercial decision-making.

Artificial intelligence agents can already search for products, recommend options and even complete purchases on a consumer’s behalf. Yet many shoppers remain uneasy about handing over control. Although many consumers report using some AI assistance, most currently say they wouldn’t want an AI agent to autonomously complete a shopping transaction, according to a recent survey from the consultancy firm Bain & Company.

As scholars studying the intersection of law and technology, we have watched AI-assisted commerce expand rapidly. Our research finds that without updated legal measures, this shift toward automated commerce could quietly erode the economic, psychological and social benefits that people receive from shopping on their own terms.

Caveat emptor

Part of shoppers’ hesitation is about privacy. Many are unwilling to share sensitive personal or financial information with AI platforms. But more profoundly, people want to feel in control of their shopping choices. When users can’t understand the reasoning behind AI-driven product recommendations, their trust and satisfaction decline.

Shoppers are also reluctant to give away their autonomy. In one study involving people booking travel plans, participants deliberately chose trip options that were misaligned with their stated preferences once they were told their choices could be predicted – a way of reasserting independence.

Other experiments confirm that the more customers perceive their shopping choices being taken away from them, the more reluctant they are to accept AI purchasing assistance.

Although the technology is expected to get better, there have been some well-publicized missteps reported in financial and tech media. The Wall Street Journal wrote about an AI-powered vending machine that lost money and stocked itself with a live fish. The tech publication Wired cataloged design flaws, like an AI agent taking a full 45 seconds to add eggs to a customer’s shopping cart.

The business case for AI shopping

Consumers have good reason to be cautious. AI agents aren’t just designed to assist; they’re designed to influence. Research shows that these systems can shape preferences, steer choices, increase spending and even reduce the likelihood that consumers return products.

And companies are hyping these capabilities. The business platform Salesforce promotes AI agents that can “effortlessly upsell,” while payments giant Mastercard reports that its AI assistant, Shopping Muse, generates 15% to 20% higher conversion rates than traditional search – that is, pushing shoppers from browsing to completing a purchase.

To retailers, AI tools are one way to convert searches into actual purchases. Rupixen on Unsplash., CC BY

For companies, the appeal is obvious. From Amazon’s Rufus app and Walmart’s customer support to AI-enabled grocery carts, companies are rapidly integrating these tools into the shopping experience.

Assistants with names like Sparky and Ralph are being promoted as the future of retail, while technologists are calling on companies to prepare their brands for the era of agentic AI shopping.

The real concern is not that these systems might fail, but that they may succeed all too well.

The human side to shopping

AI shopping agents do offer considerable benefits.

For example, they can scan numerous products in seconds, compare prices across sellers, track discounts over time, sift through thousands of product reviews, and tailor recommendations to the user’s preferences and needs. They can even read through terms of service and privacy policies, helping consumers detect unfavorable fine print.

But there’s more at stake than these considerations.

While consumers have reason to focus on privacy and control, AI shopping agents carry some overlooked emotional risks, such as squashing the joy of anticipation. Psychologists have shown that the period between choosing a purchase and receiving it generates substantial happiness – sometimes more than the product or experience itself. We daydream about the vacation we booked, the outfit we ordered, the meal we planned. Automated buying threatens to drain this anticipatory pleasure.

Consumers still value the social connection that shopping in real life fosters. Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash, CC BY

This anticipation connects to another value: a sense of personal and ethical authorship. Even mundane shopping decisions allow people to exercise choice and express judgment. Many consumers deliberately buy fair-trade coffee, cruelty-free cosmetics or environmentally responsible products. The brands and products we choose, from Patagonia and Harley-Davidson to a Taylor Swift tour shirt, help shape who we are.

Shopping, moreover, has a communal dimension. We browse stores with friends, chat with salespeople and shop for the people we love. These everyday interactions contribute considerably to our well-being.

The same is true of gift-giving. Choosing a gift involves anticipating another person’s preferences, investing effort in the search and recognizing that the gesture matters as much as the object itself. When this process is outsourced to an autonomous system, the gift risks becoming a delivery rather than a meaningful gesture of attention and care.

Keeping human agency alive

AI shopping agents are likely to become part of everyday life, and the regulatory conversation is beginning to catch up, albeit unevenly.

