Photo by Yaseen Najeeb

Salah Sarsour, 53, speaks to hundreds who gathered at the Islamic Society of Milwaukee June 18 to welcome him home on the day of his release after 81 days in ICE custody.

In deportation hearings for Islamic Society of Milwaukee president Salah Sarsour that concluded Monday, the government failed to meet its burden of proof and the charges were “all pretext,” his lead immigration attorney Patrick Taurel, J.D., a partner at Washington, D.C.-based Grossman, Young & Hammond, told reporters Tuesday at a post-hearing media conference. 

Sarsour’s legal team maintains the charges are an unlawful, politically motivated attack on free speech. They argued that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents targeted Sarsour, a law-abiding, respected, 32-year resident of the United States solely due to his high-profile advocacy for Palestinian rights.

“What’s at stake here is not just whether this good man can stay here, but whether people can speak freely in this country without fear of unlawful retribution, including one of the most pernicious sanctions of all, which is banishment from your home and family and everything that makes life worth living,” Taurel said. “That’s what we’re fighting about in this case.” 

The final, written ruling is expected by Sept. 30, he said.

Revealing the real reason for charges

In a 40-minute recap of four days of testimony in a Chicago immigration court, Taurel said the government’s case unraveled. He explained how.

“We’re here because of Salah’s speech,” Taurel said, highlighting Sarsour’s legal team’s chief argument. “That’s what this is all about. These other charges … are all pretext, and we know it.

“We know this for two reasons—the charge and the timeline of events,” he said.

“There’s a special provision in the immigration laws that was long dormant that this administration has revived with incredible fervor,” Taurel said. “That provision says if the Secretary of State determines a person’s continued presence in this country would have adverse foreign policy consequences, then they are deportable. Just a swipe of a pen from Marco Rubio and an otherwise legal permanent resident can be rendered deportable. It’s a really shocking statute.

“But there’s a sub-clause within that says that when they are targeting your otherwise lawful speech, they have to have an especially compelling foreign policy interest,” he continued. “Since they’ve invoked that clause in Salah’s case, we know they are going after him because of his lawful speech.”

Regarding the timeline of events, Taurel noted, “A deputy attorney general had said, ‘We are going to dismantle American Muslims for Palestine,’ a few weeks before Salah was detained.” Sarsour is a well-known AMP board member.

Dismantling the government’s case

The immigration judge will determine if Mr. Sarsour is “removable,” explained Taurel. Has he done something that makes him deportable? With a green card holder, it could be a criminal conviction or abandonment of residence, for example.

The government has argued Sarsour is deportable on the basis of three claims:

• A claim that Sarsour is a national security threat (determined by Secretary of State Marco Rubio)
• Allegations of lying on immigration forms, and
• An allegation of voter registration fraud.

The government’s claims against Sarsour are all excuses given to hide its true motivation to stop his advocacy for Palestinians, Taurel argued. Nevertheless, the defense team strongly addressed each one.  

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security based its case on documentary evidence: records from the Israeli military court system from 1988-89 and 1994-95; Sarsour’s Green Card application from the late 1990s and subsequent citizenship applications; and a 2004 voter registration card bearing Sarsour’s information. DHS called no witnesses.

The defense team brought seven witnesses who aggressively disputed the validity of the government’s evidence. Because DHS did not bring witnesses, the trial consisted largely of cross-examinations of witnesses brought by Sarsour’s legal team. 

“After four days of hearings, our position is that the charges have not been proven,” Taurel concluded. “We’ve successfully made the case he is not deportable as they have charged him.” 

Photo by Andy Chen

Members of Salah Sarsour’s family traveled from Milwaukee to the Clay County Jail in Indiana to join in protesting Sarsour’s detention.

Breaking it down

“The government bears the burden of proving removability of a permanent resident, a Green Card holder, like Salah,” Taurel explained. “We put on a case to establish he was not deportable as charged.”

DHS relied on documents from Israeli military courts that convicted Sarsour on the basis of signed confessions. Sarsour was 15 when he was arrested in 1988 for allegedly throwing an explosive device at an Israeli soldier’s home (Taurel noted he was convicted of rock-throwing and disorderly conduct). He was 22 when arrested in 1994 while visiting his family in the West Bank, accused of attempting to illegally possess weapons and ammunition.

(“They have falsely characterized the stone-throwing case in their press releases to say he was convicted of throwing a Molotov cocktail. He was charged with that but not convicted of that,” Taurel said.)

The government used Sarsour’s U.S. immigration application from the late 1990s and subsequent citizenship applications to show Sarsour had answered “no” to questions asking if he ever committed a crime or been convicted to argue he lied on his applications.

The defense team countered that the documents from Israeli military courts were legally invalid because Sarsour was severely tortured and coerced into signing a false confession written in Hebrew, which he didn’t understand. In addition, they brought expert witnesses who testified that the Israeli military court system lacks due process protections for Palestinian detainees.

“We brought witnesses, including his brother who saw with his own eyes his condition when he was in Israeli custody and a forensic psychiatrist who determined Salah suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, which is consistent with what he described as happening to him in Israeli custody,” Taurel said.

“We also heard from Jawad Boulos, who represented Salah in Israeli Military Court in 1988-89 and 1994-95,” he said. Boulos noted that Sarsour was coerced into confessing to the offenses that are now emphasized as grounds for his removal. 

Boulos testified that in 1994 Sarsour was severely tortured, beaten unconscious, eventually forced to sign a confession and, notably, hospitalized. Boulos testified that he’s represented thousands of detainees and the fact that Sarsour was hospitalized was highly unusual.

“He also testified about how Israel had no evidence against Salah except his involuntary confession, which was procured by torture,” Taurel said.

Other witnesses included a lawyer who represented Sarsour in immigration cases, a preeminent expert on the treatment of Palestinian detainees who face Israeli military tribunals and a sociologist who is an expert on Palestinian political expression.

The sociologist talked about stone-throwing by Palestinian youth. “It’s not to harm anyone. Rather, it’s an act of political protest, a kind of screaming into the void” against occupation,” Taurel quoted her as saying.

“We also heard from a good friend and another community leader, Othman Atta, who had served as Salah’s attorney for a spell,” Taurel said, “about how the U.S. government essentially admitted it had no real derogatory information against Salah in an investigation that opened in the late 1990s.” 

Significantly, Sarsour’s legal team showed that DHS had been aware of these exact records from Israeli military courts for years. The U.S. government evaluated and reviewed them multiple times since 2000, when assessing Sarsour’s immigration and citizenship applications, raising the question of why there would be a sudden push to deport now, Taurel noted.

“The U.S. government knew about the 1988 stone throwing conviction as early as 1992, when Salah was applying for and admitted into the country the next year on a visa. He’d gotten a waiver for it. The government knew about the 1994 case as soon as he came back to the U.S., because he was debriefed about it by the FBI.”

Finally, “there’s no evidence” for the claim about voter registration fraud, Taurel said. “The evidence clearly shows he has zero recollection of ever filing it. Even if he did, he didn’t do it for a purpose of any kind because he never actually voted. There’s no evidence of that. In order for you to be deportable because you falsely claim to be a U.S. citizen, you have to falsely claim to be a U.S. citizen for a purpose or benefit under the law.”

What’s next?

“How is the judge going to rule? I don’t want to venture a guess,” he said. “We have made our case. I think the judge’s heart is with us. 

“But I also know there is a lot of pressure on immigration judges today,” Taurel continued. “The New York Times has reported that judges who ruled in favor of non-citizens who were charged under the foreign policy grounds, pro-Palestine advocates, were fired. Over 150 immigration judges have been fired since this administration came in. There’ve been lots and lots of directives issued that are sending the clearest of signals to judges about how they’re supposed to rule in these cases. Neutrality of immigration courts has been severely undermined.

“I hope this judge takes a fair look at the evidence,” Taurel said. “If he does, he’ll find that Salah is not removable on the charges the government has filed.”

If the judge finds Sarsour is removable, “we’re going to pivot to the second question (an immigration judge answers): is he eligible for relief from removal?” Taurel said. “It would focus on the question of what dangers or risks to his personal safety Salah would face if he is deported to the West Bank.” 

Photo by Sandra Whitehead

With his grandson on one side and attorney and friend Munjed Ahmad, J.D., on the other, Salah Sarsour wipes away a tear as he addresses the media June 18, upon his release from ICE custody. 

What happened before the deportation hearings?

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested Sarsour, 53, of Franklin on March 30. The father, husband, grandfather and caretaker of his elderly mother, business owner and Islamic Society of Milwaukee board president was held in an Indiana jail for 81 days on charges his legal team called “false.” 

“It appears to be the latest case in which the administration has sought to deport someone active in pro-Palestinian causes, ” The New York Times reported in April, noting that U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio deemed Sarsour to be “a threat to the U.S. foreign policy interest of combating antisemitism” in 2025. 

U.S. District Judge James P. Hanlon ordered Sarsour’s immediate release June 18. In his 29-page order, the judge noted Sarsour’s First Amendment claims “are substantial, which could render his detention unlawful.” Freed, Sarsour immediately stepped back into his leadership role at the ISM and in the Milwaukee Muslim community. 

Meanwhile, the U.S. government fast-tracked his deportation case to make a political point, according to Samuel Cole, a former immigration judge and senior attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, The Guardian reported in July. 

The Executive Office for Immigration Review assigned Sarsour’s case to Assistant Chief Immigration Judge Jayme Salinardi. Although Sarsour, as a Milwaukee-area resident, would typically have his case heard by a Chicago Immigration Court judge, the executive branch bypassed standard administrative routing to assign the case to the Kansas City-based judge by using its authority to designate specific judges to high-profile or complex cases. 

Sarsour’s legal team expressed concerns about this unusual procedural shift. Prior to being a judge, Salinardi worked as a prosecutor for ICE. He has a record of denying asylum claims 90% of the time, compared to a national average of 59%.

Four deportation hearings have been held since late July, with the final hearing on Monday, Sept. 14.

Is your Islamic center Latino-friendly? It should be. Every Hispanic Heritage Month, I receive requests to write about Latinos in Islam, present a Latin American-inspired story time, speak about the Latino experience at a local masjid, or organize a special event celebrating Hispanic heritage. While I appreciate these efforts, the conversation usually stops there. The emails cease, and the phone goes silent. Latino Muslims represent the fastest-growing segment of the Muslim community in the United States, currently accounting for 9 percent and not far behind Arab American Muslims at 12 percent.¹ Yet, even in 2026, I find it alarming how little Hispanic or Latino outreach is taking place in our masajid. Adding another layer to the conversation, documented marriages between Latinos and Muslims of other ethnic backgrounds have been taking place for generations. Still, much of our leadership seems blissfully unaware of the fully Latino and blended Latino-Muslim families in our midst. Muslim leaders and community members must collectively ask themselves what they are doing to serve this growing demographic and make Muslim spaces more welcoming to Latinos in general.  

As a Puerto Rican woman who has been involved in dawah work for most of my 26 years as a Muslim, I am here to offer some practical tips. This is not the first time I have addressed this ongoing problem, but I am taking a different approach. Rather than simply listing grievances or raising awareness, I want to offer some possible solutions. Whether you serve on a mosque committee or board or are simply a concerned community member, this advice is for you. How you choose to put this commitment into practice is up to you, but I hope you will implement as many of the following suggestions as you can.

Practical Steps for Creating a Latino-Friendly Community

The following are some practical steps Islamic centers can take to welcome Latinos throughout the year:

1. Offer bilingual signage, flyers, and website content.

Spanish is the second most widely spoken language in the United States, and that is not going to change anytime soon. No matter how many xenophobes or white Christian nationalists shout, “This is America! Speak English!” Spanish is here to stay. It is also the most widely studied second language in the country. Therefore, Islamic centers would do well to provide signs, event flyers, and other written materials in Spanish. If they can include additional languages, that would be even better.

