By Jessica Russak-Hoffman, JNS
Melissa Chaudhry, who is running in Washington state as a Democrat but has said she would switch to the Green Party, told JNS that she was “forced into a corner by an aggressive and dishonest political opponent.”
Melissa Chaudhry, a Muslim who wears a headscarf, has said that she is running as a Democrat against Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), who has been in office for almost 30 years, in part because he is too pro-Israel.
“Your congressman takes money from AIPAC, Boeing and Raytheon, then calls you a totalitarian for protesting,” she stated. “His biggest funders are the Israel lobby and the defense industry.”
But Chaudhry, who has said that she supports gay rights, is drawing criticism from the Washington state Democratic Party for neglecting to mention that support on her website—a decision that she says she made to avoid alienating Muslim voters.
Jonathan Choe, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, told JNS that Chaudhry’s remarks show that she “will say anything to get elected to office, but what it really exposes is the bizarre alliance between Islam and the radical left.”
“When Chaudhry says she supports the LGBTQ+ community, I believe she’s lying” and “will pretend to do so in order to gain votes by any means necessary,” Choe said.
“Who knows what she’ll actually do to the LGBTQ+ community once she gets into office,” he told JNS. “My advice to the LGBTQ+ community is to start reading the Quran and secondary texts like the Hadith to really know what Chaudhry follows and believes.”
JNS asked Chaudhry if she believes Islam supports either gay people or gay rights.
Chaudhry told the Stranger, a progressive Seattle newspaper, on July 13 that she did not list her support for LGBT people on her website, “because a lot of Muslims do not feel that way, unfortunately.”
She told JNS that she was “forced into a corner by an aggressive and dishonest political opponent and an interview panel, who shamelessly followed her lead.”
She was referring to Kshama Sawant, a socialist and former member of the Seattle City Council who was seated next to Chaudhry at the meeting with the election control board of the Stranger.
Chaudhry told JNS that her experiences resemble those of the victims of the Spanish Inquisition.
“At some Inquisition trials, the subject confessed under pressure simply to escape the pain and suffering and move on,” she said. “Thank you for blaming the victim.”
“If someone would rather not just follow accusations blindly, some very basic reading will demonstrate those policies present on my platform, under pillars two and five,” she told JNS, of references on her campaign website to her support for LGBT people.
As of early June, there were no such references, according to an archived version of her campaign website.
Pillar two on the site now lists “dignity, protection, safety, equality and full civil rights,” and the fifth column includes “full legal protection and dignity under the law” for LGBT people. The Stranger article states as a “fact” that “Chaudhry did not have anything on her website about LGBTQ+ rights because, as she told the Stranger election control board, she ‘was careful about her Muslim constituents.’”
When a member of the board asked her explicitly, “Then why is that not on your website?” she said, “because a lot of Muslims do not feel that way, unfortunately,” according to the paper.
Chaudhry told JNS that “Islam teaches justice, mercy and protection for everyone suffering oppression” and that “my basic human decency leads me, as I’m sure yours does you, to broaden empathy and respect until they include all people.”
“I stand for dignity, safety and opportunity for all, including every marginalized community,” she added.
Chaudhry accused Israel of destroying holy sites.
“Muslims are explicitly instructed in our scripture to protect and honor Christians and Jews, and preserve Christian and Jewish holy places,” she told JNS.
“I’ll note that a country that aligns itself with Jewish tradition has actively destroyed sites sacred to others, including Christians and Muslims, without basic regard for the sanctity of human life or the fair treatment of prisoners,” she said.
Chaudhry said that she would be “unequivocal” that “antisemitism is wrong. Full stop.”
“We should enforce hate crime laws vigorously, improve reporting and tracking, support security grants for synagogues and Jewish community institutions and ensure law enforcement takes threats seriously,” she said.
She told JNS that data from the Anti-Defamation League indicates that antisemitic attacks “come from the far Right and Christian nationalists.”
“We need to be clear about where the threat really is,” she said.
In recent years, the ADL has focused on Jew-hatred both on the Right and the Left.
The Stonewall Democrats, the official LGBT caucus in the Washington State Democratic Party, urged organizations to withdraw endorsements of Chaudhry.
Chaudhry accused the Stonewall Democrats of lying, refusing her application for endorsement and blocking her from introducing herself to its caucus.
“Their position is not well informed, by their own choice,” she told JNS.
Andrew Ashiofu, chair of the Stonewall Democrats, told JNS that Chaudhry did not contact the group or submit a questionnaire, and that only candidates who submit questionnaires are invited to speak to the caucus.
Chaudhry wrote on social media that she was a founding member of the Gay-Straight Alliance in high school and that her sister is “in a homosexual relationship, happily and committedly so” and that her friends include a “disabled lesbian woman, her partner and their autistic son.”
Ashiofu, of Stonewall Democrats, wrote that “our community is not optional” and that gay rights “cannot be sidelined for political convenience.”
He also noted that Chaudhry told the Stranger that “if elected, my personal plan and commitment is to be the first Green Party member of Congress that would switch parties while I’m in office.”
“This is on the record, by the way,” a member of the board told her. “This whole meeting, this whole process is on the record, so if there’s something, if you don’t want said, don’t say it in the meeting.”
The 33rd Legislative District Democrats called an emergency executive board meeting on July 9 to discuss options for rescinding its endorsement of Chaudhry but couldn’t find one, because its bylaws prohibit such reversals. It stated that it’s probing how to do so in the future.