Transparency has emerged as a central concern. Past experience with recommendation engines shows that undisclosed conflicts of interest are a real risk. The European Union has proposed a disclosure framework around automated decision-making, although its implementation was recently delayed. In Congress, U.S. lawmakers are considering bills to require companies to reveal how their AI models were trained.

So far, consumers seem to want to choose their own level of engagement – a signal that shopping, for many people, is more than just the efficient satisfaction of preferences. Perhaps the least-settled, yet most crucial question is whether AI shopping tools will be designed and regulated to serve users’ interests and human flourishing – or optimized, as so many digital tools before them, primarily for corporate profit.

Photos by Yaseen Najeeb

Advocates, activists and a large contingent of the Wisconsin Coalition for Justice in Palestine marched from Milwaukee’s south side to downtown in support of immigrants’ rights.

On May 1, Voces de la Frontera and event co-sponsors made Milwaukee the center of May Day actions across Wisconsin as thousands of immigrant workers, families and supporters gathered on the city’s south side before marching from the Voces office on Historic Mitchell Street to the Federal Building at 517 E. Wisconsin Ave. downtown.

The solidarity event, “Day Without Immigrants: A Day for Solidarity, Truth and Power!” filled streets  with activists and advocates calling for an end to local cooperation with federal immigration enforcement and the closure of Milwaukee’s detention center. 

Organizers urged people to refrain from work, school and shopping, framing the day as a protest and demonstration of immigrants’ role in the economy and community life. Support for the mass march drew participants from the Voces de la Frontera Green Bay office to join the Milwaukee march. In Madison, an additional action at the Library Mall echoed demands for dignity, protection and a pathway to citizenship for all.

According to Christine Neumann-Ortiz, founding executive director of Voces de la Frontera, there were over 3,000 actions that day. Speakers included Kareem Sarsour, son of ISM president Salah Sarsour taken by ICE agents over a month ago, and other community members. 

Mariachi Mexico International, a Milwaukee ensemble, played traditional Mexican music in front of the crowd at the Milwaukee Federal Courthouse to end the day’s actions.

Democratic Party leaders and establishment organizers continue to treat criticism of Israel as a third-rail issue, but the positive response to El-Sayed’s comments reflected numerous recent polls that have shown voters, particularly Democrats, are growing weary of the government’s insistence that the US must continue to arm Israel.

A survey by Hart Research Associates and Public Opinion Strategies in March found that after the Israel Defense Forces’ US-backed slaughter of more than 72,000 Palestinians in Gaza since October 2023, and as the US joined the IDF in assaulting Iran in an unprovoked war, just 32% of registered US voters viewed Israel positively—a dramatic shift from three years ago, when close to half of voters expressed positive views of Israel.

A Pew Research poll last month found that 60% of respondents had a negative opinion of Israel, which receives roughly $4 billion in US military aid annually, while 37% expressed positive views.

And a survey by Upswing Strategies found last October, when it canvassed 850 Democratic voters in districts across swing states including Michigan, that nearly half said they “could never support” a candidate for Congress who received funding from AIPAC or the pro-Israel lobby more broadly. Over a quarter said they “strongly” felt they would not support a candidate who took AIPAC donations.

As he has condemned Israel’s US-backed assault on Gaza and demanded an end to US military funding for Israel, El-Sayed has spoken out against antisemitic acts like a shooting at Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan in March, saying Jewish people “have a right to worship in peace” and to “know that your religious identity and faith practice are respected.”

“There is no room for antisemitism in America,” said El-Sayed at the time. He added in a video posted on social media that the attack was part of a “cycle” of violence, noting that the suspect has lost family members in Israeli attacks in Lebanon, which intensified in March as the war on Iran widened.

Writer and researcher Matt Stoller said Sunday that—as the crowd in Detroit appeared to concur—El-Sayed “is a far better friend to Jews than AIPAC.”

The issue of Israel has previously played a role in El-Sayed’s three-way primary race against US Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.), who has received more than $5 million in funding from pro-Israel groups, and state Sen. Mallory McMorrow (D-8), who wrote a position paper for AIPAC.

El-Sayed’s opponents attacked him for campaigning with the popular commentator and live-streamer Hasan Piker, who has also spoken out against antisemitism and has strongly criticized Israel, saying that Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack was a “direct consequence” of actions by the IDF and the US in Gaza.