2. Provide classes and khutbahs in Spanish.

As mentioned above, Islamic centers should consider who attends their mosques to ensure they meet their needs. Some Islamic centers on the East Coast offer simultaneous interpretation through headsets, while others host programs, classes, or khutbahs in Spanish. Either approach speaks volumes about the care a community takes to ensure that everyone feels welcomed and supported, regardless of their background.

3. Hire Spanish-speaking staff and volunteers.

This point cannot be overemphasized. I cannot begin to count how many times I have received a text or phone call alerting me that a Spanish-speaking individual stopped by a mosque seeking information but could not find anyone who could communicate with them. Simply visiting a masjid for the first time can feel like a huge undertaking for someone who is just beginning to learn about Islam. Imagine putting yourself in that position, finally making it there, and discovering that no one understands you. Having Spanish-speaking staff or volunteers would help prevent this situation. If that is not possible, Islamic centers should consider contracting a reliable interpreter service.

4. Invest in bilingual materials.

A few decades ago, Spanish-language materials about Islam were difficult to find. Since then, national organizations have begun mass-producing Spanish materials for distribution. Islamic centers can easily order Spanish brochures and Qurans from organizations such as the Furqaan Foundation, GainPeace, and WhyIslam. Having these resources readily available can make a tremendous difference for Spanish-speaking visitors and community members.

5. Host Latino-centered events and open houses regularly.

Latino-centered events should not be limited to Hispanic Heritage Month. There is no excuse for mosques located near Latino neighborhoods not to host open houses or other events that welcome their neighbors into the community. These gatherings demonstrate that Muslims are friendly and approachable and that Islam is not exclusive to certain ethnic groups, such as South Asians, Africans, or Arabs – a common misconception among Latinos.

6. Teach your congregation about Islam in Latin America.

Remind community members about the rich history of Islam in Latin America, including its influence on the region’s cultures, its historical ties, and its existing Muslim communities. Sadly, many Muslims are unaware of the history of Islam in the Americas, which predates the United States’ Declaration of Independence. Many also do not realize that millions of Muslims live throughout Latin America today. Once we understand that our histories and roots are intertwined, we can begin to see one another as allies rather than “others.”

7. Include Latino Muslims in leadership and build relationships with Latino-led organizations.

Consider having at least one Latino Muslim board member with a voice in community decisions. Islamic centers must also establish connections with Latino Muslim leaders. There are dozens of Latino-led Islamic organizations in the United States, but you might never know unless you do your research. Take the time to identify these organizations in your local community or find the one nearest to you. Build lasting partnerships to collaborate on programs, events, and classes. 

Last but not least, assess your local community’s needs and make serving Latinos a priority. Be welcoming both as individuals and as a collective. Approach this work with a positive mindset, beginning with something as simple as a smile. The Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, said:

“Every good deed is charity. Verily, it is a good deed to meet your brother with a smiling face, and to pour what is left from your bucket into your brother’s vessel” (Sunan al-Tirmidhi 1970).

While some may argue that these words apply only to interactions among believers, we must remember that the Prophet was sent as a mercy to all humankind. Rather than viewing others as outsiders, we should regard them as our brothers and sisters in humanity. Every human being has the potential to believe, but perhaps they have not yet been given the opportunity to learn about Islam. Therefore, we have a duty to make the knowledge we have been blessed with accessible to our Latino neighbors. That effort begins by extending an invitation and graciously welcoming them into our spaces.

1. https://ispu.org/reports-and-analysis/latino-views/

Recording artist Macklemore appears on ABC’s Good Morning America Summer Concert Series in Central Park in New York on July 22, 2022, left, and Ed Sheeran appears at the premiere of the film F1 The Movie in London on June 23, 2025. (AP Photo)

NEW YORK: All supporting acts, including all scheduled opening acts, quit Ed Sheeran’s tour on Tuesday after the rapper Macklemore was removed for pro-Palestinian comments onstage during a recent show.

Hours after Sheeran posted on social media about Macklemore’s ouster and attributed the decision to the tour’s promoters, Irish acts Aaron Rowe and Beoga, the Danish band Lukas Graham, and Finneas posted on Instagram that they would withdraw from Sheeran’s tour.

Rowe was one of Macklemore’s replacements for Sheeran’s remaining US dates, while Beoga was serving as Sheeran’s touring band. Finneas, who is Billie Eilish’s brother and musical collaborator, was due to tour with Sheeran in South America later this year.

Rowe and Beoga each cited their country’s history in their statements explaining their decision.

“We are Irish people who understand colonialism. As founding members of the Irish Artists for Palestine movement, we are committed activists for justice and will continue to be,” Beoga said.

Rowe called Sheeran a friend and said he’d changed his life.

“But as Irish people we know all too well about genocide, forced famine and violent occupation,” he said, saying he could not “stand by and allow billionaires to use their position of power to silence the rightful voices of those who speak up.”

Finneas, who has publicly advocated for Palestinians in the past, reiterated his support.

“Artists must not be silenced when they speak up for the oppressed,” he wrote.

Lukas Graham, meanwhile, expressed gratitude toward Sheeran and called it “a difficult decision.”

“Money doesn’t give you the right to own the conversation. Nobody’s bank balance should decide who gets to speak or which suffering we’re allowed to acknowledge,” the band posted, seemingly referring to billionaire Robert Kraft’s role in Macklemore’s removal from the tour.

Emails seeking comment were sent to Sheeran.

Sheeran weighed in on Macklemore being dropped as his opening act after the rapper made pro-Palestinian comments onstage during their tour, saying the decision was made by the promoters alone. The British singer also said he refused to be drawn into a public discussion about the war in Gaza.

“Macklemore coming off tour was the promoter’s decision, it was not mine,” Sheeran wrote on Instagram on Tuesday. “I would never let down the fans who had made plans, nor would I abandon the touring crew and the other support acts and musicians who rely on me for work and to make a living.”

The tour’s promoter, the Messina Touring Group, did not immediately respond to emailed requests for comment Tuesday. Macklemore’s publicist also did not immediately respond.

Sheeran’s statement came a day after Macklemore said he was kicked off the Loop Tour after exclaiming “Free Palestine!” during the Sept. 5 date at New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium while introducing his protest song “Hind’s Hall.”

“To all of my Jewish brothers and sisters, criticism of Israel, criticism of apartheid, being against genocide, it in no way is criticism of you,” he said during the concert.

Macklemore said Monday on Instagram that several US venues told the promoter they would prohibit him from performing as Sheeran’s opening act, rallied by Robert Kraft, owner of NFL’s New England Patriots. His Kraft Group also owns Gillette Stadium, where the Patriots play.

In a statement Monday, Kraft said the decision to cancel Macklemore was a result of his recent comments “and a broader history of antisemitic rhetoric and imagery that we believe has been deeply offensive and hurtful to the Jewish community.”

Sheeran said in his latest post that he “spoke with the venues at length all week to try to build a bridge,” but that “the venue’s and promoter’s decision was final.”

A growing chorus of organizations and experts say Israel’s wartime actions in Gaza amount to genocide — an accusation Israel vehemently rejects.

Macklemore was scheduled to perform at eight of the 10 shows Sheeran has remaining on his stadium tour, which is scheduled to resume Saturday in Philadelphia. Ahead are stops at Gillette Stadium, Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium and Indianapolis’ Lucas Oil Stadium.

In his social media statement, Sheeran said he tries to use his music to “bring people from all backgrounds and cultures together” and that while he has personal views about “this devastating conflict,” he chooses not to speak publicly because people who come to his shows “do not expect a political forum.” He added: “I am not complicit.”

“I respect Macklemore’s strength of purpose to stand up and shout for what he believes,” Sheeran added. “However, there is room for multiple approaches to the same end: peace. I choose to use my fame and platform to be a place of safety and sanctuary, to maintain diplomacy and keep conversations open, not closed.”

Photos by Yaseen Najeeb

An adrenaline-charged Hadi Najeeb, 24, of Madison, lined up for the first event of the IRONMAN 70.3 Wisconsin on Saturday. He taught himself to swim competitively in just over eight months. “I knew I put in the work,” he said. “I just had to go out there and show it.”

Baby steps, that’s the key to tackling big challenges, says Hadi Najeeb of Madison, who completed the 2026 IRONMAN 70.3 Wisconsin Saturday. Eight and a half months ago, the 24-year-old started training practically from scratch, he said in an interview last week.

“I was not a swimmer and I hadn’t ridden a bike since early middle school,” he said. “But everything went super well. I smashed my goals for time.”

Najeeb was among about 2,500 participants in the long-distance triathlon race. It included a 1.2-mile swim in Lake Monona, a 56-mile challenging bike ride through Dane County’s rural countryside, known for its rolling hills, and a 13.1-mile hilly run that wound through the University of Wisconsin campus and finished on the steps of the Wisconsin State Capitol. 

Known as a “Half IRONMAN,” it is exactly half the distance of the full IRONMAN triathlon, which was held in Madison Sunday.

“He did 40 minutes better than he anticipated, which is amazing,” said Yaseen Najeeb of Milwaukee, Hadi’s older brother by four years. “He’s a very hard worker, very determined. And he’s very headstrong. When he sets his mind on something, for sure, he will complete it.”

The decision

Hadi Najeeb, a Milwaukee native, moved to Madison to study kinesiology at the University of Wisconsin. He graduated in 2024; an internship became a job, so he decided to stay.

Now a clinical specialist on the cardiac rhythm management program for Medtronic, a global healthcare technology company, Najeeb often has long, unpredictable work hours. “We’re experts in our devices, which are basically pacemakers, defibrillators and some other things,” he explained. “We support doctors during the implant process of these devices, and also support any sort of troubleshooting.” 

Why add triathlon training to his already full schedule?

“Now, that’s a loaded question,” Najeeb said. “People do a triathlon for a lot of different reasons, but rarely just for fitness. People who like to build muscle actually lose their fitness look when training. 

“When people do endurance sports like this, they are putting themselves in a situation where discipline becomes a non-negotiable. I’ve always had a very competitive nature. I’m someone addicted to fitness and just enjoy moving my body. I was an athlete in high school. Some injuries slowed me down. I wanted to see if I could get back to where I was.

At the starting line, “it’s very jam-packed,” said Hadi Najeeb of Madison. “You can’t even extend your hands. They whistle for people to start. You go in five at a time, and you have about five seconds between waves.”

“I had to work through a lot of baby steps,” Najeeb recalled. “Every single day, you get a little bit better and you just keep progressing. A year goes by and you’re in a completely different space than you were before. 

“For me, competing in a triathlon was not about training my body; it was about training my mind to get through difficult situations. Just like other situations—losing your job, a family crisis, whatever it is—realizing that time keeps moving and you really can keep progressing and moving forward is what matters to me. It’s really a battle of the mind.” 

In November 2025, Najeeb challenged himself to a half-marathon and it went well. In December, he started thinking about the IRONMAN 70.3 triathlon. 

“It seemed like an impossible task, but it’s been a dream of mine. I said to myself, ‘Let’s see what I’m capable of.’ Once you sign up, it becomes real,” he said. 

“I saw my family when I was going out and said hi to them,” triathlon competitor Hadi Najeeb said. “Then, I put on my goggles, put my earplugs in and got in the zone.”

Learning to swim, bike and take care of his body

Najeeb started training with a focus on swimming. “I took one step at a time. Swimming was its own battle,” he said.

“If you’re not a swimmer, you’re fighting to learn technique, fighting to not drown, fighting to figure it out. It’s a very difficult thing. I knew I couldn’t swim 50 yards without having to stop. I didn’t know form and technique. I taught myself. 

“I’m a very social guy, so in the pool, I’d be asking people on my left and right for tips. I’d watch YouTube videos. I have a little notes app where I recorded things I learned in every single swim session. Before I’d hop into the pool each time, I’d check my notes for things to keep in mind while swimming.”

Sometimes, Najeeb asked himself, “Did I get too far ahead of myself by committing to this?” he said. “But if you keep showing up, you have a little win, like realizing you just swam 200 yards without a break. Now I’m easily swimming a mile on a regular day. Even if it’s raining and the waves are coming at me, I can fight my way through all that stuff.

