ICE released<\/a> one of them, Ellie Aghayeva.<\/p>\nAbout a week later, Mr. Kassem helped arrange a dinner at Gracie Mansion for the mayor and Mahmoud Khalil, along with Mr. Khalil\u2019s wife and baby. It was a tense moment in the city, exactly one day since a teenager inspired by ISIS had thrown a homemade bomb outside the mayor\u2019s residence.<\/p>\n
It had also been exactly one year since Mr. Khalil was arrested in his Columbia University building. After 104 days in detention, Mr. Khalil was getting a tour of the mansion\u2019s garden and trading Columbia memories with the mayor and his lawyer over plates of salmon.<\/p>\n
In a photo that the mayor later posted on Instagram, Mr. Kassem almost appeared to be floating in the background, the scene forming connective tissue between his current New York life and previous ones.<\/p>\n
Idealists like to talk about New York City as a refuge, the world\u2019s sponge, absorbing the flow of people who have not been able to make long-term homes anywhere else. For Mr. Kassem, that view of the city was literal.<\/p>\n
He spent his childhood living in Beirut, Baghdad, Damascus and Amman, fleeing wartime violence so often that his siblings joked the region\u2019s conflicts were following them. He recalled that when bombs fell in Beirut, his father used to take him and his sisters far from the windows, into the hallway, where he read aloud \u201cThe Count of Monte Cristo.\u201d<\/p>\n
In Baghdad, as a teenager, Mr. Kassem saw a different kind of shadow from war. When his family talked about politics, they did so cautiously, knowing informants could be listening. When they returned from family vacations, they saw cigarette ashes in their ashtrays, a sign someone had been in their home, which they interpreted to mean they were being tracked.<\/p>\n
New York was the first place Mr. Kassem put down roots. He was drawn in by the worldliness of the city, the hole-in-the-wall restaurants in Harlem and Afropunk shows in Fort Greene. <\/p>\n
At Columbia Law School, Mr. Kassem became known for unsparing candor. In a legal philosophy class, a classmate recalled that Mr. Kassem emailed the professor to argue that the amount of reading assigned was excessive. He copied the entire class on the email, his classmate said.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy mouth literally dropped,\u201d recalled the classmate, Gyasi Ross. \u201cAll of us thought it, but we weren\u2019t going to say it.\u201d<\/p>\n
He was still at Columbia in 2001 when planes struck the World Trade Center on Sept. 11. In the weeks that followed, with the city shellshocked from the terror attacks, Mr. Kassem heard casually Islamophobic remarks on campus. His friend, Mr. Ross, was taken aback when a classmate suggested Mr. Kassem was connected to the attacks, because Mr. Kassem was an outspoken Muslim student on campus.<\/p>\n
Mr. Kassem began to feel that his Muslim and Arab classmates were taking one of two paths. \u201cYou had to either keep a low profile and avoid anything political and go the corporate route,\u201d Mr. Kassem said. \u201cOr you had folks wrap themselves in the flag and make it their job to prove just how American they were.\u201d<\/p>\n
Neither option felt right to Mr. Kassem. He soon pledged himself to an emerging field of law, hoping to represent Muslims who were being targeted because national security concerns had been raised, or held without charges at Guant\u00e1namo Bay. <\/p>\n
Even in the small, idealistic community of lawyers at Guant\u00e1namo, Mr. Kassem stuck out. One morning on the ferry ride to the detention facility, a lawyer asked why Mr. Kassem always wore a suit. Most of the others wore polos in the sticky heat. Another lawyer said that perhaps Mr. Kassem was concerned the guards would mistake him for a detainee.<\/p>\n
Mr. Kassem, typically restrained, didn\u2019t launch into a long explanation. The truth was that he wanted the detainees to know he was taking their cases seriously, that this facility wasn\u2019t as far from the dictates of U.S. law as it could feel to people there. He had also learned, in conversation with clients, that they only got two jumpsuits, one of which they kept cleaner for special occasions. The other lawyers, he said, didn\u2019t realize that their clients were dressing up for them, too.<\/p>\n
The Outsider Goes to Washington<\/p>\n
In 2016, the creator of the show \u201cHomeland\u201d took notice of Mr. Kassem\u2019s work in defending Guant\u00e1namo detainees and leading a clinic at the City University of New York that defended Muslims in New York. The show hired him as a consultant to weed out inaccuracies and racist depictions, and Mr. Kassem also became the inspiration for a character on the show, the straight-talking activist lawyer Reda Hashem.<\/p>\n
Mr. Kassem was open to being not just a critic but an insider \u2014 a stance that took him to Washington in 2022, when he joined the Biden administration as a senior policy adviser for immigration.<\/p>\n
Once he was at the White House, Mr. Kassem didn\u2019t hide his outspokenness, as his colleagues discovered in the weeks after Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas militants crossed into Israel and killed some 1,200 people.<\/p>\n
Shortly after the war in Gaza began, Mr. Kassem helped gather a group of more than 30 staff members who were particularly interested in the Middle East but had unrelated portfolios for a discussion about the administration\u2019s response. They met in a gold-plated conference room in the executive office building. Surrounded by portraits of U.S. secretaries of state, they talked about grieving over the war and fearing for Gaza\u2019s future.<\/p>\n
Mr. Kassem volunteered to request a meeting with the White House\u2019s higher-ups. He wrote an email to Jeff Zients, the White House chief of staff, and Jon Finer, the deputy national security adviser, who happened to be a former student at a Yale Law School clinic taught by Mr. Kassem.<\/p>\n
In November, Mr. Kassem, along with more than a dozen staff members, sat for a meeting with Mr. Finer, Mr. Zients and Anita Dunn, a senior adviser to Mr. Biden.<\/p>\n
Mr. Kassem and his colleagues each came prepared with a suggestion about the White House\u2019s Israel-Gaza policy, such as a proposal to condition support to Israel on curbing the number of civilian deaths in Gaza. Mr. Kassem and Mr. Finer got into a tense exchange, according to two people who were in the room.<\/p>\n