A Data for Progress poll taken last month found that Michigan voters were far more concerned about AIPAC influence in the election than they were about El-Sayed’s decision to campaign with a commentator who harbors negative views about the increasingly unpopular Israeli government.

The race is close according to recent polls, with Stevens backed by 24.9% of voters, according to the latest Detroit Regional Chamber survey, and El-Sayed supported by 22.9% of respondents. Thirty-six percent of voters said they were undecided.

Sunday’s rally served as both an event promoting El-Sayed’s campaign ahead of the August 4 primary and the latest stop on US Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) Fighting Oligarchy tour, with the progressive leader also urging Detroit voters to support state Rep. Donavan McKinney (D-11) in the primary in Michigan’s 13th Congressional District, now represented by Rep. Shri Thanedar (D-Mich.).

“I want to give you some good news,” Sanders said. “As Rashida Tlaib will tell you, over the last six to eight years, we have elected dozens of great members of Congress; strong progressives who are standing up and fighting for the working class. And I certainly hope Donavan McKinney will join that group.”

While El-Sayed and McKinney—who are both supporters of Medicare for All and raising taxes on billionaires—have three months to go until primary voters go to the polls, and are campaigning without the support of party leaders, Sanders reminded voters in Detroit that other progressive leaders like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani have recently emerged victorious in races after being denounced as too critical of Israel or too far to the left.

“Think about what’s happened in the last six months,” said Sanders. “Zohran Mamdani started his campaign for mayor of New York City at 1% in the polls. Got it? He was opposed by the entire Democratic establishment, he was obviously opposed by the Republican establishment, he was opposed by the president of the United States, he was opposed by every oligarch in New York City.”

“I don’t care how much money the other folks have, when you have 100,000 people knocking on doors, whether it’s New York, or Michigan for Abdul, there ain’t nobody gonna beat you,” Sanders said. “They’ve got the money. We’re never going to compete with that. And they don’t like Abdul, by the way, in case you haven’t noticed, for a lot of reasons. … But if we mobilize the people, we win.”

American Progress, a 1872 painting by John Gast, depicts the settler-colonial dispossession of Native America as a celebration of the idea of Manifest Destiny. (Image: Wikimedia)

The United States was founded and exists on stolen Native American land, taken in the course of an ongoing national genocide. Israel was founded and exists on stolen Palestinian land, taken in the course of an ongoing national genocide. In both nations, these genocides are a structural part of settler colonialism. And as I will argue in what follows, the ideology grounding settler colonialism in both nations comes from the same source, helping to cement a long-standing relationship between Israel and the United States.

Settler colonialism is a variation of colonialism. Colonialism is the takeover of one country by another to exploit its resources, material and human. Settler colonialism is the takeover of one country by another to settle it with the invading country’s population through the elimination of the Indigenous population and the theft of Indigenous land. Colonialism exploits the Indigenous population’s labor and land. Settler colonialism eliminates or seeks to eliminate the Indigenous population to take its land. That is, settler colonialism typically involves genocide. I am defining genocide in two ways: first, as it is defined in international law in Article II of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide:

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

• Killing members of the group;
• Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
• Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
• Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
• Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

The term genocide was coined by the legal scholar Raphael Lemkin in the wake of the Holocaust and is typically understood to entail a cataclysmic crime whose intent and enormous scale is manifest as was the extermination of six million Jews by the Nazis or the hundreds of thousands of Tutsis murdered by the Hutus in the Rwandan genocide of 1994. But Lemkin’s definition, while pointing to a cataclysmic physical crime, also defines genocide as a daily process of the social and political destruction of a national group:  

Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be disintegration of the political and social institutions of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups. Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group. (Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, 79)

Lemkin’s definition, while it points to the Convention’s conventional definition, also points to an incremental form of genocide, what Patrick Wolfe terms “structural genocide” in his 2006 generative essay “Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native” (see also LeVine and Cheyfitz “Israel, Palestine and the Poetics of Genocide Revisited”). In this case, Wolfe defines a “logic of elimination” that exists as the bedrock of a society that imposes over the course of its existence institutional conditions that impose on its Indigenous population a failure to thrive. 