Hadi Najeeb’s older brother Yaseen took him to the starting line. “It was dark when we got up. We watched the sunrise. The sky was a nice pink, and there was no wind.”

“I got a bike a couple of months later and went through the same battles. The ride through the hills in Madison is known as one of the more difficult in an IRONMAN. It seemed impossible. So, you question yourself. ‘Is this doable?’ But you just keep showing up and finding the little wins.”

Although Najeeb had just competed in a half-marathon before training for the triathlon, the run still had challenges. A stress fracture in his foot taught him to take breaks and give his body time to heal, he said. He added yoga and stretching sessions to his routine. 

Najeeb had also lifted weights before he began training for the triathlon. At 5-foot-11, Najeeb was “around the 190-pound range,” he said. “Now I’m sitting around 181. I’ve definitely just leaned out, lost some of that bulked muscle.”

During training, “you’re burning a lot of calories, and so you have to focus on eating a lot, too,” Najeeb said. “There’s a lot to learn about how to fuel your body, eat clean and drink more water. There will be times when you fail, but you keep learning and improving.

“I remember situations when I completely cramped up and couldn’t move in the middle of a bike ride and had to Uber home, or a neighbor would give me some bananas or electrolytes before I knew how to fuel properly. I was burning 2,500 to 3,000 calories a training session. If you’re underfueled, your body will shut down.”

He also learned to focus on getting good sleep, he said. “No caffeine after 4 p.m. No wasting time at night. Sleep recovery is super important.

“It’s a transformation of life,” Najeeb said about the training experience. “It’s the only way you can do it, change everything.”

Rain or shine

Najeeb trained every day for more than eight months, doing two training sessions a day, four days a week. On the other three days, he did one session. Each session was about an hour and a half, except for weekends, he said. 

The weekend sessions were longer, three to four hours. “I’d go for a 50-mile bike ride and then maybe a little run right after,” he said. “They’re called brick sessions. You’re doing one sport followed by another sport. The pair is called ‘a brick.’

“Committing to the race really enforces discipline,” Najeeb said. “I don’t work 9 to 5. I can be at work at 6 a.m. and come back at 10 p.m. I’d barely eaten and been on my feet all day, but I’d still head to the swimming pool for a training session, and wake up at 4 a.m. the next day to go for a run, then I’d take a bike ride midday. You start planning it out and go through all these little battles to train your mind to do what you have to do. 

“If you freeze, you just break it down and tell yourself, ‘Let’s take a baby step.’ You end up taking that step and you keep going. It builds until you get to a point where you have accomplished what you once thought was impossible.”

“You also have to face the challenges alone,” Najeeb said. “You meet people along the way but, for a race like this, you have to be able to do the sessions alone and focus on your craft.

“It’s actually very peaceful,” he added. “At work, I’m very social and surrounded by people. During the race, you aren’t allowed to listen to music, so I didn’t when I was training either. “It’s time to think on your own. It’s very peaceful.”

Race day

Lots of people may be motivated to try a triathlon but not everyone finishes it. “There’s only so much motivation can do,” Najeeb said. “Once you actually start training, discipline takes over. It’s a matter of showing up for yourself day after day.

“I’m someone who tends to keep moving the bar,” he said. “When I started in December, my goal was just to finish the race. With how impossible it originally felt, I would have been happy to complete it.

“But doing training sessions I had originally thought were impossible, I told myself I’d try to do a sub-seven-hour finish time,” Najeeb told WMJ a week before the race.

Adrenaline woke Najeeb up at 2 a.m. He forced himself to eat, loading up on carbs. “No one wants to eat that early,” he said in an interview after the race.

Yaseen had spent the night Friday and drove Hadi to the competition in the morning. They watched the sunrise, then went to the start line at 7 a.m. “You could feel the energy in everyone,” Yaseen said.

“I checked my heart rate,” Hadi said. “It was around 120. In training, it’s around 50 or 60 to start. So, I told myself to start out slow and make sure I didn’t go out too fast and burn out.”

Hadi Najeeb (center) is surrounded by family who cheered for him throughout the IRONMAN 70.3 competition.  They include (left to right) his aunt Heather Nelson, cousins Jehan  and Salam Salous, uncle Issan Atta, sister-in-law Dr. Reem Mahjoub and brother Rayyan Najeeb, and their children. “When he finished one event, we’d run to the next,” brother Yaseen Najeeb said. “I think he was surprised to see us at every turn.”

The average overall finish time for an IRONMAN 70.3 is between 5 hours and 30 minutes and 6 hours and 30 minutes, the IRONMAN organization says on its website. The average swim time is 35-45 minutes; the average bike time is 2 hours and 45 minutes to 3 hours and 30 minutes. The average run time is 2 hours to 2 hours and 30 minutes.

Najeeb finished the race Saturday in 6 hours and 21 minutes, with his personal bests in both swimming (40 minutes) and biking (3 hours and 10 minutes). 

He finished the final event, the run, in 2 hours and 19 minutes, about 20 minutes more than his time in a half-marathon last year. “I had to do some running and some walking,” he said. 

Najeeb saw family and friends along the way, but “everyone cheers for you, whether they know you or not,” he said. “It was an incredible experience. Just seeing that red carpet—I can’t explain how it felt. A sense of accomplishment, of relief – I felt every emotion all at once. It was great!”

“Contemplation of Justice” Statue on the Supreme Court Plaza by James Earle Fraser. (David, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)

“One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.” That is the title of Omar El Akkad’s 2025 National Book Award–winning nonfiction book, based on the full quotation:

“One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.”

“This” means the genocide of Palestinians – in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria — in the war for “greater Israel.”  

Our world now witnesses the evisceration of internationally accepted standards as well as U.S constitutional and statutory law, lowering the moral bar to more atrocities.

What can we, as citizens and taxpayers, do to counter the prevailing lawlessness and trampling of nearly all basic legal principles and sense of human decency as genocide is waged?

Article VI of the U.S. Constitution makes the Genocide Convention the “supreme law of the land.” The convention was thereafter statutorily implemented into U.S. law as a serious crime carrying the death penalty.   

The president and his (newly retitled) “secretaries of war” do not and cannot enjoy unfettered authority, unreviewable by the judiciary, to violate the Constitution per their own judicially-created “political question doctrine” — the mistaken notion that the courts don’t have the power to judge foreign policy decisions of the executive branch even when ostensibly unconstitutional.  

Nor can this “political” fog be employed to circumvent the “Tax and Spend Clause” of the Constitution, which specifically limits congressional spending to be for the “general welfare” of U.S. citizens, and which gives taxpayers like ourselves the standing to sue. 

The U.S.-funded Israeli genocide makes taxpayers complicit in the “crime of crimes” through this unlawful expenditure of our public funds. 

Given this situation, 15 months ago a group of us in Minnesota commenced a civil lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota against our legislative and executive branch “leaders” who voted for and then implemented U.S. “supplemental funding” for the arming of Israel’s genocide.

We Consider Tax-Payer Funding of Genocide Illegal

Our suit simply asked for a judge to rule on whether the voting of tax-payer funding of genocide is against the law. 

We sought judgment on the despicable commission of the worst crime imaginable: mass-murder genocide, which includes the wanton killing of tens of thousands of babies and children. Surely, we thought, U.S. federal judges who have spent the better parts of their lives invested in learning, applying and upholding the rule of law would “be against this.”  

We “Minnesotan Taxpayers Against Genocide” numbered nine, drawn from congressional districts throughout the state and constituents of the various U.S. congressional representatives and senators who voted for the supplemental funding of Israel in April 2024, well after the International Court of Justice had adjudicated Israel to be engaged in plausible genocide.  

Our backgrounds are diverse: a retired F.B.I. special agent and former Minneapolis Division legal counsel; three military veterans; a former U.S. Postal employee; a retired teacher; two with administrative/business experience; a Lutheran deacon expert on “moral injury,” the topic of her PhD thesis. 

Well over 200 other Minnesota taxpayers had signed a petition in support of our lawsuit but the majority of our federal congresspersons were obviously not in support since they were the named defendants — along with both Biden’s and Trump’s Defense Secretaries Lloyd Austin and Pete Hegseth. 

A notable exception is Rep. Ilhan Omar. We did not name her as a defendant since she is the only congressperson in Minnesota, in either the U.S. House or Senate, to vote against the Israel Security Supplemental Appropriations Act of 2024. Eventually, Tina Smith and Amy Klobuchar, the two U.S. senators for Minnesota, did stop voting for further armaments to Israel so, who knows, maybe our lawsuit did help change their minds. (Smith is not seeking reelection and Klobuchar is now running to become Minnesota’s next governor.)

A Judicial Marathon 

U.S. District courthouse for the District of Minnesota in downtown Minneapolis. (Tony Webster /Wikimedia Commons/CC BY 2.0)

The civil suit engendered 60 filings. There were a number of reasons for this large number: 

-the government shutdown in 2025 caused delay by the defense of the assistant U.S. attorneys (AUSAs) representing U.S. officials; 

-our plaintiffs being subsequently allowed to amend our complaint to merely seek declaratory judgment; 

-dropping our original request for certification as a class action and any monetary damages; 

-and also due to the clerk of court granting us plaintiffs an “entry of default judgment” in February 2026 for the government’s “failure to respond” to the judicial deadline when 14 assistant U.S. attorneys (nearly half) in Minnesota resigned after U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen directed federal prosecutors to investigate the partner of murdered activist Rene Good, rather that the ICE agent who shot her. 

Those who resigned included the chief of the Civil Division assigned to our litigation.   Those departures, along with a massive increase in habeas petitions resulting from the unwarranted and punitive detention of thousands of immigrants, many of whom had legal status, left the remaining federal prosecutors unable to handle their caseload, including non-immigration suits like ours. 

In this context, we had a good argument that the government’s default in our case was not merely negligent or excusable since it was a problem created by unethical, and likely illegal, actions by the Department of Justice itself. 

Nonetheless, the presiding district judge in our case failed to grant us default judgment, which would have meant that the factual allegations in our amended complaint would have been deemed true by the court because of the defendants’  failure to respond. 

But that didn’t happen. 

Instead, the judge allowed the government to go back to the drawing board and refile a motion to dismiss on the grounds of our lack of legal standing as taxpayers to bring our complaint and the “political question doctrine” restricting court power over foreign policy decisions of the executive branch  — as it had with our original complaint. 

This all culminated with our final legal memorandum in support of our motion for declaratory judgment (filed fittingly enough on “Tax Day,” April 15). 

Judge Belittled Our Claim of Standing 

Thank you Congress/Biden, your aid was received! March for a Free Palestine, Freedom Plaza, Washington, D.C., Nov. 4, 2023. (Diane Krauthamer, Flickr, CC BY-NC)

Eric C. Tostrud, the chief district judge of Minnesota, summarily dismissed our case and refused to even issue a mere declaratory judgment acknowledging that our officials’ complicity in genocide is illegal.  

His 10-page dismissal is here.  

Essentially Judge Tostrud’s dismissal is based solely on “lack of standing” by taxpayer plaintiffs, for which he cited the Flast v Cohen Supreme Court precedent that created taxpayer standing.  (Prior to Flast, taxpayer status was not considered sufficient, in and of itself, to confer standing to taxpayers wishing to sue the government for unlawful or unconstitutional appropriations.) 

Flast v. Cohen carved out an exception for taxpayers in 1968 after the government appropriated tax dollars for use by religious schools; a now recognized violation of the Establishment Clause of the Constitution.  

Unfortunately the district judge was unwilling to read Flast as applicable to arguably far more serious unconstitutionality, even as he acknowledged our claim that Congress and the executive branch were in violation of another provision of the Constitution; Article VI, which makes the Genocide Convention the supreme law of the land.  

