Marc Janks/HuffPost

Earlier this month, top lawmakers from both parties and a slew of big-name pundits castigated Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) for suggesting that lobbying influence pushes American politics toward an unquestioning “allegiance” to Israel. The outrage persisted this week: Nearly every major speaker at the high-profile American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) conference referenced the congresswoman. Never mind that Omar didn’t point to the Jewish community in particular or that many of Israel’s staunchest allies in Congress are Christian. Omar, her critics claimed, had advanced the anti-Semitic trope that Jewish Americans are more loyal to Israel than to the United States. Omar’s foes were right about one thing: Suggesting that members of a religious or ethnic minority are guilty of dual loyalty is an inherently bigoted and dangerous charge. It’s also one that Muslim Americans ― especially those who, like Omar, dare to run for political office ― face every day. “The Muslim Brotherhood is now part of Congress. New Reps. like @IlhanMN @RashidaTlaib are known as #AntiSemitic and Anti #Israel. Moreover, they both are representatives of #CAIR and #MuslimBrotherhood and their values clash with American values,” prominent pro-Israel donor Adam Milstein wrote on Twitter last week. He was trying to link Omar and Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) to the Council on American Islamic Relations, a civil rights group, and to the transnational Muslim Brotherhood movement, and his words drew significant attention because of his own ties to AIPAC. (He backed out of speaking at the group’s event following backlash to his post.) The assumption behind such commentary is that the 3 million or so Muslims who live in the U.S. are more closely tied to the 1.6 billion Muslims globally than they are to anyone else and that their faith makes them less committed to America. That’s the foundation for the troika of dark suspicions that define anxiety about Muslims in the U.S.: that they want to impose religiously mandated Shariah law, that they’re linked to violent foreigners and that they have a particular animus toward Israel because of how it treats the Palestinians. As Muslim Americans seek office in record numbers, looking to shape U.S. policy after years of being subjected to it in often abusive ways, they can offer definitive answers to those first two fears. No, they don’t want to impose Shariah law. Like other religious groups, they honor the separation between church and state. And no, they do not support extremism. They want to serve the people of the U.S., not promote the agenda of forces abroad. Talking about the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is a lot more fraught. It’s hard to pretend that peace efforts in that part of the Middle East have worked so far, to ignore Israel’s crackdowns or to gloss over Palestinian violence. But it’s also risky for a candidate to stake their reputation on some new moonshot proposal for resolving the yearslong conflict. The smallest misstep can become a major news story, and any comment is ripe for misrepresentation ― particularly when the candidate’s identity means they’re already drawing outsize attention and already thought to be biased. Even as they run campaigns focused on health care, economic inequality or immigration, Muslim Americans say they’re pushed again and again to comment on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, particularly to explain how they feel about the U.S. alliance with Israel. “For a Muslim, if you ran for city council, somehow this was supposed to be a thing you should answer,” said Deedra Abboud, who unsuccessfully ran in Arizona’s Senate primary last year and is now a vice chair of the state Democratic Party. “It’s not, ‘What’s your position on the issue?’ or ‘What do you think about this?’ It’d be, ‘Do you support Israel?’”

ASSOCIATED PRESS Deedra Abboud entered last year's Democratic Senate primary in Arizona for the chance to take on then-Sen. Jeff Flake (R). In the end, she lost the primary and he didn't seek re-election.

Since Omar took office in January, becoming the first lawmaker to regularly wear a religious head covering in the House and, with Tlaib, one of the first two Muslim women in Congress, she’s pressed former State Department official Elliott Abrams on U.S.-backed human rights abuses, urged a boycott of Saudi Arabia and warned against American military entanglement in Venezuela. It’s the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, however, that’s been perceived as her top priority. Her remarks about that issue have driven two separate multiday news cycles and bitter fights within the new Democratic House majority, which could spill into a 2020 primary challenge against her involving big outside money. And President Donald Trump has repeatedly targeted her﻿, recently promoting a story about some Minnesota Democrats frustrated with her and boosting Fox News host Jeanine Pirro, who suggested that Omar’s religious identity made her disloyal to the U.S. What’s happening to the congresswoman sends a warning to all Muslim politicians. As Trump administration policy makes Israeli-Palestinian relations even more tense, nativism rises again in American political life and the GOP continues to accuse Democrats of institutional anti-Semitism, the pressure on Muslims over their views on Israel and Palestine will likely grow. Already, “there is a not-insignificant assumption about where you are likely to stand,” said Abdul El Sayed, who sought Michigan’s Democratic gubernatorial nomination in 2018 but lost. Muslim politicians have to weigh whether anything they say could be enough to counter those preconceptions. They might be able to assuage people’s genuine concerns rooted in limited experience or misinformation and boost solidarity between American Muslims and Jews, which has flourished under a president who seems to dislike all minorities. Or they might be entering a trap. Rivals, bigots or some mixture of the two are always waiting for a slip-up. Abboud said she developed a standard answer for those challenging her on Israel. “I pledge allegiance to the United States of America. That is the only country in the world that I will ever pledge allegiance to,” she would say. “Israel’s an ally.” She said she responded similarly to Muslim voters looking for assurances of sympathy for the Palestinians. Her message was that as an American and an aspiring lawmaker, she had immutable loyalty only toward the U.S. “Everything else is up to American interests,” she would note. El Sayed offered that kind of appeal to universal principle on the campaign trail too, pointing to his views on other countries ― including Muslim-majority nations like Egypt and Saudi Arabia ― to say his progressive take on foreign policy wasn’t uniquely concerned with Israel. “Our ideals matter more than our identities,” he told HuffPost. “As a country that holds certain truths to be self-evident, we should not be in the business of subsidizing foreign militaries or an occupation that has flouted international law for a very, very long time. I don’t care whether my name is Abdul El Sayed or my name is Peter Jones.” And Sameena Mustafa, who made a failed attempt to oust Rep. Mike Quigley (D-Ill.) last year, said she would note her support among both Jews and Muslims, endorse a two-state solution and then return to discussing the domestic policy issues in her platform, chief among them economic justice. The need for candidates to repeatedly refocus conversations on their concerns as Americans and to establish their distance from Muslim communities abroad is a testament to how the U.S. has normalized subtle Islamophobia and how anti-Muslim activists have successfully spread the perception of dual loyalty. “The playbook is to always connect a Muslim candidate to an overseas political party that becomes the bogeyman in the campaign,” said Robert McCaw of CAIR. “In most cases, it’s the Muslim Brotherhood. In some cases, it’s Hamas or Hezbollah, Saudi Arabia or Iran.”

ASSOCIATED PRESS Anti-Muslim activists, like those seen here in New York City in 2017, spread the myth that Muslims are imposing "creeping Shariah" on the United States as part of an un-American agenda.