New York just weathered one of the ugliest political seasons of the last 50 years, with multiple public figures pumping out literally thousands of divisive, hateful messages about Muslims that were seen and heard by millions. Unfortunately, the bigotry has continued postelection and will poison our city until and unless a vocal majority demands it come to an end.
On the night of Zohran Mamdani’s election victory, Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, posted congratulations on social media, writing, “New Yorkers faced a clear choice — between hope and fear — and just like we’ve seen in London — hope won.” But Khan, the first Muslim mayor of London, knows all too well that even after hope wins, hatred hangs around like an angry drunk in an alley, spoiling for a rematch.
The political ads were part of a deluge of online messaging, mostly on X, that only accelerated as Election Day approached. “We found a huge spike in online hate and fearmongering targeting Muslims in the aftermath of Mamdani’s primary win, blending racism, anti-Muslim bigotry, red-baiting, and anti-immigrant sentiment into one dangerous narrative,” Raqib Hameed Naik, the executive director of the Washington-based Center for the Study of Organized Hate, told immigrant-oriented news website Documented. The center issued a report after studying 6,669 public social media posts about Mamdani in a 17-day window during the campaign and found that just under 2,000 of the, “frame Islam itself, not any policy detail, as a public threat.”