A couple of years ago I endeavored to write a story for a magazine I worked at about the political attitudes and experiences of American Muslims. I discovered that there isn’t a reliable figure for how many Muslims live in U.S., owing to the fact that there isn’t a census line for religion. Basically, demographers infer the total number of American Muslims from country-of-origin questions asked by the census. And that’s obviously an inexact science: how can you infer whether someone from, say, Lebanon is a Christian or a Muslim, for instance. Huh, I thought, live and learn. I reported the variance and moved on.

David Harris can’t seem to. A couple of years ago, Harris, the executive director of the American Jewish Committee, wrote a bizarrely long screed playing amateur demographer to "debunk" some of the higher-end claims of the American Muslim population. Why? He was too much of a euphemistic pussy to say. But it wasn’t difficult to see that what he was after was the marginalization of a very, very diverse group of communities who practice Islam in the U.S., out of an indecent, tribal and frankly un-American belief that Jewish influence and Muslim influence in American politics is a zero-sum game. It was ugly, and it was beneath the dignity of a major American Jewish leader.

So the motherfucker is up to it again. Today at the Jerusalem Post’s website, not only does Harris reprint his greasy 2007 essay, but he adds to it the gloss of merely playing factchecker to President Obama’s recent statement that "if you actually took the number of Muslim Americans, we’d be one of the largest Muslim countries in the world." This time, he wades ever so slightly further out into explaining why anyone should care:

Does it matter? In the real world, yes, numbers have consequences - not just demographic, but electoral and political. And I come from an American Jewish community that is not only obsessed with counting itself, but also counter-intuitively attacks any researcher who might, heaven forbid, offer good news by suggesting that the Jewish population is larger than we thought. As a result, the practice of seemingly inventing numbers just strikes me as odd.

OK, so Harris remains a euphemistic pussy. But at least now he says that the number has political implications. If politicians believe that there are millions and millions of Muslims in America, maybe they’ll start to take American Muslims seriously as a constituency.

In the annals of ethnic paranoia, this is — well, history is too replete with greater crimes of ethnic hatred to consider this to be within the pantheon. But so many of them have been committed against Jews, designed to marginalize them and reduce their impact and rob them of a sense of belonging, for the leader of a Jewish organization to get within 100 rhetorical yards of such an ugly sentiment. So fucking what if politicians believe there are 20, 30, 40 million Muslims in the United States. Do you have such little faith in the U.S. commitment to Israel that you think it’ll suddenly collapse under the weight of demography? Do you really believe demography is destiny? Do you really think this is how America works — or, worse, ought to work?

Maybe Harris will take his logic a step further. How can we really know how many American Muslims there are? Perhaps they can do us all a favor and sew little green felt crescents onto their clothes. Just so we can know for sure.

American Jews need to step up and clarify that David Harris does not and will never speak for us.