My interest in settler colonialism begins in the United States because, as a scholar of American studies, I am necessarily interested in how the United States was settled and how this settlement continues to affect the course of the nation. In 1492, there were in the estimation of the demographer Russell Thornton an estimated 5+ million Native people in what would become the lower forty-eight states. By the end of the nineteenth century, this Indigenous population had been reduced through genocide to 250,000, corresponding to both kinds of genocide I have defined, and its land occupied by immigrants from a range of European countries.  Of the 1.894 billion acres that are the land mass of the lower 48 states, the land occupied by and available to Native Americans in 1492, they now occupy only 68.5 million acres of land, or 3.46% of the land originally open to them, now parceled into reservations and divided among the approximately 345 federally recognized tribes in the lower forty-eight states. Although Native Americans own relatively small parcels of this land both inside and outside the borders of reservations, they do not own their reservation land, which is the vast majority of Native land that remains. Rather, this land is held in perpetual “trust” for them by the federal government in what is a colonial relationship, the relationship of a “minor” to a “trustee.”  This land is governed under the regime of federal Indian law, a colonial body of law dating from the early nineteenth century that is not about justice but containment. So, for example, the prosecution of all major crimes on reservations is in the hands of the federal government, who withholding the necessary resources and lacking incentive contribute significantly to elevated crime rates in Indian country. 

One result of this genocidal history, which is ongoing in structure, is that Native Americans—which include American Indians (the legal designation of Natives in the lower forty-eight states), Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians—are the poorest of the poor in the United States; and poverty, which could be ameliorated by the government,  takes its toll: American Indians and Alaska Natives have the highest mortality rates in the US and the lowest life expectancy. These populations are incarcerated in state and federal prisons at twice the national average. “As of 2016, the National Crime Information Center…. reported 5,712 cases of missing American Indian and Alaska Native women and girls. The majority of these murders are committed by non-Native people on Native-owned land. The lack of communication combined with jurisdictional issues between state, local, federal, and tribal law enforcement, make it nearly impossible to begin the investigative process.” All of these conditions, which the federal government could ameliorate, contribute to what Wolfe has termed “structural genocide,” creating the conditions that make it impossible for an entire national, religious, or ethnic group to thrive. In the US, structural genocide insures that the past of “frontier homicide” is always present in other forms.

Palestine/Israel is the other region of settler colonialism on which my teaching and scholarship focus, both for scholarly, political, and personal reasons, the latter, my heritage: I am Jewish, and one of my four daughters and her three children are citizens of Israel. The scholarly reasons, which I have elaborated in my writing, have to do with my understanding of the precise ideological and historical agenda that has motivated the settlement of both the US and Israel: that of US Manifest Destiny, which has its equivalent in the Jewish idea of the Chosen People, interpreted in the philosophy of Zionism, though not in traditional

Judaism, where it suggests a particular relationship to the Jewish God,  as a claim to the land of Palestine for all Jews who, contradictorily enough, are not largely Zionists (indeed a significant number of Jews and Jewish organizations oppose Zionism), any more than the majority of Americans subscribe to or have even heard of Manifest Destiny.  Nevertheless, both ideas have been and are being used in one form or another by the factions in power to justify the displacement by colonial settlement of Indigenous peoples from their lands.

Whereas Manifest Destiny had its heyday in the nineteenth-century US and is now implicit in the nation’s imperial reach (“the greatest country on the earth”), Zionism, explicitly, has been fueling Zionist expansionism from 1917 to the present, where it is manifesting a particularly racist form in its anti-Palestinian animus (the use by the  Israeli government, for example, in its Gazan genocide of typing Palestinians as “terrorists” or “human animals”). Thinking of Zionism and Manifest Destiny comparatively in the context of settler colonialism, I would say that Israel/Palestine is currently in the stage of settler colonialism that the US was in the nineteenth century: a militarized zone of concentration camps, the US called and calls them reservations. Rashid Khalidi refers to the Occupied Territories as an “archipelago of large open-aired prisons” (Palestinian Identity, Kindle edition, location 372). In this archipelago, Gaza, now undergoing a cataclysmic genocide by Israel, is widely known as “the largest outdoor prison in the world.” Thus, the West Bank and East Jerusalem compose balkanized territories under Israeli military rule aided by the collaborationist Palestinian Authority (PA) of which Khalidi wrote in 2010: 