It was unusual for Mr. Kassem, an adviser with no focus on Middle East policy, to be rounding up impassioned staff members to share their views about the war with the chief of staff. <\/p>\n
\u201cHe wasn\u2019t a flamethrower. I don\u2019t think he did it in a confrontational way,\u201d said Susan Rice, the former director of the Domestic Policy Council and national security adviser, who hired Mr. Kassem but had left the White House by then.<\/p>\n
Because of Mr. Kassem\u2019s history of advocacy for Palestinians, some on the right viewed his appointment as the mayor\u2019s chief counsel as an ideological move \u2014 surprising, some noted, for a role that is supposed to be lawyering, not policymaking.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe mayor has called the Palestinian cause the core of his politics,\u201d said Reihan Salam, the president of the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. \u201cThe selection as chief counsel of a lawyer for whom opposition to Israel has been a defining commitment \u2014 from his college writings through his legal career, including his representation of Mahmoud Khalil \u2014 fits that pattern, and New Yorkers who are uneasy about where this administration is heading have good reason to read it as a statement of priorities.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Ear Whisperer<\/p>\n
Mr. Kassem\u2019s friends joke that at some point, he will have represented every prominent Muslim in New York. He not only is counsel to Mr. Mamdani, but his client list includes Mr. Khalil and Asad Dandia, who, with Mr. Kassem\u2019s help, sued the Police Department after an informant infiltrated his nonprofit, Muslims Giving Back.<\/p>\n
Mr. Mamdani expressed admiration for his chief counsel\u2019s history as an advocate. \u201cHe has fought to ensure that justice is extended to everyone and not simply reserved for the powerful,\u201d the mayor said.<\/p>\n
For now, Mr. Kassem\u2019s City Hall role means that his days are filled with policy dilemmas ranging beyond those on which he built his career. (Those days are long; he is not married and does not have children.)<\/p>\n
On a Friday in April, Mr. Kassem was at Gracie Mansion around 7 a.m., meeting with the mayor to discuss Mr. Mamdani\u2019s first City Council veto. The Council had passed two bills, spearheaded by Speaker Julie Menin, that would potentially limit protests close to houses of worship and educational facilities. Many Jewish leaders supported the legislation, after a volatile protest outside Park East Synagogue in the fall.<\/p>\n
The mayor planned to veto the bill related to schools \u2014 though in the days and nights before, numerous city officials had encouraged him not to do so. They suggested a veto could further inflame tensions with the Jewish community, according to a city official.<\/p>\n
Mr. Mamdani supported the bill restricting protests outside houses of worship, recognizing the constitutional right to pray. But he opposed the schools bill, since he saw no right in tension with the right to free speech.<\/p>\n
He wanted to make his thinking clear for ordinary New Yorkers. So, early in the morning at the mayor\u2019s residence, Mr. Mamdani and Mr. Kassem reviewed the script for a video where the mayor would explain his veto.<\/p>\n
Mr. Kassem has also waded into policing conversations. Weeks into the new administration, a 22-year-old schizophrenic man in Queens, Jabez Chakraborty, was shot by<\/a> a police officer responding to a 911 call from the family. Mr. Kassem joined a tense briefing among Mr. Mamdani, Ms. Tisch and a few other key advisers.<\/p>\nThe focus was understandably centered on the actions of the responding officers, but the group also discussed what the family had said in the aftermath of the shooting.<\/p>\n
The police wanted to know what family members were saying to one another, but Mr. Kassem had questions, according to two people familiar with the interaction: Why did police officials find it relevant to bring up translations of the conversations among the victims\u2019 family members, captured on the officers\u2019 body-worn cameras?<\/p>\n
Mr. Kassem\u2019s public appearances, so far, are sparing. He works for a mayor who doubles as an influencer, in an administration adept at using vertical video, yet Mr. Kassem doesn\u2019t use social media.<\/p>\n
Recently, at a news conference, Mr. Mamdani called Mr. Kassem up to the podium to answer a question about whether City Hall had been served with search warrants in a federal investigation of New York\u2019s migrant shelter contracts. \u201cI\u2019m going to pass it over to my chief counsel,\u201d Mr. Mamdani said.<\/p>\n
Mr. Kassem stepped forward and said: \u201cNot at the moment.\u201d The response was so terse that the crowd burst out laughing, as did the mayor. Mr. Kassem, pointing at the spot off to the side where he\u2019d been standing, added: \u201cCan I go back now?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It was a Goldilocks job, one that demanded somebody not too agreeable and not too contrarian. That was…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":811740,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5122],"tags":[5229,311673,4292,155799,45110,329829,5708,155798,405,403,5226,5225,5228,5227,329830,67,586,132,5230,68,2969,5709],"class_list":["post-811739","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-america","tag-appointments-and-executive-changes","tag-columbia-university","tag-content-type-personal-profile","tag-immigration-detention","tag-kassem","tag-mamdani","tag-muslim-americans","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-newyork","tag-newyorkcity","tag-ny","tag-nyc","tag-ramzi","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa","tag-zohran"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116611481070971141","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/811739","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=811739"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/811739\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/811740"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=811739"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=811739"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=811739"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}