Monday was national Muslim Advocacy Day on Capitol Hill, but in Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s office, it was more like Ignore Your Muslim Constituents Day.
A total of 215 congressional offices opened their doors to Muslims who traveled to Washington to meet with their representatives, members of the U.S. Council of Muslim Organizations said at a Monday evening press conference.
But 14 Texas constituents were unable to get a meeting with anyone from Cruz’s office, despite repeated attempts over a period of weeks.
“During the initial onset of us requesting a meeting, we did get a response back,” said Alia Salem, one of the Cruz constituents. “They said, ‘We’re going to put you in touch with our Middle East policy adviser.’ We were kind of perplexed by that. … We’re Americans coming from Texas to talk about American issues.”
Salem felt her group was being stereotyped. “Once we affirmed that we’re not coming for that but for this — we’re coming for American Muslim issues, American issues in general — we didn’t hear back from them. And this was over the span of weeks, so we’re talking about multiple emails, more than five emails being sent, multiple phone calls, and the latest one being on Saturday, telling them we are coming, you haven’t scheduled a meeting with us, there will be 20 of us coming. … So it’s not like we didn’t give them a chance, repetitive chance after chance.”
“Once we got there, we were given the excuse by interns: “They’re all tied up in meetings,’” Salem said.
The group held meetings in other Texas Republicans’ offices, including with staff in Rep. Joe Barton’s office, and with Sen. John Cornyn’s staffers. Salem said no other Texas office declined a meeting.
Meanwhile, Cruz foreign policy adviser and notorious Islamophobe Frank Gaffney published an op-ed in The Hill headlined “Muslim Brotherhood Day on Capitol Hill” — a reference to the Islamist movement in the Middle East that forms the ideological basis for various Sunni Arab political parties.
Gaffney wrote that the organizers of Monday’s events were “associated with Islamic supremacism,” and called them “the latest in a long series of front organizations associated with, and working to advance, the agenda of the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States.”
Some of the Muslim Texans noted a change in Cruz’s behavior since he became a leading Republican presidential candidate. “We met with the senator two years ago for the first time,” Mustafaa Carroll said. “We met with his office last year. It was cordial. We had no problems. But the election, or the temper of the election, is what’s causing the problems.”
In his presidential campaign, Cruz has made Muslims a frequent rhetorical punching bag, suggesting police surveillance for Muslim American neighborhoods and arguing against letting Syrian refugees come to the United States.
Cruz’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Mazen Mokhtar, executive director of the Muslim American Society of Dallas, said it was “an alarming development” that a presidential candidate would express “bigotry against their own constituents, essentially.” And he criticized Cruz for hiring Gaffney.
Related:
- Ted Cruz’s New Foreign Policy Team Makes Him as Extreme as Donald Trump
- Cruz’s Smearing of Syrian Refugees Echoes Attacks on Cuban Refugees During His Father’s Era
- GOP Lawmakers Tout Religious Liberty, Duck Questions About Discriminating Against Muslims
Top photo: Cruz campaigning in New York City on April 6.
Not only is Cruz a danger he’s also a coward hiding behind the skirts of ‘rhetoric’ designed to germinate the poisonous seed of hate.
btw: How many centuries does it take to graduate from being a hyphenated American to the full blown one word signifier of ‘American’ with all the rights afforded to that status.
So Muslim Americans are ‘American’ enough when they vote for him but after that they get disrespected like they are the enemy? If this guy cannot be counted upon to do the job he already has, how does he expect anybody to believe he would do the job he is vying to get?
Not someone we should ever call Mr. President.
What do you expect from that asshole?
Well said. I can’t think of anything better to call him. What a freak.
What else should we expect from someone who is being advised by Frank Gaffney ? It probably has less to do with his Christianity than his advisor.
Kind of what is expected from a medieval christian fascist. Cruz would make a great president of the KKK.
NY gives ted cruz a badda bing badda bang badda
Z – E – R – O
The supposition of this article is unreasonable. How can Cruz’s staff be expected to meet with his Muslim constituents? Why can’t the writers of this piece simply understand that Cruz’s staff is far too busy meeting with climate change denial nut jobs, and Coal Industry lobbyists in working to remove coal regulations?
Cruz posits that his staunch effort toward removal of our coal regulations is humanitarian in nature as the soot from the coal along with its resulting CO2 emissions into the environment will end the suffering of our youth as they meet an early demise. They will then no longer be subject to a yoke of indentured servitude not seen since before the American Revolution in the form having to pay off student loan debt of $1.5 trillion.
lol. i know you are being facetious yet i know you are also telling the truth. Somewhere in the back of that despot cruz’s psychotic brain your facetiousness is his reality.
And the truth sets us free.
Let’s not forget that Cruz’s genius plan also helps solve the Social Security problem. When future generations die well before they are eligible for benefits, Social Security will remain solvent.
Cruz really has the right idea.
Social Security is not something we need to be ashamed about using as it is our money invested for us in the first place. When they took our money and made it part of the budget and invested it in tax cuts for the rich and wars they pulled off a major scam.
It would be like us attempting to make a withdraw from our most conservative savings account and the bank telling us “sorry we lost your money on some risky investments that we were not allowed to make for you”.
Fortunately Cruz got crushed in New York. If the current polls are right, Trump will thump him in Pennsylvania too, and that will be the end. Unless, of course, the republicans engineer something to deny Trump his well earned nomination.
