Sen. Cory Booker on Monday slammed his Republican opponent for “bigotry” and “vile” remarks after saying Islam “doesn’t seem to be able to cohabitate with other religions” while citing debunked or exaggerated anecdotes about Muslims in Europe.
Justin Murphy, who’s little known and virtually unfunded, is the longest of long shots to defeat Booker in November. But his words could be a headache for down-ballot Republicans in competitive races throughout New Jersey, a diverse state with one of the largest Muslim populations in the country, and where Republicans made surprising inroads with the Muslim community in 2024.
And as the party’s Senate nominee, Murphy is the first Republican voters will see on their ballot throughout the entire state this year.
He is one of the latest candidates or officials this midterm cycle whose religious rhetoric has drawn condemnation. In Tennessee, Republican Rep. Andy Ogles posted on social media that “Muslims don’t belong in American society.” Alabama Republican Rep. Tommy Tuberville earlier this year shared a social media post calling Muslims “the enemy.” And President Donald Trump, who has long derided Muslims, has recently started calling Democrats running for office “jihadists.”
The remarks from Murphy came during aforum last week sponsored by the Republican Party of Morris County. A woman asked Murphy a question in which she referred to Islam as not a religion but an “ideology” that “takes over through sheer immigration” and referred to a “big Muslim problem” in Texas. She asked his stance on “securing the Judeo-Christian tenets of America and keeping us kind of ideologically and culturally on track.”
Murphy responded that it’s part of an “immigration problem.”
“Somebody said to me the other day ‘We ought to get rid of all the Arabs. I said ‘Why? We can’t get rid of all of them. Some of them are Christian. Some of them have the faith and belief and tenets that our country was built on,’” Murphy said. “But yeah, Islam creates a problem because look at Europe. No-go zones. … There were rape gangs by Pakistani men in England who raped a quarter million English girls.”
Murphy, a former committee member in South Jersey’s small town of Tabernacle, prevailed in a four-way Republican primary in June with a 33 percent plurality. Republicans haven’t won a U.S. Senate election in New Jersey in 54 years. And Murphy as of July had $123 in his campaign account while reporting $8,782 in debt.
Booker, who as of July had $23 million in his campaign account, has said little to nothing about Murphy publicly. But on Monday he issued a lengthy statement in response to the comments.
“This is bigotry, plain and simple, and it must be resoundingly condemned. This kind of hate is cancerous. Left unchallenged, it spreads, and I will not let that to happen,” Booker said. “This is more than an attack on Muslim and Arab Americans. It is an attack on what America stands for: our shared values, our common humanity, and the fundamental promise that every one of us belongs.”
The comments are especially awkward for Morris County Republicans. County commissioner Tayfun Selen, the only county-level candidate on the ballot this year, is Muslim and immigrated from Turkey in his 20s. Selen could not immediately be reached for comment. Several other New Jersey Republican officials did not respond to requests for comment.
Murphy in a phone interview Monday said he was speaking about “radical Islam” and not Muslims in general.
“I talked about immigration from Islam and radical Islam as to how it affects western Europe. That’s what I get for putting myself out there and taking questions directly from the public,” Murphy said, adding that his response was also informed by conversations he had with attendees before the forum and others on the campaign trail.
“I do not believe all Muslims are evil people. I don’t believe that for a second. I was talking about radical Islam and that was the focus of my answer,” Murphy said.
Although Murphy’s questioner began by referring to “radical Islam,” she clarified moments later that she did not make a distinction between the mainstream religion and the religion’s radical elements. “I don’t want to even say radical Islam, I’m just going to say Islam here in this country,” she said during the forum, adding that “I’m not going to call it a religion, I call it an ideology.”
Murphy largely did not draw a distinction either when answering her. He used the word “radical” just once when he said that if he lived next door to a Buddhist he would be fine but “if I lived next door to a radical Muslim, they want to cut my head off because I’m a Christian.”
New Jersey has the fourth most Muslims of any state and the third most per capita, according to the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies.
“Justin Murphy seems to be confused about what our country was founded on. Freedom of religion extends to everyone — not only those of Judeo-Christian faiths,” Naureen Akhter, spokesperson for the New Jersey Council on American-Islamic Relations, said in a statement. “To characterize Muslims as people ‘who want to chop your heads off’ is a disgusting, bigoted claim about the 2 billion adherents to a widely practiced faith. We encourage Murphy to attend a food pantry distribution at a local mosque or a community iftar to see for himself what Muslims are about.”
Republicans made inroads with Muslim communities in the 2024 election. In heavily-Muslim South Paterson, normally safe Democratic territory, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump — who in 2015 called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” — were virtually tied.
The idea of European “no-go zones” Murphy referred to at the forum was popularized in part by Fox News guest Steve Emerson in 2015, who told host Jeanine Pirro that certain Muslim enclaves in Britain, France, Sweden and Germany operate as “a country within a country” with Sharia Law while the countries they’re in “don’t exercise any sovereignty.”
Emerson claimed that the entire British city of Birmingham, the second largest in the country, was among the zones. Not long after the segment, Emerson apologized and recanted his statement about Birmingham, and a Fox News anchor stated that there was “no credible information to support the assertion that there are specific areas in these countries that exclude individuals based solely on their religion.”
While the U.K. has seen convictions of many “grooming gang” members who were of Pakistani heritage, the figure of 250,000 victims — promoted by figures on the right including Elon Musk — is unfounded.
Murphy began his answer by mentioning Minnesota’s large Somali community, which is concentrated in the Twin Cities. “Can you tell me why every Somalian for the most part wound up in the same congressional district in Minnesota? How strange,” he said.
Somali refugees began arriving in Minnesota in large numbers in the early 1990s amid that country’s civil war, according to the Minnesota Historical Society. “Some came as refugees while others arrived as immigrants through the sponsorship of family members, or relocated to Minnesota from other parts of the United States,” reads the organization’s website.
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