Every once in a while, a politician says something that offers a useful test of our own moral consistency. U.S. Representative Nancy Mace recently did precisely that when she declared: “Every single Muslim holding public office in America is a Trojan horse, and a threat to both national security and our republic.”
Journalist Glenn Greenwald responded with the obvious question: replace “Muslim” with “Jew.” What would happen to an American politician who announced that every Jewish officeholder was a Trojan horse and a national-security threat? We know the answer. There would be outrage, calls for consequences and probably serious damage to that politician’s career. And rightly so.
The point is not that antisemitism is taken too seriously. Given its long and murderous history, it must be taken seriously. The question is why equally sweeping rhetoric about Muslims remains permissible in respectable political discourse. Mace was not criticising Hamas, Islamism, terrorism or even a particular Muslim politician. She was saying that being Muslim itself makes an elected official suspect. Strip away the national-security language and the message is simple: a Muslim can never be completely trusted.
After I shared Greenwald’s observation, someone responded with an idea he called the “dinner table test.” He described a Pakistani acquaintance who denied the Holocaust and praised Hitler, and a Jewish acquaintance in Canada who believed the deaths of Arab Muslim children could be justified because they might grow up to become jihadists. His point was that prejudice often becomes acceptable in private long before people feel comfortable expressing it publicly.
There is something valuable in that idea, but I would resist framing it principally as a Jewish-Muslim problem. We simply do not know what “many” Muslim or Jewish families say around their dinner tables. More importantly, prejudice is far more universal. Antisemitism has a long history in Christian societies and certainly exists among Muslims. Islamophobia exists among Christians, Jews, Hindus and others. Muslim societies have their own record of sectarianism and discrimination. Buddhist nationalism has contributed to the persecution of the Rohingya. And anyone following India over the past decade knows that Hindu majoritarianism has increasingly cast Muslims, and at times Christians, as objects of collective suspicion.
That should make Mace’s language sound uncomfortably familiar in India. The vocabulary differs, but the logic is often the same. Muslims are portrayed as infiltrators, demographic threats or people whose loyalties lie elsewhere. Terms such as “love jihad,” “land jihad” and “Bangladeshi infiltrator” do political work far beyond their literal meaning. They turn individual citizens into members of a supposedly dangerous collective.
The scale of this rhetoric is difficult to dismiss. India Hate Lab says it documented 1,318 hate-speech events targeting religious minorities in 2025, up from 1,165 in 2024 and 668 in 2023. Muslims were targeted, alone or alongside Christians, in 1,289 of those incidents. Christians were targeted in 162. The organization also reported that most of the incidents occurred in BJP-ruled or coalition-ruled states.
Those are the findings of one monitoring organization, and the BJP and Modi government reject allegations of systemic discrimination and have criticized such reporting as biased. But even allowing for disputes over methodology, the language documented is disturbing. Minorities were described as “termites,” “parasites,” “insects,” “pigs” and “mad dogs.” The organization also recorded repeated use of the “Bangladeshi infiltrator” trope, often in ways that stigmatized Bengali-origin Muslims.
For Malayalis, there is another reason to resist this politics. Kerala’s social reality has always been more complicated than the caricatures that increasingly dominate communal discourse. Muslims, Hindus and Christians have lived beside one another for centuries, not always harmoniously and certainly not without prejudice, but within a shared social world shaped by language, food, neighbourhood, commerce and culture. Kerala should not be romanticized. Yet that very proximity ought to make clear how absurd it is to reduce millions of people to religious categories and assign collective motives to them.
This is also where the dinner table test becomes uncomfortable, because it cannot simply be a test Muslims administer to everyone else. We must apply it to ourselves.
Holocaust denial is not criticism of Israel. Praising Hitler is not solidarity with Palestine. Antisemitism does nothing for Palestinians and cannot be excused by the horrors Palestinians have endured. If Muslims are appalled when others celebrate the killing of Muslims, there is no coherent moral basis for celebrating the killing of Jews.
The same consistency is required of everyone else. A Hindu who rightly condemns prejudice against Hindus abroad cannot remain silent when Muslims or Christians are collectively demonized in India. A Christian concerned about persecution of Christians cannot be indifferent to anti-Muslim hatred. A Jewish person who rightly demands zero tolerance for antisemitism cannot rationalize the dehumanization or collective punishment of Palestinians. And Muslims who demand minority rights in India, Europe or North America must also defend the rights of Christians, Hindus, Ahmadis, Shias and others where Muslims are the majority.
This is not “both-sidesism.” Power matters. Context matters. A bigoted remark at a dinner table is not equivalent to the same rhetoric from a cabinet minister, chief minister or member of Congress. When people with political power begin describing minorities as infiltrators or internal enemies, prejudice can migrate into policy. Yesterday’s dinner-table slur can become tomorrow’s campaign slogan and, eventually, the vocabulary of the state.
India’s own constitutional history should make this particularly troubling. The country was not conceived merely as a place where a Hindu majority graciously permitted minorities to remain. The constitutional promise was more ambitious. Citizenship was not supposed to depend on whether one prayed in a temple, mosque, church, gurdwara or nowhere at all. Indian secularism never required people to stop being religious. It required the state not to decide who belonged on the basis of religion.
That promise weakens whenever fellow citizens are described as demographic threats, infiltrators or people whose loyalty must continually be proven.
Perhaps that is the real value of both Greenwald’s substitution test and the dinner table test. When someone makes a sweeping claim about Muslims, replace “Muslim” with “Jew.” Then replace it with Hindu, Christian, Sikh, Buddhist, Dalit, Ahmadi or whatever community happens to be your own.
Take the exercise one step further. When images arrive from Gaza, Kashmir, Manipur, Myanmar or elsewhere, replace their children with ours. When someone excuses an atrocity because of what those children might one day become, imagine that argument being made about our children. When someone desecrates another community’s place of worship, imagine it is the place where our parents pray.
If the moral calculation changes with the identity of the victim, the problem was never the principle.
There is no contradiction in fighting antisemitism and Islamophobia at the same time. There is no contradiction in opposing Hindu nationalism while condemning prejudice against Hindus. There is no contradiction in defending Palestinian rights while rejecting hatred of Jews. And there should be no difficulty defending Muslim equality in India while insisting that Muslim-majority societies protect their own minorities.
Anything less is not a commitment to human rights. It is tribalism dressed up in the language of human rights.
The dinner table may be where we discover which one we actually believe.
(Faisal Kutty is a Toronto-based lawyer and regular contributor to The Toronto Star. His articles also appear in Newsweek, Aljazeera, Zeteo, and Middle East Eye. You can follow him on X @faisalkutty)