The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, today sent a formal letter to every member of the U.S. House of Representatives urging opposition to Representative Nancy Mace’s resolution to censure Representative Ilhan Omar. A vote on the resolution is expected to take place sometime later today.
In its letter, CAIR makes clear that the resolution is “not rooted in fact, but in bad faith.” The organization noted that Rep. Omar has repeatedly condemned the assassination of Charlie Kirk, describing it as “mortifying” and offering sympathy for his family. At no point did she celebrate, justify, or mock his death.
Instead, CAIR warned, Rep. Mace’s resolution represents a dangerous precedent of punishing lawmakers for words they never said while ignoring openly racist, Islamophobic, and genocidal rhetoric from other members of Congress.
“This censure resolution is not about accountability; it is about partisan cancel culture,” said CAIR Government Affairs Director Robert S. McCaw, who authored the letter. “Members of Congress should not try to silence their ideological opponents or strip committee assignments because they hold different views. That undermines the principles of free debate and distracts from real accountability for actual hate speech in Congress.”
For the past two years, Congress has repeatedly failed to hold other members accountable for real and documented hate speech and bigotry, like when:
- Rep. Randy Fine called Muslim colleagues “terrorists” and called for “nuking Gaza,” told Palestinians to “eat rockets,” used hashtags like #StarveAway and #BombsAway, and welcomed an image of a dead child’s body sitting amid rubble.
- Rep. Brian Mast compared Palestinian civilians to Nazis and dismissed the suffering of children starving in Gaza.
- Rep. Andy Ogles said of Palestinian children, “We should kill them all.”
- Rep. Brandon Gill mocked a Muslim state lawmaker’s cultural eating practices, writing, “Civilized people in America don’t eat like this… Go back to the Third World.”
- Rep. Lauren Boebert fabricated an Islamophobic story about Rep. Omar and accused her of “sympathizing with terrorists.”
- Sen. John Kennedy used a Senate hearing on hate crimes to demean and slander an Arab American witness.
- Senator Tommy Tuberville recently said that people from blue states were not welcome in Alabama if they brought a “communist, Islamic atmosphere.”
- Rep. Josh Gottheimer reportedly made anti-Muslim comments about American faith leaders in a closed-door caucus meeting.
None of these members faced the punishment that Mace now seeks to impose on Rep. Omar for words she never said.
CAIR also noted that this is not the first time bad-faith censure efforts have targeted Muslim women in Congress. In 2023, CAIR slammed the House’s “hypocritical and racist” censure of Palestinian-American Muslim Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, the lone Palestinian-American woman serving in Congress. Despite prior attempts, Congresswoman Omar has survived repeated bad-faith censure efforts designed to silence her voice.
CAIR urged lawmakers to vote NO on the resolution and to uphold the principle that political disagreements must be debated, not silenced.
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CONTACT: CAIR National Deputy Director Edward Ahmed Mitchell, 404-285-9530, e-Mitchell@cair.com; CAIR Government Affairs Director Robert McCaw, 202-742-6448, rmccaw@cair.com; CAIR National Communications Director Ibrahim Hooper, 202-744-7726, ihooper@cair.com; CAIR National Communications Manager Ismail Allison, 202-770-6280, iallison@cair.com