(We also charged that the funding of Israel is illegal under the “Tax and Spend Clause” of the U.S. Constitution in Article I, Section 8. When numerous international judicial and human rights authorities have found Israel to be engaged in genocide, a law funding that genocide clearly violates the “general welfare” stipulation in Article I.) 

The judge belittled our claim of standing, based on our position that in addition to the actual amounts of money paid by each taxpayer, such unlawful complicity in genocide can also amount to real injury, moral injury. 

He decided that we failed to 

“identify any personal injury suffered by them as a consequence of the alleged constitutional error, other than the psychological consequence presumably produced by observation of conduct with which one disagrees.”  

This interpretation of  Flast v Cohen is unduly narrow — especially given that it’s not about the de minimus taxes paid but the moral injury that comes with bing complicit, no matter the amount of money.  

Pettifoggery

Still from a U.N. film strip, circa 1949, on the 1948 Genocide Convention. (U.N. Photo)

Our request of the court was a simple one, a declaratory judgment on the lawfulness and constitutionality of the Israel Security Supplemental Appropriations Act. 

Our request was, and remains, consistent with the cornerstone rulings in Marbury v. Madison:

• Federal laws that conflict with the Constitution are invalid.
• Judges have the power and the duty to determine when federal laws are unconstitutional.

To engage in pettifoggery is to give undue attention to insignificant details in order to avoid addressing a more important question. We think Judge Tostrud’s dismissal of our legal standing absolutely amounted to pettifoggery. 

Genocide is a jus cogens, or compelling, norm from which no derogation, or limitation, is permissible. Yet Judge Tostrud chose to focus on standing, belittling our claims to injury in the process. 

Must one self immolate in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., as active-duty airman Aaron Bushnell did to demonstrate that an injury is “concrete and particularized?”

Article I – about taxing and spending for the common good — and Article VI making the Genocide Convention the “supreme law of the land”  —  are just as important backbones of the Constitution as the Establishment Clause cited in Flast to challenge the use of tax dollars for use by religious schools. 

There is therefore no reason that the standing granted to the taxpayers in Flast should not also allow us to challenge a specific congressional enactment that even more seriously injures us in violation of these other provisions of the U.S. Constitution.

We have a direct and personal stake (as will many others) in the judicial judgment we seek:  that it is illegal to fund genocide with our public monies.  We may be sounding the alarm for others in our society as we identify the blot on the skin that signals spreading cancer. (“Silence like a cancer grows” sang Simon and Garfunkel.) 

We could be likened to the relative few who spoke and acted against the Nazi genocide. After the Nazi genocide became more widely condemned, the masses of people who failed to prevent it lived with decades of guilt, shame and reparations.  Of course, many pretended that they “had always been against this.”

Moral Injury 

Vigil on Feb. 27, 2024, outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington for Aaron Bushnell, a U.S. airman who self-immolated to protest the Israeli genocide in Gaza. (Diane Krauthamer, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

To understand the context of our legal standing, one must know that “moral injury” is a new term for something that is eons old; witnessing or being forced to participate in events that contradict deeply held moral beliefs and expectations. 

While the term initially arose in connection with military service, moral injury is now identified in diverse populations, including health professionals, lawyers, public servants, teachers and journalists.  

Similarly,  PTSD (Post-traumatic Stress Disorder) was not so identified until after the Vietnam War. 

Notably, new terms may not yet have legal precedents.  

We litigants are members of the government by the people.  As such, we are party legally and morally to the duty to prevent genocide. As we witness the horror of the misery our taxes are enacting daily, we suffer from moral injury. The crime of genocide is so extreme — “the crime of crimes” — that we plaintiffs suffer anguish, alienation and anger as well as actual, resulting deleterious physical effects.

These results (and much more could be added regarding how they impair our lives) were caused by the betrayal of our duly sworn elected officials — those in authority — to follow the law.   

The actual impact of any traumatic event can vary greatly from person to person, just as some people suffer more from a toxic chemical exposure than others.  We now know, however, that intergenerational trauma causes damage and that many people “self-medicate” their distress to the point of addiction. 

In any case, just because people respond differently to a traumatic injury does not negate the culpability of the injurer.  So far, none of us have committed suicide, but we do theorize that moral injury propelled Aaron Bushnell and others to take their own lives in protest of the genocide.  

We have a direct and personal stake (as will many others) in the requested judicial judgment that the funding of genocide with our public monies is illegal.  That many others will share this injury underscores the need to address our injury with a judicial judgment. 

Normalizing genocide endangers our humanity in many ways.

A Previous Case & Dismissal 

Defense for Children International-Palestine v. Biden, another case challenging the U.S. government’s complicity in genocide, was dismissed by the 9th Circuit primarily on the erroneous grounds of the “political question doctrine” of courts’ limited power over foreign-policy decisions by the executive branch.

[See: Judges Unmoved in Biden Genocide Complicity Case]

That dismissal was reached even though the initial district judge to hear the case brought in California had cried out for something to be done:  

“This Court implores Defendants to examine the results of their unflagging support of the military siege against the Palestinians in Gaza.” 

Prolonging Widespread Suffering  

Child and others wounded in Israeli attack on Gaza, 2023. (Fars photo, Ghassan Salem, CC BY 4.0)

Criminally, even greater human, environmental, and moral suffering has continued to scream since the judge dismissed our case in July. 

Would it have helped our case to produce evidence from Gaza of the stray dog with a toddler’s arm in its mouth, or the wailing father carrying his son’s body in two trash bags?   Or any of thousands of pictures and descriptions of the genocide still unfolding after over 1000 days?  We’ll never know as our request to introduce further evidence apparently fell on deaf ears.

We think these judges shirked their responsibility and failed to do their jobs; that they failed to determine the factual and legal merits of our case. Instead of saying what the law is they resorted to legal pettifoggery. We found this extremely disappointing. There is overwhelming evidence of the ongoing clear commission of this “crime of crimes.” Haven’t judges sworn to uphold the U.S. Constitution?

Sadly enough, such judicial failure is not new.  Prior episodes of condoned lawlessness notably include the practice of slavery, the genocide of native Americans, World War II concentration camp internments of Japanese Americans, and “Jim Crow” massacres and lynchings. These obvious crimes also became widely normalized if not fully “legalized” by judges keeping their heads down during this country’s first 250 years.  

The bit of good news, however, is that the condoning of these prior historical crimes eventually came to an end, proving once again that “the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice.”  Even though the “arc” can be frustratingly long, rest assured that our officials’ attempts to legalize the post 9-11 torture programs, assassinations, genocide and the “supreme crime” of launching “wars of choice” — i.e. wars of aggression — will end up similarly widely condemned.  

Our third branch of government needs to find the courage to stand on the side of justice, on that arc of the moral universe.   

In the meantime, the enormity of the moral and legal abyss just deepens with those government officials most complicit in genocide and other war crimes, still able to claim obliviousness and to continue to personally profit.   Even worse, without any current accountability, crimes like this will always tend to spread like a cancer upon the world.

Pro se plaintiffs and co-authors:

Coleen Rowley is a retired special agent and former Minneapolis Division legal counsel of the F.B.I. who taught constitutional law and law enforcement ethics to F.B.I. agents and other law enforcement, then became a whistleblower about the F.B.I.’s pre 9-11 failures and the folly of the Iraq invasion; Apple Valley, Minnesota. 

William “Bill” Sorem, U.S. Air Force veteran, former sailing fleet manager, retired computer software engineer, advertising executive and video reporter, Minnetonka, Minnesota.

Fiona Roedl, administrative assistant of a 44-year-old non-profit, Minneapolis.

Amy Blumenshine,  Lutheran (ELCA) deacon, founded the Coming Home Collaborative to address the suffering of military veterans and their families, wrote dissertation on Military Moral Injury, co-authored the book Welcome Them Home; Help Them Heal: Pastoral care and ministry with service members returning from war, Minneapolis Minnesota.

Mike Madden, Veteran for Peace, St. Paul, Minnesota. 

Janice Ward, sociologist, bicyclist, traveler, retired from human services, Marcell, Minnesota.

David Evenhouse, retired laborer, self-educated woodsman, student of life, happy outdoorsman, and disabled Vietnam War veteran suffering from exposure to Agent Orange, Marcell, Minnesota.

Carol Walker, former business printing professional, and long-time non-profit board member, St. Paul, Minnesota.

Darlene Coffman, retired teacher, Rochester, Minnesota.

The views expressed are solely those of the authors and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

A woman places flowers into a coffin in Los Angeles on Oct. 7, 2025, during a demonstration at UCLA in memory of Palestinian lives lost in Gaza. Credit: Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

Southern California is home to one of the largest Palestinian diasporas in the country, and at least 57,000 Palestinians are spread across the state. Despite decades of oppression and displacement by Israel, generations of these Palestinian families persevered and now call Orange County and the Los Angeles area home. 

Southern California is also home to one of the U.S.’s largest Israeli communities, with at least 80% of the population in LA asserting that Israel is an essential part of being Jewish, according to a 2021 study. 

In part, this is why many Palestinians in the region say that outside of their immediate families, they feel isolated and detached from their broader community.

These feelings only worsened after Oct. 7, 2023. Following Hamas’ Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, Israel escalated its genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, eradicating entire blood lines, bombing homes, hospitals, universities, and sacred sites—efforts that continue, despite a so-called ceasefire that was announced last year. 

Following the first months of the genocide in Gaza, Palestinians in LA grappled with survivor’s guilt. Under the warm Southern California sun, they watched with the rest of the world as Israel razed Gaza, targeting schools, orphanages, hospitals, women, and children. 

Talal Kachkouche, a Palestinian in LA originally from Haifa, told Prism that during the earliest days of the genocide, LA “felt completely dystopic.” Now, as Israel and the United States are engaged in a larger regional war in Iran, he finds himself in a “constant state of fear and worry” for his family in Lebanon, Kuwait, and across the Southwest Asia and North Africa region. 

“Life in LA can be so insanely sunny and cheerful and even hopeful, that it comes off entirely delusional,” Kachkouche said. “Sometimes I’ll walk around my neighborhood and wonder how any of this is real. I’ll ask myself why the entire world doesn’t have it like this. This life … is such a far reach from so many people I know.”

According to three Palestinians who spoke to Prism from across Southern California, their communities continue to grapple with feelings of alienation while also being ostracized in their workplaces, schools, and social circles for simply being Palestinian and speaking out against Israel’s war crimes. Many report they’ve lost friendships or otherwise withdrawn from their social life as they struggle to maintain everyday routines while the devastation in Gaza continues. 

No end in sight  

For Palestinians in Southern California today, their geographical distance from Palestine has widened another kind of chasm: a persistent sense of hopelessness as they watch from afar as Israel kills their loved ones and destroys their ancestral homelands.

August 2026 marks two years and 10 months since Israel’s genocide in Gaza began. After agreeing to a ceasefire on Oct. 9, Israel has violated the agreement more than 3,000 times: carpet bombing Gaza, preventing humanitarian aid and food from entering the Gaza Strip, and continuing military operations that have killed thousands of Palestinians, Al-Jazeera reported last year. 

Israel’s genocidal efforts continue to be carried out with unconditional diplomatic and military backing from the United States. For Palestinians in Southern California such as Hanine Tarifi, the profound grief they feel watching all of this unfold has changed how they exist in the world. As a Palestinian American living in West Hollywood, she said “normal life” now feels like “a very subjective idea.” 

“I still have normal dreams, hopes, and goals, but my understanding of what a ‘normal’ life is has changed. Many of the assumptions I once had about the world have been shattered. I now realize how difficult it can be to live a truly normal life within systems that often fail vulnerable people,” Tarifi told Prism. 

Palestinians across the U.S. continue to carry immense survivor’s guilt, which for some manifests in their refusal to celebrate birthdays or other life milestones. Many report it feeling difficult to go about their daily lives, knowing Israel is killing their kin back home.

Dina Bdaiwi, a licensed family and trauma-informed therapist from Irvine, California, told Prism that the mental health field is limited when it comes to processing what is happening in Gaza. 

