Last summer, when I was eight months pregnant, I found myself in the velvet–dark glow of the Beacon Theatre for a comedy show. At one point in the night—put on by Egyptian American comic Ramy Youssef—Youssef pulled Palestinian Algerian student activist Mahmoud Khalil onto the stage, and then, unexpectedly, Zohran Mamdani walked out—our Muslim mayor-elect and someone whom I had been working alongside for years as an activist. It was the political moment that even I, a Muslim political organizer born in Queens, could never have imagined.
The Center for the Study of Organized Hate found that after Zohran accepted the Democratic Party’s candidacy for mayor, anti-Muslim and xenophobic tweets reached unprecedented levels, with 35,522 messages variously labeling Zohran as a terrorist or radical, reaching more than 1.5 billion people. And all that did not occur in a vacuum but amid an increasingly hostile political environment both across the country and abroad. At the Malikah Safety Center, the mutual-aid hub I run, we heard from hijabi nurses who were followed home from working the night shift. Workers who were fired for their political opinions. Teenagers disciplined for wearing pro-Palestinian pins. Grandmothers afraid to speak Arabic on the bus. This city has not yet learned how to keep Muslim communities safe. If anything, our Muslim mayor’s visibility has only revealed how fragile the progress has been.
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