The Council on American-Islamic Relations, the largest Muslim civil rights organization in the country, on Friday denounced three Republican senators for their treatment of President Joe Bidens historic judicial nominee Adeel Mangi during his recent confirmation hearing.

GOP Sens. Ted Cruz (Texas), Tom Cotton (Ark.) and Josh Hawley (Mo.) berated and interrupted Mangi in his Wednesday hearing in the Senate judiciary committee, demanding that Mangi, who is Muslim, share his personal views on the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the Oct. 7 terrorist attack in Israel and the Israeli-Hamas conflict in general.

Mangi, if confirmed, will be the nations first ever Muslim American appeals court judge, and only the third Muslim American federal judge. Biden nominated him to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit, based in Philadelphia.

We strongly condemn Senators Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley for subjecting Mr. Mangi to irrelevant, hostile questions about Israel and Palestine, Edward Ahmed Mitchell, CAIRs national deputy director, said in a statement.

Singling out a Muslim judicial nominee and forcing him to answer gotcha questions about the Middle East simply because of faith or because of his tangential connections to Muslims who comment on the Middle East is Islamophobic and un-American, Mitchell said. So is raising the hateful trope that presumptively assumes that Muslims are antisemitic.

Mitchell called on all senators to reject this nonsense and start assessing Muslim American judicial nominees based on their expertise and qualifications, like all other nominees.

Questions about personal views are inappropriate for any judicial nominee, as they are only supposed to talk about their legal expertise. Even so, the line of questioning that Mangi faced was particularly offensive, given that he is Muslim and repeatedly had to attest that he wasnt antisemitic or sympathetic to terrorists.

At best, the Republican senators questioning was terrible optics. At worst, it was plainly Islamophobic.