The situation [for a two-state solution] is made much worse by the delusions fostered by the fiction of the PA established by the Oslo accords [1993-94]. This is in effect a virtual body that does not have sovereignty, jurisdiction, or ultimate control. In other words it is an authority that has no real authority over anything….The PA has become a sort of subcontractor for Israel and has thus served in part to mask the reality of an Israel military occupation whose full security control over all these territories, and total domination over land and all other resources, is now in its forty-second year (Palestinian Identity, Kindle, Location 326-337 of 8833).

Bound up with the US strategic reasons in the Middle East for its close ties with Israel as “the only democracy” in the region are the ideological and historical affinity of the two countries, cemented by the financial and ideological power of the Israeli lobby in the US. A comparative study of settler colonialism in Palestine/Israel and the US helps us understand why the two countries are so intimately and destructively involved: to understand how American and Israeli “exceptionalism” are intertwined. I understand “exceptionalism” as the way the US and Israel project their histories as being exceptions to the very colonial-imperial histories that drove Western Europe, when, in fact, they are extensions of these histories. In The Jewish State (1896), the bible of Zionism in its projection of a national home for the “Jewish people,” Theodor Herzl makes this extension clear: “Palestine is our ever-memorable historic home….We should there form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism” (Kindle edition, location 1079-1089 of 2339). 

I put “Jewish people” in quotes because all national groupings are fictions, that is, they are constructions that provide an origin narrative, a myth, of unity for a culturally, socially, politically, and typically conflicted, diverse population bound together by the force of law. In The Invention of the Jewish People, Shlomo Sand points out the Old Testament provides this national myth of homogeneity for Zionism and its national apotheosis Israel; and “[w]hen occasional findings threatened the picture of an unbroken, linear Jewish history, they were rarely cited; when they did surface, they were quickly forgotten, buried in oblivion. National exigencies created an iron-jawed vise that prevented any deviation from the dominant narratives (Kindle edition, page 18).” 

Ironically, the influential Zionist Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky recognized the correspondence between Native Americans and Palestinians, though in a thoroughly racist way, in his generative essay “The Iron Wall” (1923), which has substantially become Israeli policy— for example, Israel’s current program of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank is termed “Operation Iron Wall.” While professing a desire to live peacefully with the Arabs in Palestine, although insisting on a Jewish majority state, Jabotinsky contradictorily enough sees no way to bring about this peaceful cohabitation except through war. This, he argues, entails constructing an “iron wall” against Arab resistance, because “Every indigenous people will resist alien settlers as long as they see any hope of ridding themselves of the danger of foreign settlement. That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of ‘Palestine’ into the ‘Land of Israel.’” In formulating his militant approach to Zionist settlement, Jabotinsky openly acknowledges the Arabs in Palestine as the “indigenous” inhabitants and the Jews as “settlers.” 

In making his argument for an “iron wall,” Jabotinsky compares the Zionist settlement of Palestine to the European settlement of the Americas, both of which, unsurprisingly, he idealizes:  “But those ‘great explorers,’ the English, Scots and Dutch who were the first real pioneers of North America were people possessed of a very high ethical standard; people who not only wished to leave the redskins at peace but could also pity a fly; people who in all sincerity and innocence believed that that in those virgin forests and vast plains ample space was available for both the white and the redman. But the native resisted both barbarian and civilized settler with the same degree of cruelty.” In the settler fantasy, the “ethical” settlers always seek “peace,” while the Indigenous response is “cruelty.”

At the same time, Jabotinsky expresses typical settler ambivalence to the Indigenous inhabitants, at once lauding their resistant spirit while noting their intrinsic inferiority: “Culturally [the Arabs] are 500 years behind us, spiritually they, do not have our endurance or our strength of will, but this exhausts all of the internal differences.” In the settler fantasy, one can simply substitute the Indigenous peoples of the Americas for the Arabs.