According to the therapist, since October 2023, many of her Palestinian clients are experiencing secondary trauma, emotional distress that occurs when you are exposed to the traumatic experiences of others. Over the last few years, Palestinians in the U.S. have been bombarded with violent imagery, and their guilt drives them to bear witness to the suffering of their people in Gaza, Bdaiwi explained.

“What I do see coming up for a lot for folks is this description of survivor’s guilt, of ‘that could’ve been me,’” Bdaiwi said, noting that many of her Palestinian clients postponed weddings or canceled graduation ceremonies in late 2023. “There is a lot of guilt and shame that Palestinians here carry; that they are the ones that get to live here without the threat of current genocide.” 

What makes these dynamics more difficult for Palestinians is that the trauma is ongoing; it is generational trauma rooted in decades of violence, displacement, and dispossession by Israel. Bdaiwi said many of her clients are processing these difficult realizations in isolation. To help, she emphasizes the importance of understanding retraumatization. This is particularly important as Israel continues acting with impunity, which lends to the feeling that there is no end in sight to the violence. 

And the violence is astounding, and multifaceted. It is not only measured in the countless lives lost, but through the decades of displacement, imprisonment, and destruction of Palestinian land and homes.

Since the start of the genocide, Israel has detained thousands of Palestinians in inhumane conditions, and many of these civilians have been detained with no charge. This includes hundreds of children, who report being tortured and sexually assaulted. Israel also targets children outside prison walls, including the infamous killing of Hind Rajab. The 5-year-old was in a vehicle that was shot at over 300 times by the Israeli military, which initially denied targeting the child.

For Palestinian Americans in the U.S., there is a particular kind of anguish knowing their  own government is working against them, aiding in the torture and killing of people who look just like them. 

Dani Marzouca, a Palestinian American living in LA, told Prism that it’s “forever changed” them to see children who look like their brothers carry pieces of their family in plastic bags, “simply because they are Palestinian and refuse to abandon their land.”

There are the before times, and the after times, according to Marzouca. Before Oct. 7, they said they boycotted, signed petitions, protested, and wept for martyrs. But along with the continued fight for Palestinian rights, they also cherished replicating their grandmother’s malfoof, for example, and they loved the magic of weaving and gifting tatreez. After Oct. 7, it’s been difficult to move beyond agony and rage. Watching the genocide from afar was akin to “soul death,” they said. 

Almost three years into the genocide, their feelings continue to evolve. 

“My Palestinian identity has gifted me a depth of agony and fierce love for life that has pushed the boundaries of my courage to disrupt industries of death everywhere,” Marzouca said. 

Israel’s attack on Palestinians, layered with the military occupation in Gaza and the West Bank, suspends diaspora Palestinians between two realities: being deeply and emotionally tied to Gaza, while physically present in Southern California. By extension, this also means existing in a country that supports, funds, and provides weapons for Israel’s genocide.

But some also report an expanded worldview they did not previously have. For example, some Palestinians who spoke to Prism described a greater awareness of global struggles. 

“The disconnect between everyday life here and what people are experiencing elsewhere can feel surreal and sometimes painful,” Tarifi said. “At the same time, it has helped me understand the power of denial—I was also affected by it. Maybe I was not ready to face how cruel the world can be. But going through this experience has also made me appreciate that my perspective has expanded. I feel more aware and able to see the world from different angles.”

Tarifi told Prism that as brutal as it’s been to witness the genocide, it has also made her  more proud of being Palestinian and that it’s inspired her to learn more about her ancestral homeland.

“I began to understand how trauma, displacement, and oppression can make people feel disconnected from their own identity and homeland,” Tarifi said. “Now, I understand more than ever how the world works and what is actually happening, without trying to minimize it or dismiss it as something beyond my understanding.”

Intimidation campaigns 

As Palestinian Americans witness the genocide from afar, they have also become targets. 

With support from the White House and elected officials, Zionist institutions have weaponized accusations of antisemitism against pro-Palestinian voices, leaving Palestinians in the U.S. navigating job loss, harassment, doxing, and other abuse largely due to their identities. Some have even faced serious legal threats from the state. 

Marzouca was one of those victims. 

The Zionist social media account StopAntisemitism that targets vocal anti-Zionists doxed Marzouca in January 2024. They said soon their inbox was filled with “transphobic death wishes,” along with an interview request from The Washington Post. The Post revealed that the primary investors in sites such as StopAntisemitism are Adam and Gila Milstein. The millionaire Israeli American real estate moguls fund these anonymous organizations through their 

Milstein Family Foundation.

American Zionists pour millions of dollars into efforts aimed at intimidating and silencing Palestinians and their allies in the U.S. But the U.S. government also appears to have launched its own campaign against these populations. 

In 2024, the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ reported its Southern California office “received numerous complaints” from members of the Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim communities, alleging they were questioned by the FBI due to their identities.

This is par for the course, according to Kachkouche, who told Prism that Palestinians need people outside of their communities to stand with them, speak out against the genocide, and generally “do more.”   

“Do more to safeguard us here in LA with our jobs and our positions and our rights to protest, but also for the amazing humans in Palestine who have been up against a most narcissistic and brutal imperial regime,” he said.  

Endurance and resilience 

In the years since the genocide first began, humanitarian aid workers, activists, human rights lawyers, academics, and others have referred to Palestine as a litmus test—gauging the world’s commitment to justice, liberation, and human rights. Young people have shown a fiercest commitment, putting their bodies, educations, careers, and futures in the U.S. on the line, asserting that Palestinian solidarity is a nonnegotiable. 

Palestinians in the diaspora also remain fiercely committed to activist movements, holding sacred spaces to collectively grieve the genocide and fight for a free Palestine. 

These efforts, though born from tragedy, create a deeper unity within Palestinian communities, according to Palestinian Americans who spoke to Prism. This is especially true for those who’ve never set foot in Palestine, said Tarifi. 

“When people ask whether I have family in Palestine, I sometimes wonder if they assume my sadness comes only from having a personal connection,” Tarifi said. “The reality is that many of us are heartbroken because we cannot accept seeing this happen to any group of people. My concern comes from a sense of shared humanity, not only from my Palestinian identity.”

The world is watching Gaza closely in ways it never has before, thanks in part to social media, community reporters, and videos from everyday Palestinians surviving the genocide. These efforts have not just transformed political conversations, The Nation reported; they have “changed U.S. politics forever.”   

Tarifi characterized this reality as “emotionally complex.” The solidarity from people around the world is “beautiful,” she said, but the polarization—in which Palestinian suffering is “debated rather than simply acknowledged”—remains deeply painful.  

Equally complicated is how members of the diaspora feel about the possibility of Palestinian liberation in their lifetimes. Tarifi told Prism that on a personal level, it’s difficult to even envision being able to see family in Palestine. For Kachkouche, liberation is not possible without the “complete dissolution of the militarized colonial apartheid state of Israel.”

Still, even as Israel continues its genocidal campaign with impunity, Palestinians in the diaspora remain unequivocally committed to liberation, something they say they have learned from their kin in Gaza.

Kachkouche told Prism that beyond the despair felt by Palestinian Americans is “a zest” to prove they are here and they deserve not just to live, but to one day return home and thrive. 

“It’s best described using the Arabic words ‘sabr’ and ‘sumud,’” Kachkouche explained. “Two profound Arabic words meaning ‘endurance’ and ‘resilience.’”

Editorial Team:
Tina Vasquez, Lead Editor
Lara Witt, Top Editor
Stephanie Harris, Copy Editor

Shaheena Khan, M.D., will discuss how to use the body’s natural mechanisms to prevent and address health issues at the September MWC Networking Brunch.

Shaheena Khan, M.D., an assistant professor at the Medical College of Wisconsin and a hospitalist at Froedtert Hospital in Wauwatosa, is on a mission to share a key to physical and psychological health. The guest speaker at the Muslim Women’s Coalition’s Networking Brunch will present The Calm Code: Unlock the Power of Your Vagus Nerve.

The vagus nerve, the longest cranial nerve in the human body, running from the brain to the intestines, is the main component of the parasympathetic nervous system, which oversees a vast array of crucial bodily functions, including control of mood, immune response, digestion and heart rate. “The brain-gut axis is becoming increasingly important as a therapeutic target for gastrointestinal and psychiatric disorders, such as inflammatory bowel disease, depression and posttraumatic stress disorder,” according to a 2018 article in Front Psychiatry, found in the National Library of Medicine.

“This nerve plays important roles between the gut, the brain and inflammation,” the article states. New treatment options involving stimulation of the vagus nerve and meditation techniques “have been shown to be beneficial in mood and anxiety disorders” as well as “other conditions associated with increased inflammation” … “Finally, the vagus nerve also represents an important link between nutrition and psychiatric, neurological and inflammatory diseases.”

At the September MWC Network Brunch, Dr. Khan will teach guests ways to activate their vagus nerve to help regulate heart rate, blood pressure, sleep, mood, breathing, bladder function, digestion and the immune system to benefit the body’s overall balance and well-being. 

The brunch, catered by Taqwa Bakery and Restaurant, will be held from 10 a.m. – 12 p.m., Friday, Sept. 25 at the Islamic Resource Center, 5235 S. 27th St., Greenfield. Register here. A $15 payment will be taken at the door.

Dr. Khan’s journey to good health

Wisconsin Muslim Journal interviewed Shaheena Khan, M.D., M.S., Tuesday to learn about the personal journey that set her on the mission of sharing a vital key to physical and mental health. Here are the highlights:

What experiences have you had that inspired you to share this secret to mental and physical health?

Walking the lines of illness and health for the past two decades, alongside going to medical school and doing allopathic (conventional) medicine, and also looking into the research about what exactly benefits people in terms of longevity and chronic disease control and stress relief. 

I found there are quite a few differences between what I learned in medical school and residency, the way we do things in mainstream medicine, and other information I’ve found. Traditional medical treatments are based on randomized, controlled trials. Guess what? You can only do those trials when you have a lot of money to spend.  Who is going to spend that kind of money? The pharmaceutical companies. 

Fortunately, there are other researchers in this country and around the world doing research on longevity and disease prevention. What I have found by looking at their research and experimenting on myself is that you can really prevent and reverse a lot of disease, and optimize your mind and body in ways you never thought possible.

The MWC Networking Brunch at the Islamic Resource Center is a monthly program open to everyone, offering opportunities to connect, learn and have a lively discussion.

What have you learned that would surprise us?

We think you’re supposed to get sicker as you get older. You’re supposed to have memory loss. You’re supposed to get depressed with all the stressors around you. We’ve got all these medicines to help you. Take pill X, Y, Z for your ailments A, B, C. 

No one really tells you your body already has these amazing mechanisms that are built in to solve a lot of your problems and to prevent others from arising.

I’ve found and used a lot of these mechanisms. I haven’t really discovered anything. I have just learned what the literature says and tried a lot of those principles on myself.

I also stumbled across “functional medicine.” It aims to restore function by looking for the root causes of disease. I found that for me a root cause was that I was too stressed out, living in a “sympathetic dominant state.” That’s where your body is in fight or flight mode, which we are only supposed to activate when there is an immediate threat, like a bear running at you or someone holding a gun to your head. When the danger is gone, we’re supposed to switch back to a healing state, the “parasympathetic state.” I learned we can activate the parasympathetic state at will. That’s what this talk stems from.

What are the benefits of activating the parasympathetic state?

It can improve your sleep, your memory, your focus, your cognition. It affects inflammation throughout the body. It even affects hormonal health. There are just so many mechanisms this nerve impacts, so it is literally the biggest bang for your buck. 

It’s not something that’s out of reach of anyone. It’s something I wish everyone learned in third grade. It’s that important.

But aren’t many diseases caused by genetics? How can you change genetics?

Diseases are sometimes caused by genetics. But your lifestyle pushes your body to turn on the genes that’ll give you that disease. You can keep those genes quiet by knowing the right lifestyle tweaks.

