Sen. Tommy Tuberville reposted a photo of the September 11 attacks alongside an image of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who is Muslim, with the comment, “The enemy is inside the gates.”

Last week, I stood in the rotunda of San Francisco City Hall with Mayor Daniel Lurie, state and federal legislators, Muslim first responders, community leaders and allies of every background, gathered together for an iftar — the meal that breaks the daily fast during Ramadan. It was, in the truest sense, an American scene: People of different faiths and backgrounds choosing to show up for one another, to share a table, to mark something sacred together.

That iftar in San Francisco — the warmth in that rotunda, the ease of it, the sense of community across every kind of difference, and the way local, state, and national leaders showed up — is the America I believe in. It is also, increasingly, the America that certain members of Congress seem determined to dismantle.

Earlier this month, Rep. Andrew Ogles of Tennessee posted that “Muslims don’t belong in American society,” adding “pluralism is a lie.” 

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Rep. Randy Fine of Florida wrote in February that “the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one” and called for deporting them all. 

Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama reposted a photo of the September 11 attacks alongside an image of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who is Muslim. “The enemy is inside the gates,” Tuberville said in the post. 

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I recognize this playbook. I spent several years as a senior executive at News Corp., which owns Fox News, watching it get written one prime-time segment at a time. It was that depiction of Muslims and immigrants that ultimately led me to leave the company. Since then, however, what was once the province of sensational cable news has moved into Congress — and found a home there in part because too few people in either party have been willing to pay a real price to stop it.

Consider the basic math of what is happening. Ogles represents a congressional district that includes Nashville’s immigrant corridor, home to a majority of the city’s more than 40,000 Muslims. Fine called for the deportation of all Muslims while representing a district where the largest city has been home to a mosque for nearly 40 years. Tuberville used September 11 as a political prop against a Muslim elected official while representing a state with an estimated 25,000 Muslim constituents.

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My family came to this country as refugees from Afghanistan in the early 1980s, settling first in New York and eventually in California, and the America we arrived in was not always a welcoming one. On many days, the message was delivered without subtlety: You are tolerated here, not embraced. You are present, but you do not belong.

Like generations of Americans before me, I spent years outrunning that feeling. I watched my parents build a life here from scratch. They poured everything into a country that had not yet fully decided it wanted them. And I watched that country, slowly but stubbornly, come around until my family not only became a part of the fabric of America but started to weave it.

That’s what makes these recent hateful remarks all the more disturbing. These Republican officials are talking about Americans, their own neighbors and constituents — people who pay taxes in their districts and have every legal and moral right to expect their elected representatives to speak for them, not against.

More than 100 members of Congress have mentioned Muslims or Islam in social media posts since the beginning of 2025, with two-thirds of those posts invoking radical Islam, Sharia law, extremism or terrorism, according to a Washington Post analysis. The Sharia-Free America caucus now counts 50 Republican members.

When Democrats have spoken up, too many have reached for the language of racism rather than Islamophobia, as if the distinction didn’t matter. Others have made empty threats of censure, posted the obligatory post on X and returned to business as usual with the very colleagues whose words are making Muslim Americans afraid to go to their mosques during one of the holiest times of the year.

Outrage that evaporates by the weekend is not outrage. It is cover.

Real people are bearing the cost — Muslim Americans across the country are being harassed at work, threatened outside mosques, targeted in schools, and their daily reality is made more dangerous every time an elected official posts a slur and faces no consequence for it.

I know from experience what it does to a child to grow up in a country where powerful people openly question whether he deserves to be there. It teaches you to make yourself smaller, to speak more carefully, to apologize for your existence preemptively. It took my family decades to stop doing that — to stop shrinking and start claiming the full belonging that this country had always promised us.

The Muslim Americans in the crosshairs of this awful rhetoric should not have to earn their belonging by outlasting the people trying to take it from them.

To Muslim Americans, feeling that old familiar smallness: You belong here. Fully, without asterisk, without apology. Don’t let anyone — not a U.S. representative, not a senator, not a party that tweets in your defense and legislates in your absence — convince you otherwise.

Guest opinions in Open Forum and Insight are produced by writers with expertise, personal experience or original insights on a subject of interest to our readers. Their views do not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Chronicle editorial board, which is committed to providing a diversity of ideas to our readership.

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And to the members of Congress trafficking in this hatred: You are not the first people in this country’s history to build a political career on telling a minority community it doesn’t belong here. Not one of them is remembered well. We have outlasted every version of this before.

We will outlast you, too.

Joseph M. Azam is a lawyer, writer and policy adviser. He serves as board chair of the Afghan-American Foundation and was a senior executive at News Corp.

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