Interview with Suraj Patel by Neil Sehgal

Interview with Suraj Patel

Suraj Patel, an attorney and adjunct professor at the NYU Stern School of Business, unsuccessfully ran for election to the US House of Representatives to represent New York’s 12th Congressional District in 2018 and 2020. Patel’s June 2020 primary election was marred by extensive delays and errors, with one in five ballots disqualified and results not certified until August 4, six weeks after the election. In July, Patel filed a federal lawsuit against Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Board of Elections over the invalidation of the uncounted ballots, before conceding the race on August 27.

by Neil Sehgal ’21 illustrator Nicholas Edwards ’23

Neil Sehgal: More than one in five ballots were discarded in your district. The few votes that you were able to get counted through your lawsuit saw you leading by a wide margin. And the federal judge in your case explicitly welcomed campaigns to petition for additional votes to be counted. Why concede?

Suraj Patel: Honestly, we realized that the finality of the election and proximity to the November election put us in a really bad position to keep fighting. It’s really disappointing that democracy didn’t work in our district, but this was always bigger than one campaign and one candidate. Donald Trump is an existential threat to our democracy. Thousands of New Yorkers didn’t have their voices heard. I think they’re angry and they will continue to be, and they know who sided with them.

President Trump had suggested that there be a do-over for your primary. Had more actors been on board, would a fresh election have been a solution?

I honestly can’t speculate. Obviously there’s no way my opponent was going to be on board with anything like that. And I didn’t want to share common cause with Donald Trump and give him a precedent in November.

You participated in the Black Lives Matter protests this summer. What is the role of inside work (e.g. electoral politics) as opposed to outside work (e.g. street protests) in creating positive change?

I am a massive proponent of the Black Lives Matter movement and of the street protests because they are a catalyst for legislative change. One thing I always said during this race was this time had to be different. This time the aspirations of the millions of people that are marching across the streets had to be turned into laws through new legislation. At the end of the day, that’s the ultimate goal of the movement: legislation. And the folks who had their hand in making the laws that we are now protesting cannot be trusted to undo them with new ones.

yourself as a progressive anti-establishment candidate and an Obama Democrat. Many on the left would claim that Obama represents the establishment. How do you resolve the conflicting labels?

When I joined the Obama campaign in 2008, we were in a primary against the establishment. Hillary Clinton at that point had locked up the entire party machinery. So when I say anti-establishment, it is running against a status quo that isn’t delivering. When we ran that campaign and when we governed the country with President Obama, there was a unifying element. And that’s the kind of positive campaign we ran, with a message of bringing more people in and building a big tent. So that puts me in that sort of Obama lens. At the same time, I’m running against the establishment and am significantly more progressive than the current office holder in the district.

How do you explain the dissonance between Obama’s startlingly high popularity among Democrats and the fact that the majority of 2020 presidential candidates, including Biden, ran far to his left?

Obama governed where he could at the time. Let’s not forget Obamacare was a massive expansion of the healthcare system, and let’s not forget that he pushed hard for a public option that was torpedoed by Joe Lieberman. I think that the idea that Obama wasn’t progressive enough has to be viewed through the lens of the times.

As an Asian American, do you think you faced unique challenges in running for Congress?

One hundred percent. I think that there’s a significant problem in the establishment party apparatus specifically in New York, and in media coverage of Asian American and South Asian candidates. There are a lot of assumptions made about the type of background and candidacy you have. The proof is very simply put in the fact that there are no South Asians in office in the entire city of New York. Not a single one—not in city council, not in any state, local or federally elected position. For a city that is as diverse as it is, its political machinery is anything but. There is no home base and that’s a problem we’re going to have to keep fighting head-on.

Before choosing Harris, Biden had already made a public promise to choose a woman as his vice president. When does representation become tokenism?

I don’t think that Biden’s promise amounts to tokenism. It amounts to recognizing that it’s 2020. It’s essential for the Democratic Party, if it really wants to be the party of diversity, to elevate voices that aren’t the historical ones that have been.

You’ve had a pretty successful professional career, but after Trump’s election in 2016, you became a full-time organizer. Does the careerist culture in today’s universities worry you?

People should be entitled to do what they want. I don’t have umbrage at young 22-year-olds graduating and entering professions that will allow them to pay their debt back. We have an astronomical student debt load and astronomical tuition rates in this country. But you are seeing that even within those professions, they are entering these big firms with a pretty different mindset that looks at the world, the community, and the stakeholders as parts of business. We can’t abandon business if we’re progressives because commerce happens to be 85 percent of our economy. If we leave that to a certain set of folks, then I think we’re doing ourselves a major disservice.

What advice would you give to young people who want to get involved in politics?

I honestly can tell you that the best decision I made in my life was to leave law school in 2008 to join the Obama campaign because I was inspired by it. Find a cause, find a campaign, and at some point in your young life fully dedicate yourself to it.