Please tell us more about your personal experience.

I grew up with a lot of stress and it continued into my twenties and thirties. Then I discovered the vagus nerve and that I could activate it. By activating it day in and day out, multiple times a day, you teach your body to stay in the parasympathetic state, which helps you recover from stress.

Because I spent decades of my life constantly stressed out, I was a very sick 20-something-year-old, which turned into an even sicker 30-something-year-old. I ended up with a disease called ulcerative colitis, which is severe inflammation of the colon. It just kept getting worse. I couldn’t really control my symptoms very well with the pills that they were giving me. The stresses of medical school and residency made it worse.

It was going to leach into being a very, very sick 40-something-year-old, but I put a stop to that. And one of the ways I did it is with vagus nerve training. Now I’m completely off all my pills and medication.

So, I created this lecture and the handouts that go with it to give people a basic overview of how to activate the vagus nerve. I hope they will get excited about learning more about it and do their own research as well.

The worksheet I’ll share is a little companion for you to remind yourself, “Hey, I could be doing this, this and this right now.” 

‘There is no way to contend with Islamophobia in this country if we don’t contend with our policy towards Israel-Palestine.’ Photograph: Penguin Random House

Growing up in the early 2000s in California, surrounded by piles of history books about the Kennedy family and her Buffy the Vampire Slayer DVDs, Rozina Ali’s childhood felt idyllic. She and her family had moved from Pakistan to the US when Ali was five years old and ever since she had immersed herself in her new world.

“I really, really also believed in American exceptionalism,” said Ali, now a journalist working for New York Times Magazine, in a recent interview with Stateside with Kai and Carter, a Guardian podcast. So when her parents sat Ali and her siblings down in the hours after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, almost every word coming out of their mouths felt wrong.

“I kept telling my parents: ‘This is America. This is not Pakistan. We are living in the United States of America,’” Ali recalled. “And they kept telling me: ‘This country is at war, and Muslims attacked this country, and we are all going to be under suspicion.’”

It wasn’t until years later, when she was reporting on the impacts of the war on terror on Muslim communities in the US, that Ali would realize how right her parents had been. The result is a book she never intended to write – an ambitious attempt to trace the history of Islamophobia in this country, starting decades before 9/11.

Seasons of Fury, out now, is a chilling tale of suppression and paranoia, which Ali unspools through the stories of four families. One notable profile follows Abdeen Jabara, an Arab American lawyer who, in the 1970s, uncovered one of the largest government surveillance efforts in US history. Jabara would eventually become known as the first American citizen surveilled by the National Security Agency. Ali’s book also explores the nuanced experiences of Muslim men who were convicted of terrorism in the wake of 9/11.

Ten years since she first began her research, Ali says Islamophobia in the US feels more present than ever.

A May 2026 poll conducted by Pew Research Center found that most Muslims report feeling discrimination in their daily lives. And that perception is not unfounded. In the 25 years since 9/11, Pew found that the percentage of US adults who said they believed Islam was more likely than other religions to promote violence has more than doubled. As the anniversary approaches, tens of thousands have signed an online petition telling New York City’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, who is himself Muslim, to “Stay Away.” Some states, including Texas and Florida, have recently classified the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a longstanding Muslim civil liberties organization, as a terrorist organization.

Carter Sherman, co-host of Stateside With Kai and Carter, spoke with Ali about why she believes Islamophobia is more pervasive than ever – and what this means for our politics right now.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. Watch the Stateside podcast episode in full here.

CS: We are talking just days ahead of the 25th anniversary of 9/11. I’m wondering, what do you remember of that day?

RA: I was a teenager the day that 9/11 happened. I was living in a small town in California, and my family was one of, I want to say, three or four Muslims living in this town. Because it was in California, I was still waking up and getting ready for school. I just recall my parents being paralyzed in the living room, watching the news. There was a level of fear in them that I hadn’t really noticed before.

Relatives of those lost at Ground Zero stand on the ramp during a memorial service in New York, on 11 September 2002. Photograph: David L Pokress/EPA

How do you think the days and months that followed 9/11 changed your relationship to the US?

I really believed that the US government would protect the very fundamental pillars and values that it believed in, which was freedom of religion, tolerance, pluralism and first and foremost, freedom of speech. It took me a long time to understand that things that my parents had gone through in Pakistan or things that happened abroad could also happen here. I don’t think I fully, fully registered their fear and how not paranoid they were until I actually started reporting on the stories.

After 9/11, what were the main ways that we now know the US government was interacting with Muslim communities?

Law enforcement, FBI agents, police departments – they were undercover informants. They surveilled not just Muslim neighborhoods, but sat in cafes. They sat in mosques. They spoke to people trying to goad them into plots. It did not matter if you were guilty or not. You know, one of the most popular refrains that I kept hearing over and over and over again in my interviews was, the walls have ears. So many Muslims had that same reaction, that someone was watching us.

As obviously pivotal as 9/11 was, I think your book really illustrates how Islamophobia has been growing into a political tool in this country since the 1960s. Can you walk me through some of the bigger inflection points in that history?

One big one is the 1967 Israel-Arab war in which Israel took over a lot of Palestinian land. That war galvanized the Arab American community living in the United States. There were protests on the streets. There were fundraising campaigns to help Palestinian refugees. It was actually quite remarkable, this level of political activism.

What was also happening was that globally, Palestinian militant groups were becoming more violent against not just Israel, but also western assets and western allies. One big event was the 1972 Munich Massacre in which Black September, a Palestinian militant group, kidnapped and killed the Israeli Olympic athletes. Immediately after that, Nixon’s White House launched a surveillance program against the Arab American community living in the United States. It was ostensibly targeting Arab immigrants, visa holders, but it eventually also targeted US citizens of Arab heritage, including one of the main characters in the book, Abdeen Jabara, who was surveilled not just for months, but for years, and eventually became the first US citizen to be surveilled by the National Security Agency.

25 years after 9/11, is Islamophobia in the US at an all-time high? — Stateside with Kai and Carter

The first US citizen?

Yes. At least the first that the NSA has acknowledged.

I think that bringing up the 1967 war is really interesting. One of the threads in the book that you bring up a lot is how the United States’ growing relationship with Israel shaped political attitudes towards Arabs in the United States.

Absolutely. There was this point in which Arabs became racialized in the United States, and that really has to do with the Israel-Palestine conflict. The lens through which the US has seen Palestine and eventually Muslims has been national security. So when we talk about the surveillance that happened after 1967 and we talk about surveillance of Muslims that happened in the 90s as well as after 9/11, they’re all seen through the lens of national security and terrorism. That is a common thread that has not just connected this larger history, but also rationalized this growing Islamophobia that we see today. There is no way to contend with Islamophobia in this country if we don’t contend with our policy towards Israel-Palestine.

It seems like the US government was targeting Arab Americans and then that targeting expanded to encompass all Muslims. How did that happen?

The 80s was a really interesting time.

For many reasons outside the scope of this conversation. Leg warmers, for instance.

Yes, many many reasons. Maybe the best decade, who knows. But a strange decade, nonetheless.

Dozens of protesters gather near the White House during a demonstration against Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to Washington DC on 28 July 2026. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images

After the Soviet Union fell, the biggest enemy that the US believed it faced was Islamic terrorism. Granted, this did not come out of nowhere. There were actually attacks by Islamic terrorists against the US. But what the US did do was start thinking of terrorism as an abstract idea. That actually goes back to Israel and Netanyahu himself, who really insisted and encouraged this idea of terrorism, not as a tactic that groups used or even states used, but as an end unto itself – that militant groups did terrorism because they were evil. After the Soviet Union fell, as this definition of terrorism became more broad, what we saw in the 90s was this conflation of terrorism with Islamist groups. I remember speaking with one former FBI agent who was actually a police officer in 1995 after the Oklahoma City bombing, and he told me that he was taking a master’s program in national security threats and learning about the term jihad. When the OKC bombing happened, his first thought was, “Oh, this is probably the Muslim terrorists.”

It was not. It was a white guy.

It was a white guy who was an army veteran. But that response was not uncommon. Actually, a lot of media outlets immediately said this looks to be the work of Arab terrorists or Middle Eastern terrorists. There was already a narrative brewing by the mid-90s that suggested that if there is going to be terrorism in the United States, it’s going to come from Muslims. This was the same lens through which the Nixon administration had viewed possible threats coming from the Arab American community. But by the 1990s, the US government thought those threats would come from the much broader Muslim community.

There are various reasons for that. One is because political Islam was rising; people were becoming more visibly Muslim in the United States. Also, the 1990 immigration law actually allowed a lot more immigrants to come into the United States, many of whom were Muslims. At the same time, Muslims were really strengthening their political voice and their social voice. Even though Palestine as an issue might have died down for the American public at large, a lot of Muslim communities were fundraising for Palestinians abroad. All to say that Palestine has been a throughline, even in the 90s.

Now that you have charted out this history of Islamophobia, where would you say we are today with Islamophobia?

Ten years ago, when I even got the seeds of this book idea, I thought I was going to write something that was looking back in history. I am astonished today to be living in a world in which the vitriol against Muslims is not just accepted, but is so violent and so aggressive. And it is so widespread.

Florida and Texas have both designated the Council on American-Islamic Relations as a terrorist organization. What does that move signal to you?

Cair remains a significant institution in American Muslim life in the sense that it is not just nationwide and massive, but it helps protect Muslim rights. It helps record hate crimes against Muslims and Arabs. I always thought that at some point the US government and Cair would reconcile, but these moves by Texas, by Florida, really suggest to me that they are trying to push out Islamic institutions like Cair and really trying to vilify them, to shut them down.

Left to right: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Abdul El-Sayed and Bernie Sanders greet the crowd after El-Sayed’s speech at the People v the Powerful rally in Detroit, Michigan, on 18 July 2026. Photograph: Sarah Rice/Getty Images

How do you think Islamophobia is playing into politics now, particularly when we look at the rhetoric employed against a new generation of Muslim politicians such as Zohran Mamdani and Abdul El-Sayed?

RA: It is incredible that the rhetoric really harkens back to a time of suspicion of Muslims after 9/11. This idea that [Abdul El-Sayed] might have terrorist affiliations, which is exactly what law enforcement was worried about regarding Muslim communities [in the 90s]. Or that he has nefarious aims, which is exactly what anti-Muslim hate groups were saying back in 2009, 2010. Islamophobia has become a feature of American politics.

Why do you think Islamophobia is so bad at this moment, so pervasive and out in the open?

RA: I think there are a lot of factors at play. After 7 October [2023], we saw the US give full-hearted support to Israel as it basically committed genocide in Gaza. That led to not just outcry among Muslims and Arabs, but also a lot of the wider American public. Political opinion and public opinion on this has shifted dramatically in the last two years. What happened after 9/11 was that there was a merging, a national consensus on our fight against terrorists. The public was behind the Bush administration. The media was behind the Bush administration. We don’t have that consensus today. We actually have a huge gap between public opinion on this matter and what policymakers are doing and saying [about Israel’s war on Gaza]. At the same time, we are seeing a rise of Muslim policymakers in this country. This is creating a perfect storm in which, because there isn’t really that much to push back on – even the progressive policies that Abdul El-Sayed and Zohran Mamdani espouse are backed by the American public – what is being used is racism and Islamophobia. I think it has become a weapon.

So many of the tools that were created in the wake of 9/11 to target Muslims, like the Department of Homeland Security itself, are now being used against other groups of people too, like Latino immigrants. What has it been like for you to see these tools expanded and deployed this way?

RA: It’s chilling but not shocking. I think any civil rights lawyer and any activist who was paying attention to how these laws were being used against Muslims knew immediately that this was going to happen. It’s not just that these laws are in the books and are able to be used so readily but also they’re effective because our definition of terrorism has expanded so much. When the Bush administration launched its “war on terror” it did a very, very bad job of actually defining what terrorism was.

Which was: what we were at war against.