Here, then, in the beginning of the Zionist project in Palestine, we see the material of militarism and racism that since the Balfour Declaration of 1917 has paved the road to the genocide in Gaza and Israeli expansionism, fully supported by the United States government. And Jabotinsky’s words erase the genocide of Native Americans, which, after their holocaust ended at the end of the nineteenth century, is ongoing in a structural form as the genocide in Palestine, structural in form since 1917, has now taken the cataclysmic form explicit in the 1948 Convention. (Some of the material in the final four paragraphs comes from my essay “Zionism and the Iran War” published in CounterPunch, March 31, 2026).

Jabotinsky’s early recognition of the Jews as settlers and the Arabs as indigenous (he does not recognize the potential national status of “Palestinians”) runs counter to the early Zionist mantra “A land  without a people for a people without a land.” But as Zionism builds its iron wall in Palestine and in 1948 forcefully transforms Palestinian land into “Israel,” this mantra for Israelis erases the actual history of settler colonialism that, for example,  enables then Prime Minister Golda Meier to say in 1969 “There was no such thing as Palestinians….They did not exist,” when Jews began to settle in Palestine under the flag of Zionism. Thus, in denial of their ongoing settler history, the vast majority of Israelis today claim to being the indigenous people of Palestine with an exclusive relation to the land, the “Chosen People.”  This claim, both in Native American and Palestine, rationalizes genocide.

Photo by Hamza Zuberi

Wisconsin Muslim Civic Alliance policy lead Fatima Malik, shown at the Wisconsin State Capitol on Advocacy Day 2025, will be a guest presenter at the Muslim Women’s Coalition’s May Networking Brunch on Friday, May 29.

With Wisconsin campaigns for August and November elections in full-swing, Wisconsin Muslim Civic Alliance and Wisconsin Muslim Civic Foundation are ramping up efforts to engage Wisconsin’s 70,000-plus Muslims in this election cycle.

The governor’s seat is in play. After eight years in office, Gov. Tony Evers announced he will not seek re-election, leaving the field wide open for the first time since 2010. More than half a dozen well-known Democratic contenders are in the race. The Aug. 11 primary will determine the Democratic nominee. U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany is the only prominent candidate running to represent the Republicans.

And this is the “first state election in more than a decade in which there is a viable possibility that Democrats will gain majorities in at least one of the two legislative houses,” wrote Alan Borsuk, long-time Milwaukee Journal Sentinel education reporter and now a senior fellow in law and public policy at Marquette University, in an MJS article published today.

“Everyone needs to be engaged in every single election and on every issue,” said Fauzia Qureshi, who serves as both WMCA’s and WMCF’s executive director. “If we are not at the table, decisions will be made without our input and our voices won’t be heard.” 

These statewide elections matter because those elected “will have a huge impact on issues that matter to the Muslim community,” Qureshi said. “Freedom of speech and immigration are at the top of the list.”

Statewide townhalls for Wisconsin Muslims 

In the lead-up to the elections, WMCA and WMCF are hosting Community Town Halls across the state.

“Many of Wisconsin’s more than 70,000 Muslims are eager to engage, but haven’t always had structured pathways,” Qureshi said. “Our role is to bridge that gap between community and civic life.”

The goal is to establish chapters across Wisconsin, she said. “We want to find leads across the state—in Madison, Appleton, the Fox Valley, Green Bay, Barron, Altoona, Janesville, Racine—this isn’t a finite list. We want to make sure they know who we are and we want to learn who they are as well.”

The Brookfield Community Town Hall this evening, 6:30 – 8 p.m., is at the Islamic Society of Milwaukee-Brookfield, 16670 Pheasant Drive. Attendees will learn about WMCA and WMCF, and how they can get involved. They’re also invited to identify issues that matter to them. Register here.

“Our town halls are about creating accessible, welcoming spaces where community members can ask questions and be heard,” Qureshi said. “Sometimes politicians come to speak with us, but that’s not what it is all about. It’s about community voices shaping the conversation.”

Common goals, separate roles

“We also want the community to know how WMCA and WMCF work to build a civically engaged, informed and empowered Muslim community in Wisconsin,” Qureshi said. “Part of that process is to make sure that our community across the state is well informed about who we are and that we’re the organization that can help make sure they are more informed and civically engaged.

“The main difference between WMCA and WMCF is their roles,” she explained. “WMCA is about advocacy, legislative engagement, endorsements, voter engagement and more. It can make endorsements and lobby.

