On Sunday, August 30, 2026, at the Republican Jewish Coalition's annual summit inside the Venetian resort in Las Vegas, Florida congressman Randy Fine told the room he wanted to talk about what he called "the elephant in the room: the rise of Islam in America."

Then he asked a question.

"We are constantly told that the problem is not mainstream Islam, but radical Islamism. But where are the so-called moderate Muslims in our political system?"

Four of them are in the House of Representatives, in the same chamber Fine sits in. According to the Pew Research Center's count of this Congress, the House has four Muslim members: André Carson of Indiana, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, and Lateefah Simon of California. Fine votes on the same floor as all four.

He was not asking a research question. He answered it himself, talking to reporters after the program:

"The fact that not all Muslims are bad does not mean that no Muslims are bad. People are unwilling to have that discussion, and if we don't have it we're going to have real problems in this country."

The second speaker said it more plainly

Texas congressman Brandon Gill spoke at the same summit and did not bother with the framing. Islam, he said, is "fundamentally incompatible with our way of life," and he warned about the "Islamization of Texas."

Gill then tied it to immigration: "If we want to fight antisemitism, we need to start with our immigration policy," he said, arguing that "importing people whose values are incompatible with our own" would weaken the country.

Fine's response to Gill, according to the Times of Israel: "I give him credit."

Neither man named a Muslim American who had done anything. They named politicians. The targets on stage were New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, and streamer Hasan Piker — one elected official, one candidate, and one streamer.

This is not just what they say. It is what they have written.

A speech at a donor summit is easy to wave off as red meat. This one is not, because both men had already turned it into legislation.

On September 19, 2025, Fine introduced H.R. 5512, the "No Shari'a Act". Gill is one of its 33 cosponsors.

The bill claims to be about "foreign law" in general. Its definitions section reaches broadly: "foreign law" means "any law, legal code, or system derived from a jurisdiction outside the United States or its territories, including religious law when invoked as a substitute for State or Federal law."

But read the bill as introduced and one faith is the only one in it. Its stated purpose is to "prohibit the enforcement of Shari'a or any foreign law that infringes on constitutional rights." Section 5 is headed "APPLICATION OF SHARI'A." The word appears seven times across five pages. No other religion, and no other religion's law, is named anywhere in the text.

American courts already cannot enforce a foreign or religious code that violates the Constitution. That is what the Supremacy Clause does, and the bill's own findings section says so in its first sentence. What the bill would add is a federal statute with the name of one religion in the title. It was referred to the Judiciary Committee the day it was introduced and has had no action since.

A civil rights group calls their caucus a hate group

Fine and Gill both belong to the House "Sharia-Free America Caucus," launched on December 18, 2025 by Texas congressmen Keith Self and Chip Roy.

In February 2026, the Council on American-Islamic Relations designated that caucus an anti-Muslim hate group — the first time in the organization's 32-year history it had applied that label to a congressional caucus. At the time, the caucus had 40 members from 19 states, with Texas and Florida the two biggest delegations.

CAIR's analysis named Fine's bill directly, arguing that H.R. 5512 and two of Chip Roy's bills — the PAUSE Act of 2025 and the Preserving a Sharia-Free America Act — "would deny adherents of the world's second-largest faith basic civil rights such as free speech, freedom of religion and equal protection under the law using their choice of faith as the disfavored characteristic."

"Congressmen Randy Fine, Chip Roy, Keith Self, and other members of this so-called caucus have appointed themselves as religious police with the power to tell Americans how to worship," CAIR research and advocacy director Corey Saylor said. "Islam is an American faith, present for over 250 years."

There is no takeover to stop

The thing these bills are written against keeps turning out not to exist.

We traced the 2026 panic back to its origin. A hate group's blog post about a subdivision in Little Rock became a viral Facebook post on April 4, 2026, then a state bill, then a statement from Arkansas's governor in July. The caucus came first — Self and Roy launched it in December 2025, and NPR counted 50 members in it on March 14, 2026, seventeen days before the blog post ran. The subdivision is five houses that have been there for about two decades, and two of them are occupied by Christians.

The money tells the same story. Republicans spent more than $10 million on TV ads mentioning Sharia or Islam negatively heading into the 2026 midterms — roughly ten times what was spent in each of the last four cycles — and a pollster who studies it found anti-Muslim sentiment spikes during election cycles, not after terrorist attacks.

Las Vegas in August is an election cycle.

Both men have been here before

This is not a first offense for either of them.

Fine went on television in July and said "a Muslim terrorist runs the city of New York," blaming the mayor for a stabbing that police were investigating as a possible hate crime by a man they said may have had mental health issues. CAIR notes he has also "compared Muslims unfavorably to dogs," and the JTA reported he has said Gazans should "starve away" until the Israeli hostages were released.

Gill posted in July that "Calling us racist doesn't work anymore". Rep. Shri Thanedar, an Indian American Democrat, replied that people call him racist because he referred to Indian Americans as "7-Eleven workers." Gill never answered him — his position was that the word has lost its power, not that it was untrue.

What the record shows

Randy Fine asked a Republican donor audience where the moderate Muslims in American politics are, when four Muslims serve in the House with him. Brandon Gill told the same room that Islam is "fundamentally incompatible with our way of life." In September 2025, Fine had written a bill that would put one religion's name in federal law — seven times, including as a section heading — and Gill had signed onto it as one of 33 cosponsors. The caucus they both joined has been designated an anti-Muslim hate group by the country's largest Muslim civil rights organization — the first congressional caucus it has ever labeled that way in 32 years.

Source

Rep. Randy Fine blasts 'rise of Islam' and Muslim politicians at Jewish GOP confab — The Times of Israel, August 31, 2026. Photo: The Jerusalem Post.