3 hours ago
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Pack your bags and flee, infidels: New York City has fallen to a cabal of socialist Jihadists. With Zohran Mamdani to become the city’s first Muslim mayor, many are celebrating the Democratic socialist’s historic win. Billionaires, Islamophobes and Republicans, however, are in the throes of hysteria. But what’s new? The New York mayoral race has been marred by bigotry so unhinged it’s almost impossible to parody.
Far-right activist and unofficial Trump adviser Laura Loomer posted on X, for example, that “there will be another 9/11 in NYC” under Mamdani. New York City councilmember Vickie Paladino called the 34-year-old a “known jihadist terrorist”. Actor Debra Messing, meanwhile, has been having a Mamdani-induced meltdown on Instagram, posting story after story about how the puppy-eyed politician is a threat to civilization. She recently posted: “In Judaism and Christianity, we are commanded to speak the truth. In Islam, they are commanded to lie if it means spreading Islam … Now, take a look at Mamdani … He’s revealing their goal: mass conversion.”
Mamdani’s goal, as he has made almost comically clear, is actually affordable mass transit and housing. One of the reasons his campaign was so successful is that it stayed laser-focused on affordability. However, Mamdani has addressed the attacks against him on a number of occasions, noting how common it is for Muslims to be branded as terrorists. And, it’s not just Muslims, I should note. Islamophobes don’t tend to differentiate between a Muslim of Indian descent who was born in Uganda, like Mamdani, and a Palestinian atheist like me. They don’t care if you’re a Christian Arab or even a Sikh. We’re all the same to them: brown barbarians.
The incoming mayor has also called out how just how normalized Islamophobia is on both sides of the aisle. A couple of weeks ago Mamdani released a six-minute video addressed to Muslim New Yorkers where talked about how Andrew Cuomo “laughed and agreed when a radio show host said that I would cheer another 9/11”. He talked about how outgoing mayor Eric Adams said Mamdani and his followers wanted to “burn churches”. And he stated: “To be Muslim in New York is to expect indignity. But indignity does not make us distinct – there are many New Yorkers who face it. It is the tolerance of that indignity that does. In an era of ever-diminishing bipartisanship, Islamophobia has emerged as one of the few areas of agreement.”
Amen to that. Islamophobia is so normalized that’s it’s not even seen as bigotry by many but, as conservative commentator and former Fox News host Megyn Kelly recently put it, “a sensible position”. It’s so normalized that trafficking in Islamophobia is not career-ending, but often career-elevating. Making breathtakingly racist comments about Muslims certainly didn’t stop Randy Fine from winning a special election earlier this year to represent Florida’s sixth District in Congress. Fine, by the way, is now leading a push to investigate Mamdani’s path to US citizenship in an attempt to denaturalize and deport him.
And Islamophobia hasn’t hurt the career of Shaun Maguire, a partner at the influential venture capital firm Sequoia Capital. In July, Maguire, who has a well-documented history of making inflammatory statements, posted on X that Mamdani “comes from a culture that lies about everything. It’s literally a virtue to lie if it advances his Islamist agenda. The West will learn this lesson the hard way.” Sequoia didn’t take action against him, citing a policy of “institutional neutrality”. In the end, the only person to lose their job was Sequoia’s female COO. Sumaiya Balbale, a practising Muslim quit after Maguire’s comments; the Financial Times reported that she felt her position was untenable.
In the US, Muslims only make up about 1% of the adult population. Media coverage, therefore, disproportionately affects people’s views of Muslims and support for anti-Muslim policies. And there is a huge body of research demonstrating the extent to which the mainstream media in the US has dehumanized Muslims. One 2018 study by Middlebury researchers, for example, found that Muslims were the most negatively portrayed minority in America, “principally due to reporting on foreign conflict zones”.
The reason that someone like Cuomo was so comfortable insinuating that Mamdani was a terrorist sympathizer throughout the election is because the media has embedded the idea that all Muslims are terrorists. A 2019 analysis media coverage found that between 2008 and 2015 terror attacks carried out by Muslims received more than 350% more coverage in the US media than terror attacks committed by non-Muslims. That’s even though attacks by non-Muslims (largely white supremacists) were more prevalent during that time frame.
The mainstream media’s peddling of Islamophobia doesn’t just help politicians run racist campaigns; it helps them pass racist policies. There’s a direct link between the dehumanization of Muslims in the mainstream media and Trump’s Muslim ban. A direct link between decades of the media portraying Muslims as terrorists and US complicity in the genocide in Gaza. While it’s easy to call out the Laura Loomers of the world and their crass Islamophobia, it’s respectable Islamophobia that’s more insidious. The framing of newspaper headlines; the choice of which stories to cover; the way in which prestigious Wall Street Journal and New York Times columnists will casually compare Arabs to bugs and insects.
The New York mayoral election may be over now, but the racism and Islamophobia underpinning it aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. However, Mamdani’s victory does provide a glimmer of hope. The first step in solving a problem is addressing it. And Mamdani has been steadfast in calling out Islamophobia and forcing people to confront it. During his victory speech, Mamdani mentioned the Islamophobic attacks against him once again, and rejected the cynical attempts by his detractors to pit Jews against Muslims.
“[W]e will build a city hall that stands steadfast alongside Jewish New Yorkers and does not waver in the fight against the scourge of antisemitism,” Mamdani said. “Where the more than 1 million Muslims know that they belong – not just in the five boroughs of this city, but in the halls of power. No more will New York be a city where you can traffic in Islamophobia and win an election.”
Inshallah.