WMCA works to empower, educate and organize Wisconsin’s Muslim community “to ensure Muslim voices are represented in decisions that shape our communities and our future,” its website states. Founded in 2019 by Janan Najeeb of Mequon, the organization uses advocacy, education and coalition-building “to protect civil rights, expand civic participation and ensure Muslim voices are represented in decisions that shape our communities and our future.”

WMCF does education and research, she said. Its research helps guide the development of policies. For example, in a survey of Wisconsin’s Muslims, “we saw the Eid as a real issue. Without it being recognized, it is hard for Muslims to take off work or for Muslim children to stay home from school,” Qureshi noted. “It is also an issue community members have raised.

WMCA took that finding and created a policy to recognize the holiday. WMCA helped it gain bipartisan support. It didn’t get to the floor last session, but it will be back, she said.

WMCF also creates educational programs about Muslim culture and heritage that are shared with Muslims and non-Muslims. “We want to make sure there is deep understanding between Muslims and the rest of the community, and that Wisconsin Muslims are visible, connected and confident about shaping our collective future.”

Muslim Women’s Coalition Networking Brunch offers a deep dive

The Muslim Women’s Coalition’s Networking Brunch is where Muslims and citizens of other faiths discuss topics of common interest. It meets from 10 a.m. to noon on the last Friday of each month.

For the May 29th brunch, Qureshi and Attorney Fatima Malik, WMCA’s policy lead, will “do a deep dive” into the new Wisconsin law defining antisemitism, signed by Gov. Evers in March. Their presentation, Palestine, Free Speech and Wisconsin’s New IHRA Law, discusses the adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism and what it means for Wisconsin residents’ free speech rights and advocacy for Palestinian human rights.

That Gov. Tony Evers did not use his veto power to reject it was a great disappointment to the Muslim community and shows how important it is to have a governor who understands the issues of the Muslim community, she said.

The Muslim Women’s Coalition’s monthly Networking Brunch at the Islamic Resource Center offers people a chance to make new connections, share a meal and learn about an interesting topic.

How to stay engaged

“There are so many ways to be engaged in your community’s civic life,” Qureshi said.  “It will be different for every person.”

Here are some suggestions to get started:

• Inform yourself about your community, its leadership and the issues it faces.
• Vote in every election.
• Follow WMCA and WMCF on social media for information about issues and opportunities.
• Attend a Common Council meeting in your community.
• Volunteer to serve on a committee.
• Watch for WMCA’s endorsement of candidates. (WMCA is currently surveying candidates in races around the state to get their views on issues of importance to the state’s Muslim community. When survey responses come in, WMCA’s team will put them through a three-stage review process, after which it will release its endorsements in statewide races and local races across the state.
• Consider WMCA’s leadership training for community members who want to take on leadership roles, whether in local government, an organization,or a board.

As of April 2026, the U.S. government has not required a warning label on Roundup weed killer. AP Photo/Haven Daley

Chemical giant Monsanto has argued for years that if the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency approves a pesticide label without requiring a cancer warning, states cannot hold its manufacturer liable in court for failing to warn consumers about cancer risks. The U.S. Supreme Court has now taken up the question after hearing oral arguments for and against that position on April 27, 2026.

Between 2009 and 2019, the EPA repeatedly concluded there is no evidence that glyphosate causes cancer in humans. The agency has, therefore, allowed glyphosate-based weed killers, including Monsanto’s Roundup, to remain on the market without a cancer warning on its label. That’s despite a 2015 report from the International Agency for Research on Cancer, a branch of the World Health Organization, that classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans” based on “limited” evidence of cancer in humans from real-world exposure and “sufficient” evidence of cancer in experimental animals. A 2025 study had similar findings in lab rats.

Several U.S. lawsuits have used the 2015 report to win legal cases claiming that Monsanto failed to warn them of the chemical’s dangers. One of the first, Hardeman v. Monsanto Co., ended in a US$80 million verdict against Monsanto in 2019. The jury found that Edwin Hardeman, a California man who used the weed killer on his properties, had proved that Roundup had caused his cancer and that Monsanto had failed to warn consumers of the dangers of its product. That finding was upheld on appeal.

