In November, President Biden nominated Adeel A. Mangi to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. The nominee is currently a partner at Patterson Belknap and served on the board of advisors for the Center for Security, Race, and Rights at Rutgers Law School from 2019 to 2023. Over that period, the Center produced several extremist programs, featured speakers with ties to known terrorist organizations, and sponsored lectures brazenly touting antisemitic themes.
For example, the Center co-sponsored an event titled “Whose Narrative? 20 Years since September 11” that explored what it called the “exceptionalization of 9/11/2001.” The event’s featured speakers included Sami Al-Arian, who pled guilty to conspiring to provide services to a terrorist organization, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Hatem Bazian, one of the co-founders of Students for Justice in Palestine, an organization that has publicly called for an intifada in the United States.
It doesn’t end there. In 2020, the Center held an event titled “White Christian Privilege: The Illusion of Religious Equality in America.” In 2021, it issued a “Resource Guide on Palestine” that listed a host of anti-Israel organizations, several of which have been forums for antisemitism. In 2022, the Center teamed up with one such group, Palestine Legal, for a program designed to help anti-Israel college students strategize.
Mangi left the board earlier last year, but the Center continues to sponsor hateful events. One of its lectures held on December 4, 2023, advertised that it “will contextualize Israel’s current war against the Palestinian people and the history of western racism which enables that support.”
On October 31, 2023, in the wake of the horrific October 7, 2023, massacre, the Center posted the following on X: “To assess Hamas’s October 7th operation and the Israeli regime’s subsequent response in isolation is to ignore over 75 years of colonial violence and the horrific consequences born out of these decades of oppression and attempted erasure.”
When asked about his affiliation with the Center during his Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last month, Mangi downplayed his involvement, insisting that he only gave advice on academic research for the Center and was not aware of the vile antisemitic content of its programs. Yet Mangi’s firm, Patterson Belknap, is one of the Center’s few “Law Fellow Sponsors,” and Mangi appears to have been the firm’s only employee on the board of advisors.
Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats are reverting to their usual playbook, touting Mangi as the first Muslim-American who would serve as a federal circuit court judge and accusing their Republican colleagues of Islamophobia. But they conveniently dodge the very real problem the nominee presents: Either he was grossly negligent in supporting the Center for years without bothering to acquire a basic familiarity with its programming or he misled the committee. As Senator John Kennedy put it, “With [the Center’s] long history of hate-filled events and rhetoric, are Americans really supposed to believe that Mangi wasn’t aware of any of it? No fair-minded American would think that he sat on the Center’s advisory board without so much as reading the Center’s website.”
Mangi has remained unwilling to disown the Center’s wretchedly antisemitic, anti-Western, terrorist-coddling programming. He is clearly unworthy of a lifetime appointment to one of our nation’s most powerful courts. That President Biden deems this nominee fit for a such an appointment is unconscionable.