Yes. We did not know who the enemy was and so the enemy morphed over the years to become Muslims. But it also morphed into anyone who disagreed with the US government. We kept expanding the authority and the power of the executive branch, and US government to constantly use the phrase national security to justify a lot of things, including eventually in the supreme court with the Muslim ban. What we have now is an executive that has expansive powers. We have a broad definition of terrorism. We have laws in the books that have been fine-tuned, but that are still vague. And we have an administration that has decided that its enemies are leftists, anti-ICE activists, anyone [Donald Trump] considers part of Antifa.

Thirty years ago, we would say we have a crazy president, but at least we have checks and balances. What’s happened over the last 25 years is we have expanded the ability and the authority of the executive branch to launch its “war on terror” abroad or at home.

• Seasons of Fury by Rozina Ali is out now via Crown Publishing Group

The rubble of the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001 in New York. 11 September 2026 will mark the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania (Alexandre Fuchs/AFP)

The 9/11 Memorial & Museum has preserved almost everything.

Seventy feet beneath Ground Zero are burnt-out fire trucks, mangled steel beams, firefighters’ helmets, survivors’ watches, and the final messages left by passengers aboard the hijacked planes.

Visitors can watch the towers being struck from several angles and listen to the voices of those on the hijacked planes who knew they were unlikely to make it out alive.

Ahead of the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, which killed 2,977 people in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania, I visited the museum to examine the story it tells of that day – and what it omits.

Even the most carefully managed narratives can contain details that quietly subvert it. 

I was looking forward to being surprised, given that 9/11 is among the most consequential events of the 21st century.

The retainer wall inside the 9/11 museum (MEE)

But the historical context and global consequences of what transpired that day are in short supply.

Those who may have come to the museum to understand why such an incident would occur in the first place are likely to leave with a very truncated and dubious version of history and the present day. 

Funding ‘terrorists’

In its narration of the attacks of 11 September 2001, the museum says that these were carried out by “al-Qaeda – an international Islamist extremist terrorist network” founded in the 1980s whose aims include wanting to “overthrow governments in the Middle East, and elsewhere in the Muslim world, which do not strictly enforce a religiously sanctioned political and social order”.

“Attacks against the United States were intended to reduce American support for many of these governments; US support was viewed by al-Qaeda as a major obstacle to creating a global order under Islamic authority,” the museum says.

Unlike the exhaustive reconstruction of 9/11, these details are sparse and intentionally obtuse.

“As part of the Cold War – the struggle between the Soviet Union and the United States – the US supported the Afghan rebellion by funnelling money and arms through Pakistan. The CIA provided money to recruit Afghans but did not directly fund foreign militants,” one of the captions at the museum reads.

This description is evasive. Washington deliberately channelled funds via Pakistan as a means to preserve plausible deniability.

Instead of explaining the statecraft, it became part of it.

A brick from Osama Bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan (MEE)

Whereas the museum had the opportunity to examine how the US-backed war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan helped create the infrastructure and conditions from which al-Qaeda emerged, it chose to foreground al-Qaeda’s religious ideology as a principal explanation for its militancy.

In so doing, it became another vessel of Islamophobia.

The global ‘war on terror’

The museum also has very little to say about the so-called global “war on terror”. 

The attacks of 9/11 took place on the morning of a particular day in 2001, but the wars launched in response lasted more than 20 years.

They killed nearly a million people and led to the displacement of 37 million people across the globe.

The attacks of 11 September 2001 became the pretext for a vast expansion of surveillance across American society, directed particularly at Muslims. 

There was the use of black sites for torture and documented abuse at detention facilities like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.

In the US, the events of 9/11 were used to turn immigration into a matter of national security, leading to the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). 

Even entering the museum felt like a trip to the airport. 

On entering the lobby, I was directed to one of those large cylindrical booths that one typically encounters when travelling today.

I removed my belongings, including my belt, and raised my hands as the body scanner swung by. Still unconvinced, the security guard conducted a gentle frisk to see if I had concealed anything in my back pocket. 

I should note that not everyone was asked to go through the cylindrical booths. Others were directed to general metal detectors. 

In this way, the museum may not have needed to say much about the legacy of 9/11.

It was a living example of its excesses.  

And so while the museum meticulously gives names, faces and voices to those killed in America, those killed in America’s response remain nameless and faceless.

It was fitting that almost none of the visitors I saw were people of colour.

A staff member told me he had reservations about the lack of any portrayal of the global war on terror. He didn’t want to say more. 

Among the museum’s honorary trustees is former US President George W Bush, who presided over the beginning of that campaign. 

The museum felt like a time capsule  – with a $36 entry ticket – a place where an old story was still being sold to muster confusion and hatred, while above, an entirely new world was taking shape.

In the real world, the official story of 9/11 is now often treated by a younger public with derision, and in memes, and is seen as a pretext for war and global extraction.

As I walked through the museum and looked at the exhibit dignifying the lives of thousands of people who died that day, I thought about the nameless and faceless people who died in Afghanistan and Iraq.

When I read about how dust storms from the collapse of the towers had infiltrated lungs and caused disease, I thought about the people of Gaza, who have endured around 78 percent of their homes and buildings being razed to the ground with US weaponry and political backing. 

These were two large towers that collapsed to the ground in New York City. The city had to remove 1.8 million tonnes of debris. 

In New York, more people subsequently died from related diseases, including blood and lung cancers, than the actual attacks themselves. On 8 September, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani released 170,000 pages of previously undisclosed records on air quality following the attack, showing New York City officials knew conditions around Ground Zero made it unsafe to breathe.

In the Gaza Strip, it is an entire 365-square-kilometre enclave covered in plumes of smoke and dust, with few medical supplies, clean water or aid. The United Nations estimates that “more than 61 million tonnes of debris will require clearing” in Gaza. 

In this aerial view, People walk amid the destruction in Gaza City in the northern Gaza Strip on October 11, 2025, a day after a ceasefire took effect (AFP)

I thought about a US military judge ruling just days earlier who concluded that statements made to the FBI by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, could not be used at trial because they were tainted by the torture and abuse he had endured in CIA custody. His trial is set to begin on 5 June 2028 – nearly 25 years after his arrest.

The museum’s method of retelling the story of the attack and its failure over the past decade to include the so-called global war on terror in its curation made it feel like part of the larger enterprise of war-making in America.

The trauma had a purpose. It was to keep visitors numb, or busy shopping.

“Thank you for visiting the museum,” an usher says as visitors exit the escalator to the ground floor.

He reminded us all to visit the museum store, where patrons could buy 9/11 magnets, T-shirts, American flags, and “Never Forget” mugs made in Thailand.

‘Reflecting absence’

At ground level, alongside the museum, two giant square pools make up the 9/11 memorial. 

On exiting the museum, I returned to the memorial, where hundreds continued to gather to reflect, take photos or just catch a glimpse of the historic site. 

Here, water cascades down the sides of a wall before streaming and disappearing down another square deep in the pool. 

Around the pools, the names of those who were killed on that day are cut into the wall.

These two striking artworks, named ‘Reflecting Absence ‘, were unveiled in 2011. 

Michael Arad, the architect of the 9/11 memorial, said he imagined “two voids tearing open a surface of water and the river failing to fill it up”.

This image, he added, captured “a sense of rupture and continued absence”. 

Water drips down the square and into another opening, as if entering a void.

The metaphor is powerful, but maybe not as the designers originally intended.

It felt as if the memorial asked us not to forget the void. The museum, however, appeared to pull us all further into it.

For many from diaspora communities, news coverage of their homelands or the lack of it is often a source of frustration and anger. 

At the Muslim Women’s Coalition’s Diaspora Trauma Workshop last month, Munther Barakat, Psy.D., a clinical psychologist and director of Behavioral Health for Aurora Health Care, discussed the harm biased or neglectful media cause immigrant communities and suggested media literacy as an antidote. 

How Western media gets it wrong

Barakat cited content analyses of Western media’s coverage of Gaza that showed an absence of the Palestinian perspective and an erasure of context. 

“They don’t use the word ‘occupation’ or ‘blockade,’ he said. “They refuse to acknowledge a history before Oct. 7. It becomes the starting point, and the background isn’t considered.” 

Barakat noted two keys to understanding how Western media misrepresents international news: framing and agenda-setting. Framing tells an audience how to think about a situation. It is the process of highlighting certain aspects of a reality and omitting others. Just as in photography, a journalist may zoom in on one example, excluding countless others, distorting the reality of the situation. Scholars use framing theory to explain how the selective presentation, emphasis and organization of information shape an audience’s interpretation and understanding of an issue. 

Media framing frequently relies on and incorporates stereotypes, which reinforce societal prejudices, he said. “Not only in mainstream media, but also in the entertainment industry, if there’s an Arab or Muslim character, they’re always portrayed in a negative light,” Barakat noted. “Palestinians are almost always framed as the aggressors.”

Framing also influences journalists’ word choice, he added. For example, “the word ‘self-defense’ is specifically given to Israel and never used for the Palestinians and their resistance.”

For a detailed example of how U.S. media used a “war on terror” framework to downplay, obscure and repackage Israel’s campaign of extermination of the Palestinians, see media analyst Adam H. Johnson’s data-driven research in his 2026 book How to Sell a Genocide. (The Islamic Resource Center Book Club is currently discussing How to Sell a Genocide at its meeting at 7 p.m. Monday, Sept. 14.)

Agenda-setting, on the other hand, tells audiences what to think about. Through selection and placement, a news organization tells us a news event is important. For people from Sudan, where the world’s largest humanitarian and displacement crisis is underway, the absence of media attention is hurtful, Barakat said. U.S. media coverage of the Sudanese Civil War that began in April 2023 is widely described as abysmal and severely disproportionate to the scale of the humanitarian catastrophe. 

Media distortions of reality cause harm

“Bias coverage and no coverage both impact diaspora communities in very negative ways, but different ways, psychologically,” Barakat said. “In bias coverage, misrepresentation is felt as a threat. Victims of bias coverage may experience chronic anger and moral injury. They become hypervigilant, checking the news and wanting to correct other people’s opinions. Or they experience social stigma, adding to the need to constantly correct the misrepresentations. There’s a chronic defensiveness of trying to defend your perspective because it is being displayed in a biased manner.

Moral injury is the lasting psychological, social and spiritual distress that occurs when a person commits, witnesses or fails to prevent an act that violates their core beliefs. When a member of a diaspora community watches their homeland being bombed, they are aware their taxes are funding the harm against their people, Barakat said. “We feel our behavior somehow contradicts our morals. There is a sense of shame and helplessness, difficulty in feeling joy or sometimes an over-identification with suffering.”

Neglectful media, on the other hand, make people feel invisible, Barakat said.  “If I’m not being covered, am I important? If no one is talking about us, do we matter? Nobody is acknowledging their experiences. There’s a collective loss of worth. They feel abandoned; there’s a sense of despair.”

Another important impact of bias or neglectful news coverage is on U.S. policy and public opinion. As Johnson argues in How to Sell a Genocide, “the genocide could not have been sustained without the active, sustained complicity of the U.S. media.”

Media literacy is the antidote

Media-literate individuals understand that media is not a reflection of reality but is constructed from a certain point of view. Scholars have long emphasized the importance of media literacy in democracies. It not only enables us to be critical consumers of news, but also to engage as citizens more effectively.

In July, the European Parliament adopted a resolution on a new strategy for media literacy and digital learning, signaling awareness of the strong connection between media literacy and citizens’ engagement in democracy. Its purpose: to strengthen democracy.

In 2025, Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction adopted Wisconsin Standards for Information Technology Literacy. “In today’s interconnected, digital world, information and technology literacy is not optional—it is essential,” the introduction to the Standards says. “We believe that information and technology literacy is foundational to lifelong learning, civic engagement, college and career readiness, and personal empowerment.”

“It’s something I think is extremely lacking in our society,” Barakat said. “We’re so easily influenced by media because of the lack of media literacy. Many of us are not asking enough questions when we’re consuming media.”

