Talk about regression. Nearly two centuries after Massachusetts brought an end to Protestant privilege and elitism in the commonwealth by ending a state-imposed tax on communities used to pay the pastors of Congregational churches in 1833, Beacon Hill lawmakers seek to establish Muslims as a privileged class in the state.
Senate bill S.2134 would create a permanent, taxpayer-supported commission exclusively for “people who practice Islam,” grant it the power to recommend American Muslims for appointive government positions at every level, and charge it with studying and combating “Islamophobia”—a term that functions as a shield against legitimate criticism of Islamic doctrine and practice. In short, lawmakers in a state that once rejected special religious status for Protestants are now preparing to accord Muslims privileged status.
Let the coddling come to an end.
Advocates for the bill argue that passage of the bill—which is likely to die in committee—is “much-needed” and “fills a gap” without providing any proof of discrimination against Muslims in the public square in Massachusetts. In September 2024, one of the bill’s sponsors, Jamie Eldridge (D-Middlesex and Worcester), hosted a forum on Islamophobia awareness at the Islamic Society of Boston in Wayland that failed to deliver the goods.
As previously reported in Focus on Western Islamism (FWI), the event offered a revealing glimpse into just how thin the evidence for systemic anti-Muslim animus in the commonwealth actually is.
Speakers, far from documenting exclusion or hostility in the public square, repeatedly described a Massachusetts that has gone out of its way to integrate Muslim citizens into civic and professional life. Subheen Razzaqi, a social studies teacher at Newton North High School with a graduate degree from Harvard, recounted how Newton administrators accelerated their hiring process by three months and extended a job offer within 24 hours once she mentioned she had accepted a position in nearby Lexington.
Razzaqi’s primary example of “Islamophobia”? Non-Muslim teenage boys eating large sandwiches in front of their fasting Muslim classmates during Ramadan. The Muslim students themselves, she acknowledged, responded with humor—“That really sucks, but oh my God! Isn’t that funny?”—yet Razzaqi framed the episode as a microaggression.
Leena Muntasser, then a student at Lincoln-Sudbury High School, complained that teachers and classmates sometimes confused her with other hijabi students, including one with a darker complexion. She also expressed irritation that a teacher assigned Khaled Hosseini’s novel A Thousand Splendid Suns, which depicts the oppression of women under Islamist rule in Afghanistan, and that the same teacher presented Western commentary on the hijab alongside Islamic sources. “This is not a political debate,” Muntasser insisted. “Hijab is a religious belief.” In other words, even criticism from secular Muslims like Hosseini is off the table.
Mariam Ibrahimi of Northborough described the fear she felt as a 19-year-old hijab-wearing candidate for the Lincoln-Sudbury Regional School Committee in 2021. To illustrate the hostility she faced, she read an online comment criticizing her as a proponent of “indoctrination/social justice, BLM” liberalism. That remark, however uncivil, said nothing about Islam. As it turns out, the entire Northborough Select Board endorsed her candidacy—an unprecedented step—and residents carried signs for her on Election Day. “People were supporting a young person … a hijab-wearing Muslim girl,” she said, “and that was incredibly exciting to see.”
These are not the testimonies of a persecuted minority locked out of opportunity; they are accounts of professional advancement, civic endorsement, and the ordinary frictions of life in a pluralistic society. The advocates of S.2134 inflate these frictions into a crisis requiring a permanent, taxpayer-supported commission with the power to recommend Muslims for government appointments and to police “Islamophobia.” If the strongest case that can be made for special status is sandwich-eating during Ramadan and the occasional—and unintentional—misidentification of veiled students, then Massachusetts is not witnessing an epidemic of bigotry; it is witnessing an attempt to manufacture Muslim privilege by Eldridge and his allies.
The reality is that “Islamophobia” is what Christopher Hitchens rightly described as a “stupid neologism” that “aims to promote criticism of Islam to the gallery of special offenses associated with racism.” Whether Muslims and their allies like it or not, Islamic beliefs and practices are subject to debate and criticism. Muslims, ex-Muslims, and non-Muslims are going to criticize the religion’s impact on the public square just the same way Baptists complained about Congregationalist privilege in Massachusetts in the 1800s, just as people like H.L. Mencken mocked Fundamentalist Protestants during and after the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925.
