Muslim leaders on Friday called for the resignation of state Sen. Sara Feigenholtz over anti-Arab social media posts, including one in which she praises an Islamophobic poster as a “badass truth teller.”
The Muslim leaders, who included two state representatives, said the posts amounted to the same type of hate speech that led to the resignation Thursday of the Chicago Board of Education president, who wrote anti-Israeli posts on social media.
“We call on her to apologize and resign from office,” Ahmed Rehab, executive director of CAIR-Chicago, told reporters from CAIR-Chicago’s downtown office. He also called on state Senate President Don Harmon to remove her from committee leadership positions.
“Anything less suggests the promotion … of hatred against Muslims is accepted and rewarded by our state Senate,” Rehab said.
Feigenholtz, a Chicago Democrat, apologized Friday morning for the since-deleted comments.
“I made a mistake and, as a result, I shared a message I do not believe in. It was never my intention to reply to — let alone amplify — that individual’s inflammatory remarks,” she said in a written statement.
Feigenholtz’s district includes parts of Lake View, Lincoln Park, Old Town, Ravenswood and Roscoe Village neighborhoods.
Feigenholtz won a state Senate seat in 2020. She had served as a state representative since 1994.
Asked to respond to the calls to resign, a spokeswoman for Feigenholtz said the senator has no further comment.
A spokesman for Harmon’s office did not immediately reply to a request for comment on calls to remove her from committee posts. According to Feigenholtz’s district webpage, she chairs the Committee on Financial Institutions and is vice chair of Appropriations.
The apology came after attention was brought to two of Feigenholtz’s social media posts.
Nearly a week ago, Feigenholtz called another X user who has made repeated explicitly Islamophobic posts “one badass truth teller” in response to a post in which he said, “Westerners who praise Islam are bootlickers.”
“If they love Islam and Muslims, why don’t they move to an Islamic country and stick their heads in the dirt multiple times a day for enlightenment?” read the post, to which Feigenholtz replied. “Their affection for Islam and Muslims is not coincidental. They prefer a masculine-dominant society where women are bought and sold like cattle.”
She also shared a quote on Facebook by former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir suggesting Arabs do not love their children and force Israel to kill them. “We cannot forgive [the Arabs] for forcing us to kill their children,” the post read, in part.
Rehab said Feigenholtz crossed a “red line” with her comments and endorsed hate speech. He said it was similar speech that emboldened the murderer of 6-year-old Wadee Al-Fayoume, who was fatally stabbed by his landlord in a hate crime last year in Plainfield Township.
Dilara Sayeed, president of the Muslim Civic Coalition, said Feigenholtz’s comments rose to the same level as that of the Rev. Mitchell Ikenna Johnson, who resigned Thursday as president of the Chicago Board of Education after just seven days on the job after antisemitic comments were found on his social media pages.
“It is not acceptable, and our CPS board chair was asked to step down. And I think our expectations must be consistent for all our public officials,” Sayeed told reporters.
Earlier this week, Feigenholtz, a leading Jewish and pro-Israel politician in Illinois, was one of the first to call on Mayor Brandon Johnson to ask the board president to resign, or “the Legislature is likely to do it for you.”
“Shocked and appalled that the mayor wouldn’t vet someone before he appointed them,” Feigenholtz wrote on social media.
Two of Feigenholtz’s colleagues in the Illinois General Assembly attended Friday’s news conference to condemn her comments.
State Rep. Lilian Jimenez, D-Chicago, said: “I’m here to say that — whether it is bigotry and hate, whether it’s Islamophobia, whether it’s antisemitism — it has no place, has no place in the mouths of our elected officials.”
State Rep. Abdelnasser Rashid, D-Chicago, said the comments are “the textbook definition of bigotry.”
“If you replace ‘Islam’ and ‘Muslims’ in the post that she commented on with ‘Judaism’ and ‘Jews,’ we would be rightfully calling out such horrific antisemitism and making it clear that the person holding these views is not fit for public office,” said Rashid, the only Palestinian American elected official in Illinois or Chicago government.
The news conference also included speakers from Jewish Voices for Peace Chicago and the Catholic Theological Union.
Before Feigenholtz apologized, her office issued a statement Thursday afternoon in an attempt to distance herself from the posts.
She claimed the comment this week was in response to the poster’s “address before the European Union Parliament where he spoke out against Hamas and their mission. I do not subscribe to or support any inflammatory remarks made on the post where my comment appeared,” she wrote in the statement.