I guess we have gotten to the point where we practice the same policies at home as abroad: calling for free and fair elections, then doing dirty tricks when our stooge doesn’t get elected.
I dunno if the lesser of two evils got so scintillatingly exiting as the choice between the sexist and racist
And, I mean, we’re talking about JUST A HAIR splitting them down the middle between who’s more sexist and who’s more racist
i do not believe that Donald Trump is a racist. I do believe that Ted Cruz is a psychotic megalomaniac.
I agree. Trump is just going along to get votes because he knows how crazy people are about people from the ME .
Basically I think he has a head on his shoulders and can recognize
BS propaganda.
Cruz is plainly nuts, a religious freak.
My comment was not meant to imply that I would be voting for any of them. I will vote for Jill Stein, like I did in 2012. Some of you will say that is wasting my vote, but tell me, how is your way working out for us?
Jeff, it’s always an excellent use of your vote to vote your conscience.
Seeing Cruz in politics at all proves, PROVES, beyond any shadow of any doubt just exactly how corrupted by wealth, power, and religious stupidity politics has become. It is these kinds of politicians heinous actions while in office that create the horrors of man’s inhumanity to everything that is alive. These miscreants we put in charge of our lives are the originators of the evils that are done every second to the people of this planet by the wealthy and powerful corporations that now own our world lock stock and barrel! Cruz is pure pond scum!
Cruz has a comeback for your accusation about him being pond scum. Cruz will tell you and his flock, while raising a hand and finger pointing to his god in the rafters above the ceiling, that (his) god made pond scum and that you have no idea how good pond scum really is.
Cruz should cruise on back from whence he came.
you think TRUMP is bad news? Cruz is another species altogether..
reporter President Cruz, what is that man doing behind bars for so long?
cruz Well it’s pretty obvious he is a very bad thief. He stole a calculator.
reporter And why is that fellow on death row?
cruz He stole 2 calculators.
reporter And we heard that you have a young lady in guantanamo who is rumored to being tortured on a rack. Any truth to that?
cruz It’s all true i’m proud to say. That so called young lady isn’t just a young lady. She happens to be one of them gay creatures. And from what the old testament prescribes, i’m being very good to her.
reporter I believe the supreme court would prohibit that kind of thing wouldn’t they?
cruz i once worked for the supreme court and i can tell you like i have told my following before, there is a higher law than the supreme court. So please, don’t insult me.
Exactly right. If Clinton or Trump becomes president, I will just hunker down. Hell, I’ve been hunkered down for fifteen years now. But if Cruz gets in, I am out of here, no doubt about it. His beliefs make Osama bin Laden look like a Unitarian.
you aint the only one. Why just today i heard that congressman king said that if cruz became prez, king would drink cyanide. No matter what disapproval i iterate for king, he is honest about his pov and is funny as heck. And he is one of the few republicans with a pulse.
Cruz is the worst. I wonder if a higher law could put an end to him?
A presidential candidate was busy? Weird. For a comparison, any idea how many meetings Bernie Sander’s office managed to hold that day?
cruz is not a christian, he is a crusader. consider it a warning.
Someone on his staff could have met with this group. They aren’t campaigning.
Uh, you misunderstood. These Muslims from Cruz’s home state weren’t able to get a meeting even with anyone from Cruz’s senate staff. Cruz’s senate staff doesn’t run his presidential campaign, so it doesn’t make any sense to assume (as you do) that Cruz’s presidential campaign would make Cruz’s staff too busy to meet constituents. All members of a senator’s Washington staff are paid a salary, which is 100% taxpayer-funded, to carry out work related to the senator’s duties in office, and they’re not supposed to spend their government-funded jobs working on their boss’s election campaign. The headquarters of Cruz’s presidential campaign are in Houston, not in Washington DC. When senators run for president, the presidential run typically takes up the vast majority of their time, and the only reason why their senate office gets some work is done is because the Washington staff are taking care of a lot of senate-related things while their boss is away. So yes, Cruz’s staff members definitely do have time to meet with constituents. And the excuse these Muslims were given — “They’re all tied up in meetings” — doesn’t hold water. I bet Cruz either was worried that having his staff even meet Muslims would stoke paranoia on the part of some of the voters Cruz is trying to appeal to, or else was worried that anything his staff said to Muslims, whether positive or negative, would only exacerbate the problems Cruz has with the gap between his positions and human rights.
It’s a wonder that the Republican party exists. Politicians have always pandered to their base during a primary contest, but this level of extremism is fatal in a general election.
The Republicans need to look no further back than Mitt Romney and primary season gaffs that eventually doomed his election bid. What are they expecting this time, make it worse and not carry a single state? Loose control of both the house and senate?
I may start to stockpile Republican memorabilia, because they will be out of business come November.
We can only hope that the Republican Debacle trickles down to the legislative halls and rid the halls of the likes Mitch Mc Connel.
KJ hillarious
John K.
old mitch has lived beyond his mental life. He is treating the senate as his rest home and will insist on it being his hospice.
I’ve been hearing this for years now but it never seems to happen because the totally corrupt and feckless dems keep coming to their rescue. Now they’re at it again.
the republicans are more criminal minded than any other organized crime operation and that they havent split up or gone out of business is only a testament to their corruption of money dependency from their pimps.