In the years since, Monsanto, now owned by German chemical giant Bayer, has paid out over $10 billion to settle about 100,000 claims from people who said their health was harmed after they were exposed to Roundup. But Monsanto continues to say that a federal law passed in 1947 and significantly amended in 1972, the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act, bars states from imposing any labeling requirement beyond what the federal government has approved – meaning state courts cannot hold the company liable for failing to include a warning that the U.S. EPA does not require.

While the law was originally administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, today the Environmental Protection Agency regulates the registration, use and sale of pesticides in the United States. Companies that wish to sell pesticides must, according to the law, demonstrate that they will not “cause unreasonable adverse effects on the environment,” including “water, air, land, and all plants and man and other animals … and the interrelationships which exist among these.”

As a scholar of environmental and food law, I know the Supreme Court’s decision in the case will affect tens of thousands of pending cases of those alleging harm from glyphosate.

A crowd demonstrates at the Supreme Court in favor of consumer protections on April 27, 2026. Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images

A short history of the case

The case before the Supreme Court began in 2019, when John Durnell, a resident of St. Louis, sued Monsanto in a Missouri state court, claiming that his regular use of Roundup in neighborhood beautification efforts over many years had caused him to develop non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a type of blood cancer.

As it had done in previous cases, Monsanto sought to dismiss the lawsuit by claiming the federal law prevented Durnell from making those claims in state court. But the trial proceeded, and in 2023 a Missouri jury found that Monsanto had, in fact, failed to warn Durnell of the danger and awarded him $1.25 million in damages.

In February 2025, a state appeals court upheld the jury’s verdict, ruling that Missouri’s laws requiring companies to warn of dangers are not preempted by federal law. Both Missouri and federal law, the appeals court found, require companies to label products with adequate warnings to protect public health. The fact that the EPA had not required a cancer warning on Roundup did not, in the court’s view, absolve Monsanto of its separate obligation under Missouri law to warn consumers of known dangers.

The Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal in the case, seeking to determine whether federal law bars states from holding a company liable for failing to include a warning that the EPA reviewed and chose not to require.

At the Supreme Court

During the oral argument, lawyer Paul Clement, representing Monsanto, claimed that Missouri was trying to require a different label than federal law allows, and that the company could not have added a cancer warning on its own. The company argued that EPA regulations prohibit manufacturers from changing safety warnings without the agency’s prior approval, a step Monsanto never took.

Principal Deputy Solicitor General Sarah Harris, a top Justice Department attorney, told the court the Trump administration agrees with Monsanto’s interpretation of the law.

Durnell’s attorney, Ashley Keller, argued that registration of a pesticide with the EPA does not exempt a company from civil liability for its product’s safety.

Legal commentators have suggested the justices are split but that perhaps a majority favors Monsanto’s position.

Protests around the world, including this one in Paris in 2019, have objected to the manufacturing and use of glyphosate, the active ingredient in the weed killer sold as Roundup. AP Photo/Rafael Yahgobzadeh

What comes next

A Supreme Court ruling in Monsanto’s favor would block Durnell’s claim. Other efforts are also underway to defend corporations from similar claims by consumers alleging products were dangerous.

In February 2026, President Donald Trump signed an executive order calling glyphosate “crucial to the national security and defense” because of its role in boosting food production by killing weeds in farmers’ fields.

Congress is also considering a proposal that would prevent state and local governments from imposing stricter labeling requirements than approved by the EPA. That legislation could also prevent courts from holding manufacturers liable for harms caused by products whose labels the EPA had approved. Six states have also introduced bills to limit pesticide manufacturers’ liability. If successful, those efforts would effectively shield pesticide companies from lawsuits similar to Durnell’s.

A broader legal principle is also at stake: whether Congress or federal agencies can block states from protecting people when federal regulators have not required companies to warn the public about potential harm.

In April 2026, Sen. Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican, introduced a bill that would prevent people from filing lawsuits in state courts that seek to hold oil and gas companies responsible for environmental damage, including their contributions to climate change. In late 2026 or early 2027, the Supreme Court is also expected to hear a case about whether existing federal law already blocks those lawsuits.

Together, these efforts reflect concerted efforts to protect large corporations from consumers’ claims that products have harmed them and to prevent states from holding companies accountable when federal regulation falls short.