If H.L. Mencken were alive today, he’d be mocking Islamists seeking to re-establish the caliphate in the modern world. He’d condemn them for their misogynist teachings, their desire to police the public square, and their promotion of hostility toward gays and lesbians. He’d mock Islamist leaders for silencing dissent within the Muslim community. He would oppose official recognition from public officials that their faith is uniquely beyond criticism. And he’d be called an “Islamophobe” for his work.
Predictably, the bill offers no meaningful qualifications or safeguards to prevent the commission it creates from being influenced or overtaken by Islamist agitators. This is a big issue. One of the biggest boosters of the bill is Tahirah Amatul-Wadud, an Eldridge ally who serves as executive director and chief legal officer of the Massachusetts chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), an organization whose founding national director, Nihad Awad, met with Hamas members in a Philadelphia hotel room in 1993—a meeting recorded by the FBI—where he discussed portraying the Islamist campaign to destroy Israel as a liberationist cause palatable to American progressives and agreed to speak in support of “restor[ing] the ’48 land.”
After the October 7 massacre, Awad declared himself “happy to see people breaking the siege and throwing down the shackles of their own land and walk free into” Israel, called Gaza a “concentration camp,” and insisted that Israel, as an “occupying power,” had no right to defend itself. It’s bad enough that Eldridge is allying himself with a CAIR staffer; it’s even worse that he’s creating a pathway for the organization to have even greater influence on public life in Massachusetts.
This is blatantly, and embarrassingly, unconstitutional.
This is not the first time such legislation has appeared on Beacon Hill. In 2023, a nearly identical bill (S.1994/H.3052) sought to create an “American Muslim Commission” with the power to recommend Muslims for government appointments. The Middle East Forum launched a public campaign highlighting the measure’s constitutional problems under the Establishment Clause. Under pressure from MEF’s reporting and grassroots outreach, the legislation ultimately went nowhere.
Massachusetts attorney Karen Hurvitz, counsel for Education Without Indoctrination, put the constitutional problem with S.2134 in stark terms: “The Senators who proposed this legislation clearly do not understand the very basic principle, secured to all United States citizens by the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution, to be free from the merger of church and state. The First Amendment explicitly states that the government shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, and it applies to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment. This bill would create a permanent, state sanctioned commission, supported by taxpayers, whose very purpose is to recommend Muslims for government positions and advance legislation that prioritizes the interests of the Muslim community. This is blatantly, and embarrassingly, unconstitutional.”
John Hajjar, co-chair of the American Mideast Coalition for Democracy, was equally direct: “Why are our lawmakers advocating for adherents of one religion over all others and thereby discriminating against the vast majority of Bay Staters? This is just more evidence of the Left-Green alliance and now the shocking promotion of Islamism into the public policy of Massachusetts. It is also proof that Massachusetts lawmakers are way out of touch with the people they claim to represent.”
Simply put, Muslims do not need special treatment in Massachusetts or, for that matter, anywhere else in the United States. A few years ago, Tania Fernandes Anderson, a Muslim, was elected to the Boston City Council, serving until she was convicted and sentenced on federal corruption charges. Sumbul Siddiqui, a Muslim, is serving her third term as mayor of Cambridge. New York City has a Muslim mayor, as does Dearborn, Michigan. The city of Hamtramck, Michigan, is governed by a Muslim mayor (and an all-male) and all-Muslim City Council.
The upshot is that Muslims in the United States enjoy more rights and freedom than their co-religionists do in Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East and South Asia. The fact that they get pushback on how their faith is understood and practiced in the modern era is not proof of oppression. It is proof of America’s commitment to free expression and religious freedom.
Enough with the infantile treatment of Muslims in Massachusetts—and in the rest of the country. If they want to serve and lead their fellow citizens in the U.S., let them do what everyone else does in America—run for office, apply for posts, and let the chips fall where they may, just as they have in Cambridge, Dearborn, Hamtramck, and New York City. Let Muslims prove their worth to the U.S. republic not as a protected class, but as qualified, talented—and accountable—public officials.
Let the coddling come to an end.
