A Muslim civil rights organization and other faith groups on Friday called for for Democratic state Sen. Sara Feigenholtz to resign following a social media post that appeared to back a message the group branded as Islamophobic.
Feigenholtz on Friday apologized for her response to a post on X from Mosab Hassan Yousef, a critic of Hamas and Islam, who wrote that “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,” Yousef said in a post that went up on Monday.
“MHY… you are one badass truth teller,” Feigenholtz replied the same day.
Her reply has since been deleted and on Friday she called it a “mistake.” Feigenholtz suggested her post was made in error and said she does “not subscribe to or support any inflammatory remarks made on the post where my comment appeared.”
Ahmed Rehab, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Chicago, said the senator’s apology was “insulting our intelligence.”
Feigenholtz’s post was “terrible, offensive and racist,” Rehab said at a news conference at CAIR’s Loop offices, where leaders from religious and civic groups including Jewish Voice for Peace Chicago and the Muslim Civic Coalition joined in the call for the senator’s resignation.
Rehab described Yousef as “a professional Islamophobe.”
Senate President Don Harmon’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday morning about whether any action would be taken against Feigenholtz, who is vice chair of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee and chair of the Financial Institutions Committee.
Feigenholtz, who is Jewish, was among state elected officials including Gov. JB Pritzker who earlier this week called for the resignation of Mayor Brandon Johnson’s school board president for antisemitic and otherwise controversial social media postings. The Rev. Mitchell Johnson resigned his CPS post on Thursday
“Our expectations must be consistent for all our public officials,” Dilara Sayeed of the Muslim Civic Coalition said at Friday’s news conference.
State Reps. Lilian Jimenez of Chicago and Abdelnasser Rashid of Bridgeview also appeared at CAIR’s news conference and criticized the state senator’s post, although neither explicitly called for her to resign.
Jimenez noted that she spoke out earlier this week against anti-Puerto Rican comments made at a rally for former President Donald Trump, and said she was at the Friday news conference for the same reasons.
“Words spur actions, and so today we are here again because the words that were spoken,” Jimenez said.
In a statement from Feigenholtz’s office Thursday, she suggested that her reply to Yousef was intended as a response to his recent address to the European Union Parliament in which he criticized Hamas.
On Friday, she simply said she “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.”
Feigenholtz, who represents a district on Chicago’s North Side, is not up for reelection this year. She served in the Illinois House of Representatives for more than two decades before being elected to the state Senate in 2020.
