I wasn't going to write about this subject, but something happened a few days back over lunch that prompted me to reconsider.

I was having a peaceful meal with my wife when two men sat down in the next booth. In loud voices they began to discuss the state of the presidential contest. At one point, the gentleman directly behind me said, “and Bernie Sanders picked that Cornel West and that guy who’s the head of the Arab League who has it in for Israel...”.

That did it. I spun around and said, in a polite but firm voice, “I’m that guy. I’m not the head of the Arab League and I’m asking you to change the subject now.” Shocked, the man responded “you’re him!” and began asking me questions. I cut him off making it clear that I was having lunch and wasn’t interested in pursuing the matter. After we finished eating, I turned to the two men and explained who I was and why I found the crude description of me to be so aggravating.

In some ways I fault The Washington Post and other mainstream news outlets for having unleashed the mini-firestorm that followed my recent appointment to the Democratic Party’s platform drafting committee. When I first heard from Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz that I was to be named to the committee, I held my breath, fully expecting an attack from the far-right, anti-Arab, and hard-line pro-Israel groups. Sure enough, they didn’t disappoint. I was called “a professional Israel-hater”, “a defender of terrorism”, “Bernie’s Svengali”, and it was claimed (falsely) that I had “accused Israel of committing a holocaust”.

However, what I found most troubling was the first headline that appeared in The Washington Post announcing “Sanders wins greater say in Democratic platform; names pro-Palestinian activist”. I am, of course, a strong supporter of Palestinian rights, so is Sanders, and so, according to a recent Gallup poll, are a majority of Democrats. But the crude effort to reduce Sanders’ entire campaign and my entire life’s work to an effort to “get Israel” betrays an unsettling anti-Arab bias and a bizarre obsession to which I must respond.

In response to the question from the editorial writer as to why Sanders may have appointed me, I recited a bit of my resume. To be sure, I am the proud founder of a number of Arab American organisations, but I have also served on the DNC for 23 years. I served as ethnic outreach adviser to both the Gore 2000 and the Obama 2008 campaigns. And President Obama has twice appointed me to two-year terms on the US commission on international religious freedom.

When the mainstream media and far-right groups converge in turning my entire life’s work into a one-dimensional caricature – ”pro-Palestinian activist” – they are not complimenting me. They are setting me up. Make no mistake, I am proud of my advocacy for Palestinian rights, but given the political climate in which we live, such crude reductionism lays the predicate for political exclusion, violence, and threats of violence.

When I spoke in favour of a two-state solution in 1988, before this position became fashionable, I was told by Democratic Party leaders “you’ll never have a place in this party again”. Following that year’s convention, Michael Dukakis rejected the endorsement of our Arab American Democratic Federation saying “it was too controversial”.

And then there is the violence. The first time I received a death threat was in 1970. My office was fire-bombed in 1980 and after 9/11 three men went to jail for threatening my life and the lives of my children. By silencing my community because we might dare to advocate for Palestinians, there is the damage that this hysteria does to our national discourse. We are accused of “singling Israel out”, while in reality it is our critics who are singling out this issue as the only one we cannot discuss.

I am proud that Sanders has demonstrated the courage to raise critical issues and I am confident that if we work together on the platform committee with openness and mutual respect, we can forge a new consensus that reflects the will of majority of Democrats on all the critical issues facing our country – including the way forward to articulating the principles that would help us achieve a just and lasting solution to Israeli-Palestinian conflict.