How would Democrats react if a GOP nominee for a lifetime appointment to the federal bench had not only served on an advisory board of an antisemitic organization but also donated thousands of dollars to its cause? What if that nominee also served on the board of an organization founded by a cop killer? And what if that person then conveniently forgot to inform the U.S. Senate about this association?
Well, meet Adeel Mangi, Joe Biden’s nominee for the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. He is guilty of all the above. And a number of Democrats are concerned. So, in The New York Times this week, columnist Lydia Polgreen defended Magi in an exceptionally misleading piece headlined “The Islamophobic Smear Campaign Dividing Democrats.”
The late Christopher Hitchens once correctly called “Islamophobia” a “stupid neologism” that “aims to promote criticism of Islam to the gallery of special offenses associated with racism.” These days, merely pointing out factual, if inconvenient, truths about a Muslim person will be cynically cast as Islamophobia.
Which brings me back to Polgreen, who notes that Magi has a “sterling legal education” and a “distinguished career at a high-profile private firm mixing corporate litigation with important pro bono work.” She goes on to argue that Magi has the “classic American story” of a man who grew up “in a poor country dreaming of a career as a lawyer and immigrated to the United States, where he ascended to the heights of his profession.”
Indeed, all of that seems
