Rep. Chip Roy’s social media post calling for “No more Muslims” drew fire from the Texas chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
“No more Muslims. No more criminals. No more Marxists. No more corporatists. #SaveTexas,” the Texas Republican said Sunday on social media, prompting accusations from CAIR and others that he is Islamophobic.
CAIR-Texas said the lawmaker was “inciting bigotry” and called on House members to formally hold him accountable for his “this dangerous and un-American rhetoric.”
“Representative Chip Roy’s public demand for the exclusion of an entire faith group is a shameful betrayal of his oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution,” the organization said in a statement. “We must ask our fellow Americans: Imagine the universal and justified outrage if a member of Congress posted a message saying, ‘No more Christians or no more Jewish people.’ It would be instantly recognized as a bigoted, unacceptable, and un-American call for a religious test.”
Mr. Roy co-chairs the Shariah-Free America Caucus, a conservative effort to curb the influence of Shariah law, the moral code many Muslims live by. The group took to the House floor Monday to publicly air out their concerns about the “threat of radical Islamic terrorism” to the U.S.
CAIR’s criticism followed the floor speech on Monday.
Mr. Roy, who is a self-described constitutionalist, was deemed a hypocrite by the organization for “actively calling for the dismantling of the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious liberty.”
CAIR was named an unindicted co-conspirator in a terror-finance trial against the Holy Land Foundation and its former officials, which were convicted in 2008 for using the charity to funnel millions of dollars to the Islamic terrorist group Hamas. Evidence in the case linked the CAIR founders to a 1990s Hamas support network.
Mr. Roy is no stranger to criticism for making anti-Muslim comments. He recently likened a deadly bar shooting in Austin, in which a gunman wearing clothes with an Iranian flag design and declaring “Property of Allah” killed two people, to “Muslim immigrant violence.” He also condemned the “mass migration of Islamists.”
Mr. Roy is not the only lawmaker to make inflammatory comments about Muslims.
GOP Reps. Andy Ogles of Tennessee and Randy Fine of Florida encountered public backlash this month for a series of anti-Muslim comments.
Mr. Ogles said, “Muslims don’t belong in American society,” prompting Democrats to propose censuring him. Mr. Fine said, “We need more Islamophobia, not less.”
When reporters recently asked about such rhetoric from members of his party, House Speaker Mike Johnson, Louisiana Republican, said there is “a lot of popular sentiment that the demand to impose Shariah law in America is a serious problem.”