Barakat suggested we begin developing our media literacy by asking the following questions when we view, listen or read media:

• Who is the author of this message?
• What’s the history of their perspective?
• What’s their background?
• What techniques are being used to influence me?
• What is missing in this report?
• How might other people interpret these facts differently?

Luxury weddings. Constant romance. Perfect husbands and wives. “Relationship goals.” And the expectation that a happy marriage should always feel happy. Scroll through Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, or any social media platform today, and marriage can begin to look almost magical.

We see beautifully decorated homes, surprise flowers, expensive anniversary dinners, matching outfits, romantic vacations, thoughtful gifts, and couples laughing together in perfectly edited videos. There is nothing inherently wrong with any of these things. The problem begins when we start comparing our real marriages to someone else’s carefully selected moments.

Social media can quietly teach us to believe that a successful marriage must look a certain way, and for Muslims, this can be particularly dangerous when those expectations begin to replace the Islamic understanding of marriage.

Allah gives us a very different picture of what marriage is meant to provide. In Surah Ar-Rum, Allah says, “And of His signs is that He created for you from yourselves mates that you may find tranquility in them; and He placed between you affection and mercy” (Qur’an 30:21).

Notice what Allah highlights: tranquility, affection, and mercy. He does not describe marriage as a life of luxury, constant excitement, or uninterrupted happiness. He describes something much deeper. Marriage is meant to become a place of sakinah, where two people can find comfort and security, and a relationship built upon affection and mercy.

One of the first expectations social media has dramatically changed is the idea that a wedding must be extraordinary. Today, weddings can easily become visual productions. The venue must be impressive, the decorations must be spectacular, the clothes must be luxurious, the photography must look cinematic, and every moment must be worthy of posting. It is easy to start believing that the more beautiful and expensive the wedding, the more successful the marriage will be.

But a wedding lasts for a day, while marriage is the life that comes afterward. There is nothing wrong with celebrating a nikah beautifully or sharing happiness with family and friends, but when appearances become more important than the actual responsibilities of marriage, priorities have shifted. A couple can spend enormous amounts of money creating a wedding that looks perfect while beginning their married life under financial pressure.

Another couple may have a simple nikah and a modest celebration but build a deeply loving and peaceful home. Which marriage is more successful? The one that photographs better? Islam teaches us to look beyond appearances. When the Prophet ﷺ spoke about choosing a spouse, he mentioned qualities such as wealth, family status, beauty, and religion, but directed believers toward religion as the quality that should ultimately be prioritized. The person you marry matters far more than the wedding you have.

Another expectation social media has created is that a good spouse should be romantic all the time. Online, marriage can look like one continuous romantic experience. Every morning begins with affection, every anniversary involves a surprise, every disagreement is resolved beautifully, and every ordinary moment becomes a romantic memory. But real marriage is not a two-minute relationship montage.

Real marriage involves tired mornings, bills, work, household responsibilities, misunderstandings, different personalities, family pressures, parenting, illness, and emotional exhaustion. Sometimes love looks like flowers or a surprise dinner, but sometimes love looks like washing the dishes because your spouse is exhausted.

Sometimes love is an affectionate message, while at other times it is simply remaining patient when you are frustrated. This is why the Qur’anic concept of rahmah, or mercy, is so important. Allah did not only mention affection between spouses; He mentioned affection and mercy. There will be moments when affection comes naturally, but there will also be moments when mercy is what keeps you gentle with one another.

A marriage cannot survive on romance alone. It requires compassion, patience, forgiveness, responsibility, and the willingness to continue treating your spouse with kindness even during difficult seasons.

Social media has also encouraged another unrealistic expectation: the belief that our spouse should be perfect. We see videos of the endlessly patient husband, the emotionally intelligent wife, the spouse who always knows exactly what to say, the person who never forgets an important date, never loses their temper, communicates perfectly, and seems to understand their partner without explanation.

Eventually, we can begin looking for this imaginary person in our own marriages. But there is no perfect husband and no perfect wife. Marriage brings two imperfect human beings together. You will discover habits you did not notice before marriage. You will misunderstand one another. You will sometimes say the wrong thing. Your spouse will have weaknesses, and so will you. That does not necessarily mean you married the wrong person.

Sometimes it simply means you married a human being. The Sunnah teaches us to value character, faith, and good qualities rather than searching for an impossible standard of perfection. Social media, however, allows us to see the finished product without seeing the struggle behind it. We may see a loving husband on camera without seeing the difficult conversation the couple had the night before. We may see a smiling wife without seeing the exhaustion behind the smile. We have to remind ourselves that we should never compare our behind-the-scenes to someone else’s highlight reel.

Perhaps one of the most damaging expectations is the idea of “relationship goals.” The phrase sounds harmless, but it can slowly turn another person’s marriage into the measuring stick for our own. You see another couple traveling and suddenly your marriage feels boring. They buy a house and you feel behind. They have children and you begin questioning your own circumstances. They post romantic messages and you wonder why your spouse doesn’t express love in the same way. They celebrate an anniversary extravagantly and suddenly your own celebration feels inadequate.

Slowly, someone else’s marriage becomes the standard by which you judge your own. But social media gives us access to moments, not entire marriages. We don’t know their financial situation, their private struggles, their disagreements, their disappointments, or what happens when the camera is turned off. A couple may post one beautiful photograph from a holiday while privately dealing with serious difficulties.

Another couple may never post anything at all and have an extraordinarily loving marriage. Your marriage does not need to be Instagram-worthy to be meaningful. Some of the most precious moments in a marriage are the ones nobody else sees: the quiet conversation after Fajr, the meal prepared after a long day, the dua made for your spouse, the apology, the forgiveness, the private joke, or the sacrifice that nobody applauded. These moments may never become content, but they may be exactly what makes a marriage strong.

Perhaps the most dangerous expectation social media has created is the belief that marriage should make us happy all the time. We are constantly shown couples who appear to be enjoying every moment of life together, and it can become easy to believe that if we are frustrated, lonely, bored, or disappointed, something must be fundamentally wrong with our marriage. But marriage can bring enormous happiness while still containing difficult moments.

Life itself was never designed to be a continuous state of happiness. There will be financial difficulties, illness, grief, disagreements, parenting challenges, and seasons when one spouse has to carry more responsibility because the other is struggling. Islam does not describe marriage as an endless emotional high. Allah describes spouses as a source of tranquility, affection, and mercy. Tranquility is different from constant excitement.

A peaceful marriage may not always feel exciting. Sometimes it simply feels safe, stable, familiar, and comforting. Sometimes the greatest blessing is knowing that someone is beside you through the difficult seasons of life. The goal should not be to chase constant happiness but to build something good, meaningful, and pleasing to Allah.

So what should Muslims expect from marriage if social media has given us so many unrealistic expectations? Perhaps the answer is to return to the Qur’an. Allah gives us a beautiful framework: tranquility, affection, and mercy. These qualities require work. Tranquility means creating a home where your spouse feels safe. Affection means continuing to nurture love rather than assuming it will take care of itself.

Mercy means recognizing that the person beside you is imperfect, just as you are. Marriage is not about finding someone who perfectly completes your fantasy. It is about finding someone with whom you can build a life. And building a life requires patience, sacrifice, forgiveness, communication, responsibility, and faith.

The next time you see a couple online and think, “Why isn’t my marriage like that?” pause for a moment. You are looking at a few seconds of someone’s life, not their entire marriage. The next time you think, “My spouse doesn’t do these romantic things, so maybe they don’t love me,” ask yourself how your spouse might be showing love in ways that social media does not celebrate. Perhaps they work long hours to provide.

Perhaps they take care of responsibilities when you are exhausted. Perhaps they listen when you need someone to talk to. Perhaps they make sacrifices quietly. Perhaps they express love differently from the couples you see online. Love does not always look cinematic. Sometimes it looks ordinary, and ordinary can be beautiful.

There is a kind of marriage that will probably never go viral. It will not receive millions of views or become someone’s “relationship goals.” There will be no trending audio, perfect photoshoot, or carefully edited montage.

Instead, there will be two people waking up for Fajr, making dua for one another, disagreeing without humiliating each other, apologizing when they are wrong, forgiving one another, raising children, dealing with financial difficulties, supporting each other through illness, helping each other return to Allah after spiritual weakness, and growing older together. That marriage may never impress strangers on the internet, but it may be far closer to what Allah intended.

Social media will continue showing us perfect weddings, perfect couples, perfect homes, perfect anniversaries, and seemingly perfect lives. But we should never allow a perfectly edited image to make us dissatisfied with a real life. Your marriage does not have to look perfect. It has to be real, sincere, compassionate, and rooted in what pleases Allah. Perhaps the most beautiful marriage is not the one everyone envies online. It is the one that quietly brings two people closer to Allah.

Miliband emphasized that in banning imports from Israel’s West Bank settlements, the UK was not acting alone. The British foreign secretary noted that France and Canada will also “ban the import of goods from illegal settlements,” joining “the Netherlands, Ireland, Belgium, Spain and Norway—which have either banned goods or are in the process of doing so.”

Jean-Noël Barrot, France’s foreign affairs minister, wrote on social media that France is cutting off imports from illegal Israeli settlements “because the West Bank is on the brink of explosion: unchecked expansion of colonization in violation of international law, surge in violence perpetrated by extremist settlers against Palestinians, acts of terror denounced by the Israeli authorities themselves.”

“France cannot, through its trade, support a situation that threatens the security of Israelis and Palestinians alike, as well as peace and stability in the region,” Barrot wrote. “Europe must uphold the same imperative.”

In a joint statement on Tuesday, the foreign ministers of 12 nations—the UK, France, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, and Sweden—said that the situation in the West Bank is “rapidly deteriorating amid unprecedented levels of settler violence and settlement expansion, including the unacceptable decision to publish tenders for the E1 settlement project.”

The foreign ministers confirmed their “intention to introduce national and/or support European restrictions on trade in goods with settlements which are illegal under international law, or that they are actively considering these and other measures, in accordance with their national procedures.”

“In this regard, the UK, France, and Canada welcome the important action already taken by Ireland, Spain, the Netherlands, Norway, and Belgium, and will bring forward national measures to ban trade in settlement goods,” the statement continued. “The government of Israel must immediately halt the expansion of settlements and civilian administrative powers, ensure accountability for settler violence, and investigate allegations against Israeli forces.”

Advocates largely welcomed the governments’ announcements while stressing that they should be the starting point for more sweeping action to confront the Israeli government’s illegal annexation efforts in the West Bank and crimes against humanity across the Palestinian territories, including the decimated Gaza Strip.

“Today’s announcement is the result of many years of work by campaigners and Palestinians themselves fighting to end severe injustice,” said Nick Dearden, director of the UK-based advocacy group Global Justice Now. “We know this move will be very popular in Britain. But it must be just the beginning. How can we cooperate with a military guilty of the most serious abuses of international law? How can we trade with a country that stands accused of genocide at the world’s highest court?”

Omar Barghouti, co-founder of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, dismissed the UK government’s sanctions announcement as “largely performative,” but said they also “reflect the impact of relentless public pressure on the current government.”

“The UK is legally obliged to take serious measures to end its complicity with the State of Israel, not merely with the settlements, per the [International Court of Justice],” said Barghouti. “While Miliband says, ‘We will not acquiesce in the destruction of the two-state solution,’ he has not said how the UK will stop its active contribution to the Israeli-US led destruction of the international legal system and the drive towards a might-makes-right order.”

US and Israeli officials responded furiously to the UK’s sanctions announcement. Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s extremist national security minister, called for the closure of the British consulate in East Jerusalem, while Israel’s finance minister demanded the expulsion of the British ambassador.

Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel, characterized the UK’s trade ban as “discrimination against the Jewish people” and suggested that individual American states such as Florida could retaliate against the British government.

US Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.), a rabidly pro-Israel lawmaker and anti-Muslim bigot, wrote on social media that “Florida is one of Britain’s largest trading partners” and signaled that the state could move to boycott UK goods.