When Representative Andy Ogles, Republican of Tennessee, wrote on social media earlier this month that “Muslims don’t belong in American society” and that “pluralism is a lie,” Democrats denounced his comments.
Speaker Mike Johnson and his fellow Republican leaders said nothing.
That was just weeks after Representative Randy Fine, Republican of Florida, said that “if they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one.” Democrats called for him to resign. Top Republicans refused to criticize him.
Their silence may have been driven in part by the fact that these days, there is nothing particularly unusual about Islamophobic statements from the ranks of the G.O.P. The recent wave of anti-Muslim language from elected Republicans in Washington reflects a nationwide shift that took hold last year and has been steadily growing, with no pushback from President Trump, who campaigned on banning Muslims from the United States, or from party leaders.
Muslim advocates said they feared it would increase in the coming days because of the escalating war in the Middle East, which they said was threatening to rekindle the surge of Islamophobia that took hold after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Earlier this month, Senator Tommy Tuberville, the Alabama Republican who is a leading purveyor of anti-Muslim statements, shared a photograph of Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York, who is Muslim, next to a picture of the World Trade Center ablaze, writing: “The enemy is inside the gates.”
Democrats called him a bigot; Republicans did not.
Instead, as elected officials continue to vilify and castigate Muslims with no condemnation from Republican leaders in Washington, more than 50 G.O.P. lawmakers in the House — including the No. 3 Republican, Representative Tom Emmer of Minnesota — have joined the Sharia Free America Caucus, whose stated mission is to stop the spread of Islamic ideology in the United States.
Many of them hail from overwhelmingly Republican strongholds whose populations are disproportionately white and Christian. But Mr. Ogles, who declined to respond to several text messages about a series of Islamophobic comments he had made, represents a sizable Muslim population in a Nashville-area district that Democrats believe will be competitive in November.
It includes the membership of an Islamic center that was destroyed because of a hate crime in 2008, as well as one of the largest blocs of Kurdish people in the country. (Mr. Ogles’s website lists him as a member of the Kurdish American Caucus.)
In Nashville, home to thousands of Tennessee’s Muslim residents, some of Mr. Ogles’s constituents said they found his comments appalling. And Muslim officials and their allies, some of whom have called for Mr. Ogles to resign, said he was doing damage that would have lasting effects, regardless of the election outcome.
“When words like that come from a member of Congress, they don’t just disappear into thin air,” Councilwoman Zulfat Suara, the lone elected Muslim official on the body that governs Nashville, said at a news conference on Tuesday condemning Mr. Ogles’s remarks. “They land on people’s lives.”
On Capitol Hill, Republican leaders appear unconcerned about any of that, and have validated Mr. Ogles’s statements.
When pressed at a news conference this month to respond to Mr. Ogles’s comments, Mr. Johnson said he would not have used the same language. But, he added, “there’s a lot of energy in the country and a lot of popular sentiment that the demand to impose Sharia law in America is a serious problem.”
(It was not clear what demand he was referring to. Sharia law is a term for Islamic religious rules, though it is often invoked by opponents to refer broadly to Muslim culture and to portray Islam as fundamentally at odds with American values.)
After the Sept. 11 attacks, amid a similar rise in anti-Muslim sentiment, President George W. Bush visited the Islamic Center in Washington to tell Americans that “Islam is peace,” an attempt to calm a nation on edge.
These days, G.O.P. leaders in Washington have demonstrated a tolerance of hateful rhetoric that is amplified and normalized by Mr. Trump, who in one of his first acts in office sought to impose a ban on Muslims entering the United States. He routinely targets the two Muslim members of Congress, calling one of them “garbage” and saying they should “go back” to their countries.
Last week, Robert S. McCaw, the government affairs director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, a Muslim advocacy group, wrote a letter to House Republicans demanding a stronger response to the Islamophobia in their ranks.
“Just as it would be completely unacceptable to declare that Jewish Americans do not belong in American society, or that all ‘mainstream Jews’ should be destroyed, it is unacceptable to use such hateful rhetoric against American Muslims,” he wrote. “There is no justification for allowing figures like Rep. Fine and Rep. Ogles to use their platforms to erode religious freedom for one group of Americans.”
Through it all, Republicans who have trafficked in such statements have remained unapologetic.
“If it is considered anti-Islam to say that Americans shouldn’t have to change how we live because of immigrants who want to come here, then I guess it’s true,” Mr. Fine said in an interview on Tuesday.
He has also followed up his statement with legislation: He introduced the “Protecting Puppies from Sharia Act,” and managed to get more than a dozen of his Republican colleagues, including Mr. Ogles, to sign on as co-sponsors.
In a statement announcing that he had joined the Sharia Free America Caucus in January, Mr. Ogles declared: “Islam is a religion of violence, abuse of women and ruthless political conquest. Its laws and practices have no place in American society.”
The Islamophobic comments made by Mr. Fine, a Jewish first-term congressman who was known in the Florida legislature as “The Hebrew Hammer” and who has referred to both Muslim women in Congress as “terrorists,” may have little negative impact on him in his deep red, rural and suburban district.
Back home in Mr. Ogles’s district, which Mr. Trump has twice won handily, some Republicans expressed support for their representative’s anti-Muslim statements. Others have stopped short of condemning or addressing them at all.
The Republican Party in Maury County, the county where Mr. Ogles once served as mayor, shared a Facebook post bemoaning the fact that he was the only Tennessee member of the Sharia Free America Caucus. And Steve Hickey, the chairman of the Williamson County Republican Party, said that Mr. Ogles was “making a statement that we need people to embrace America.”
Yet some of Mr. Ogles’s constituents said he was fueling a familiar and dangerous tide of bigotry in the district, which carves through the southern neighborhoods of Nashville, including a stretch of shopping plazas and restaurants known as Little Kurdistan.
“We know Islamophobia is always there,” said Sabina Mohyuddin, the executive director of the American Muslim Advisory Council and a Nashville native. “What does it mean for our community that every so often we have to keep proving that we belong?”
Tabeer Taabur, the president of the Tennessee Kurdish Community Council, said the nonprofit organization had scrapped plans to invite Mr. Ogles to its annual new year celebration on Saturday, which draws thousands.
“Painting everyone with the same brush — I think it’s unfair,” said Mr. Taabur, who has fielded angry messages about the congressman’s remarks. The language, he added, “has made so many people disappointed.”
Even before the war in Iran, advocates who track anti-Muslim rhetoric and discrimination said they had attributed the recent uptick in Islamophobia to a few factors. One is the war that erupted in Gaza after the Hamas-led attack in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Another is Mr. Trump’s sweeping immigration crackdown, which has slashed border crossings from South America and prompted Republicans to focus instead on demonizing immigrants from elsewhere.
Fueling all of it, they argue, is Mr. Trump, who has resurfaced his anti-Muslim attacks against members of Congress and created a permission structure for Republicans to make bigoted statements, with no incentive for leaders to call them out.
“I’m very nervous about the outcome of this national conversation,” said Corey Saylor, CAIR’s research and advocacy director.
In these final days of the holy month of Ramadan, Mr. Ogles’s comments brought out a palpable weariness among his Muslim constituents. Imam Ossama Bahloul, the resident scholar at the Islamic Center of Nashville, said the congressman was using his power to foment division.
“People serving in that position should realize that they should be a reason for unity, a source for hope, and they should be part of the solution — not stereotyping communities,” he said.
Annie Karni is a congressional correspondent for The Times.
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