Senator Lindsey Graham died on July 11, 2026. Early the next morning, a Dallas-area imam named Omar Suleiman posted this:
"In other news, Lindsey Graham is dead. Bye Lindsey. May you live an eternity in ruins for the ruins you helped create in Gaza. Ameen."
That post was cruel, and plenty of people said so. Celebrating a death is indefensible, whatever you thought of the man. Nobody needs to defend it.
But four days later, a member of Congress introduced a formal resolution of the United States House of Representatives about it. And if you read all the way to the bottom of that resolution, you find out it isn't really about a tweet at all.
What H.Res.1436 actually says
Beth Van Duyne introduced H.Res.1436 on July 15, 2026. Here are its five resolved clauses, as her own office published them:
- Honors the public service of Senator Lindsey Graham;
- Expresses gratitude to Senator Graham for his commitment to advance America's foreign policy and national security;
- Recognizes Senator Graham's role in strengthening the relationship between the United States and Israel;
- Condemns the statement of Omar Suleiman celebrating the death of Senator Graham; and
- "Supports the work of House Republicans in raising awareness about the dangers of Sharia Law and its incompatibility with American legal principles, Constitutional governance, and individual liberty."
Read number five again. One man wrote one bad sentence on the internet, and the remedy Van Duyne attached to it is a House endorsement of an entire political campaign against a religion's legal tradition.
Suleiman's post has nothing to do with Sharia law. He didn't mention it. Nobody has claimed he was applying it. The clause is a payload, and the tweet is the delivery vehicle.
She's been running this play since 2015
Van Duyne didn't discover the Sharia issue in July. She built her career on it.
In 2015, a mosque in Irving offered its members voluntary mediation. Van Duyne, then mayor of Irving, accused the mosque's leaders of "bypassing American courts" and pushed the Irving City Council to endorse a state bill barring judges from using "foreign laws" — a measure widely understood as aimed at Sharia. Mosque leaders said she was stirring up anti-Muslim feeling.
That same year, Irving police handcuffed and arrested Ahmed Mohamed, a 14-year-old Muslim student, for bringing a homemade clock to school. Van Duyne went on Glenn Beck's show to defend the police and the school, and criticized President Obama for praising the boy.
Eleven years later, nobody has produced the Sharia takeover. We traced the current version of the panic — the one clause five of her resolution endorses — back to its source: a hate group's blog post and a subdivision of five houses in Little Rock, two of them lived in by Christians. Van Duyne is one of the officials named in that piece.
She is not responding to a threat. She is maintaining a franchise.
"From my hometown"
The language in Van Duyne's press release is worth quoting at length, because it tells you who she thinks she's talking about.
"The outpouring of love and appreciation for Sen. Graham was incredible and heartwarming to see. Equally, the hatred and truly evil attacks against him were utterly shocking, especially one that I saw from my hometown by an Islamist religious leader, Omar Suleiman."
"From my hometown." Suleiman is the founder and president of the Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research, in Irving, Texas — the city Van Duyne governed for six years. She calls him an "Islamist religious leader," a label he did not choose, in a document that then pivots to warning about Sharia.
She continued:
"That is not compassion. It is not faith. It is the language of hatred from a man who presents himself as a religious leader."
A member of Congress is telling the House of Representatives which religious leaders are real ones.
Twenty-six colleagues signed on. Nothing has happened since.
Van Duyne led the resolution with the Republican Study Committee and 26 cosponsors, including RSC Chairman August Pfluger, Keith Self, Brandon Gill, Michael Cloud, Randy Fine, Monica De La Cruz, Chip Roy, Dan Crenshaw and Abraham Hamadeh.
And then: nothing. H.Res.1436 was referred to the House Committee on House Administration on July 15, 2026, and that is the last thing that has happened to it.
That is how these resolutions almost always end. They aren't legislation — they can't be, since a House resolution condemning a private citizen carries no force of law and changes nothing about anyone's life. They're press releases with bill numbers. Oklahoma's Stephanie Bice filed one declaring the national anthem must be sung in English, and it sat for over a year without a vote.
The difference here is that the dead-end resolution smuggles in clause five, and clause five is the point. The tweet gave her the occasion; the Sharia language is what she wanted on the record.
Who pays for the priorities
Look at what clause three does. In a resolution nominally about a tasteless social media post, Van Duyne wrote in a line specifically praising Graham's "role in strengthening the relationship between the United States and Israel" — and the post she's condemning was about Gaza.
Pro-Israel PACs, led by AIPAC, have given Van Duyne $106,016. Only 7% of her campaign money comes from small grassroots donors, while 30% comes from PACs and another 35% from large individual donors. She ranks #293 out of 440 House members in grassroots funding.
She had time in July for a resolution about one man's tweet. She also voted for Trump's budget bill, under which an estimated 1.7 million Texans will lose their health coverage and Texas hospitals stand to lose $39 billion in Medicaid funding over the next decade. We've added up what Texas's Republicans in Congress are costing the state.
What this is really about
The state's most powerful Republicans have been running the same operation. Governor Greg Abbott declared Texas's largest Muslim civil rights group a terrorist organization — and Texas Monthly, after reviewing 1,300 pages of emails, found twelve of his thirteen stated reasons matched a report written by a fellow at a think tank the Southern Poverty Law Center lists as an anti-Muslim hate group.
Van Duyne's resolution is the congressional version. Find a Muslim who said something indefensible. Use him as the reason. Attach the clause you actually wanted.
Muslims in Irving are Van Duyne's constituents too. They pay her salary. And for eleven years, the thing she has most reliably done with her office is tell the rest of the country to be afraid of them.
We deserve better.
Source
Imam who prayed before Congress faces formal rebuke after celebrating Graham's death — Adam Pack, Fox News, July 15, 2026.
