WASHINGTON: The US House of Representatives has passed legislation requiring the State Department to create a special envoy for monitoring and combating Islamophobia.

The final vote on Tuesday night was along party lines as 219 Democrats voted for the legislation while 212 Republicans voted against. The bill now goes to the Senate.

The special envoy would also report state-sponsored Islamophobic violence and impunity in the State Department’s annual human rights reports.

The bill was the brainchild of two lawmakers: Ilhan Omar, one of three Muslim House members frequently subjected to hate speech and death threats; and Jan Schakowsky, a 77-year-old Jewish white woman from the Chicago suburbs.

The bill was the brainchild of Ilhan Omar, one of three Muslim members, and Jan Schakowsky, a Jewish white woman

The move to create an office to monitor worldwide Islamophobia followed remarks by a Republican lawmaker Lauren Boebert who depicted Ms Omar as a Muslim terrorist.

A summary of the bill says that the special envoy will “help policymakers better understand the interconnected, global problem of anti-Muslim bigotry”. It will also establish a “comprehensive strategy for establishing US leadership in combating Islamophobia worldwide”.

Congresswoman Schakowsky, who not only co-sponsored the bill but also ran a vigorous campaign to get it adopted, said she did so because she did not want Muslims to be targeted because of their faith.

“We have seen in so many ways — in my community, and in the Congress of the United States — what we know is happening all around the world, and that is increased incidents of dramatic Islamophobia,” she told reporters. “Not just people saying bad things to each other, but all the way on the spectrum toward violence.”

During the congressional debate, Ms Schakowsky said that more than 500 incidents of Islamophobia had been documented in the United States alone.

“These are close to home, but it’s also happening around the world,” she said. “The UN Human Rights Council has described hatred towards Muslims at an epidemic proportion right now. This is happening everywhere.”

Earlier on Tuesday, floor debate of the bill ground to a halt after a Republican congressman, Scott Perry, referred to Ms Omar as anti-Semitic and implied that she had ties to terrorist organisations.

Mr Perry also argued that a lack of definition for the word “Islamophobia” in the bill would allow individual lawmakers to interpret the legislation in accordance with their “political proclivities”.

He claimed that the bill was “creating an office in the State Department that will likely spew anti-Semitic hatred and attack Western ideas throughout the world under the farce of protecting Islam,” he said.

Democrats -- furious at his remarks -- immediately lodged a formal objection and asked Mr Perry’s comments be stricken from the record.

The vote on Omar’s bill comes just a few weeks after video emerged showing Boebert calling Omar a member of a “Jihad squad” and claimed that a Capitol Police officer thought she was a suicide bomber in an encounter in an elevator on Capitol Hill.

Later, Ms Boebert apologised on Twitter “to anyone in the Muslim community I offended”.

Congresswoman Schakowsky, however, warned that such “attacks on the Other that’s going on way too often in the United States is pretty devastating to our democracy and to the historic values of our country”.

She said that “anti-Semitism and Islamophobia are really all of one piece and showed a divide that really does threaten all of us. This degree of hatred and violence and threats is unprecedented”, she noted.

Published in Dawn, December 16th, 2021