Combining Cultures

Grappling with efforts to Germanize Islam

by Mathilda Silbiger ’24, an International and Public Affairs concentrator

illustration by Brenda Rodriguez ’21

The German government’s historical record of integrating Muslim migrants is less than stellar. The 867,000 mostly Turkish-Muslim “guest workers” who arrived in Germany during the postWorld War II economic boom were originally only permitted to stay for two-year periods. Even after the two-year restriction was overturned, the government’s failure to integrate these workers and their families into German society led to residential clustering, lower educational and labor outcomes, and low levels of German language fluency. Today, between 4.4 and 4.7 million Muslims live in Germany. Most are descendants of Turkish guest workers and have lived in the country for generations. However, about 25 percent—1.2 million immigrants, most of them from the Middle East—came to Germany between 2011 and 2015 alone. Decades of failed attempts at integrating Muslim guest workers and their families into German society has led the German government to blame Islam itself, rather than ineffective German policies, as a barrier to integration. For this reason, the German government has in recent years toyed with the idea of “Germanizing” Islam: creating a version of Islam “for and by Germany.” This entails policies including training imams in Germany, requiring that religious services be conducted in German, and mandating close cooperation between Muslim religious institutions and the German government. While some of the proposed policy changes are necessary to preserve national security, others are steeped in Islamophobia.

The underlying assumption in “German Islam” policies is that the version of Islam currently practiced by millions of Muslims in Germany is at odds with the values of German society and Western democracy as a whole. This imagined incompatibility between Western democracy and Islam is, at its core, a form of liberal Islamophobia. By extension, the government’s belief that there is a need for a reformed Islam is an endorsement of the stereotypes that have fed harmful anti-Muslim hostility across the political spectrum for years— that Muslims are resistant to change, loyal to their countries of origin rather than to Germany, and don’t believe in democracy, gender equality, or the freedom of speech.

The reality is quite different: A 2017 Bertelsmann Foundation study showed that Muslims feel slightly more connected to Germany than the average German and support democracy as a form of government at a slightly higher rate. Moreover, Muslims born in Germany disagreed with traditional gender roles at a similar rate to Catholics and Protestants. Clearly, other forms of discrimination like sexism, homophobia, and anti-Semitism are not inherent to Islam, and it is blatantly Islamophobic for politicians or the media to assume that they are.

The underlying Islamophobia in the move to Germanize Islam reveals the anti-Islam hostilities that permeate the highest ranks of the German government. In 2018, Federal Minister of the Interior Horst Seehofer provoked widespread outrage

“This imagined incompatibility between Western democracy and Islam is, at its core, a form of liberal Islamophobia.”

by claiming that “Islam is not part of Germany.” Disturbingly, Seehofer oversees several initiatives to improve the integration of Muslims into German society, including the German Islam Conference, a joint forum of federal and state politicians as well as Muslim religious leaders.

However, anti-Muslim hostilities in Germany are not limited to politicians: 49 percent of German Christians are uncomfortable with the idea of a Muslim marrying into their family and 52 percent of all non-Muslim German citizens view Islam as a threat. Thus, when politicians make the Muslim “other” less visible and therefore more palatable for their constituents, they are following a recipe for electoral success. In light of this political dynamic, it unfortunately comes as no surprise that major political parties like the Christian Democratic Union and the center-left Social Democratic Party support bans on hijabs, some of the most recognizable symbols of the Muslim faith. To maintain the cover that the policy’s goal is secularism and state neutrality towards religion, hijab bans are often entwined with more general

restrictions for public servants on carrying or wearing religious symbols. However, these same restrictions usually include leeway for Christians: For example, the Hessian Law on Civil Servants states that “the Western Christian tradition of Hesse is to be adequately accommodated.” The law’s proponents argue that this double standard takes into account the long history of Christianity in Germany. In reality, this reflects the belief held by key figures in the German government (and by many German citizens) that Christianity is a legitimate part of German society while Islam is not. One of the less controversial goals of Germanizing Islam is reducing the influence of foreign regimes and extremist actors in domestic Muslim organizations. Currently, the largest Sunni organization in Germany, the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs (DITIB), receives funding and directives from Diyanet, a Turkish religious institution with direct ties to the administration of Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The majority of imams in German DITIB mosques are sent from Turkey by Diyanet for a limited time period, meaning that they rarely speak German and are typically not integrated into German society. In 2016, the Erdoğan administration confirmed accusations that 19 DITIB imams were Turkish spies, and the organization maintains close connections to the Turkish intelligence agency, MIT. Similarly, one of the largest German Shia religious institutions, the Islamic Center Hamburg (IZH), maintains a strong connection to the Iranian government, and its leader is considered the Iranian revolutionary regime’s primary representative in Europe.

Organizations like DITIB and the IZH clearly threaten Germany’s national security, and in these sorts of cases, government involvement in Islamic institutions should be welcomed. If any of the imams provided by these groups have ties to Turkey and Iran, then it is common sense that the German government should promote the training of imams domestically rather than ban these organizations outright. Since they provide religious services, language lessons, and religious education for many Muslims, these institutions, with even further government involvement, could serve as a tool to encourage Muslim integration into German society. In the long term, though, these organizations’ potential as partners for integration can only be fully realized when they are no longer connected to foreign actors.

Despite the Islamophobic motives that often inform the policy discussion, involvement in Islam by the German government is necessary in cases where the alternative compromises German national security and the inclusiveness of German society. Initiatives such as deradicalizing organizations like the IZH and DITIB and expanding Muslim religious education in public schools are especially important. However, Muslims should not be entirely responsible for their own integration. Education in interreligious tolerance is key to prevent right-wing groups from spreading Islamophobia into the mainstream. At the end of the day, Islam should be seen as an enrichment, not a threat, to German society.

“A 2017 Bertelsmann Foundation study showed that Muslims feel slightly more connected to Germany than the average German and support democracy as a form of government at a slightly higher rate.”