Zohran Mamdani won by being himself – and his victory has revealed the Islamophobic ugliness of others | Nesrine Malik
ZThe astonishing victory of Ohran Mamdani in the primary of New York town hall was the story of two cities and two Americas. In one, a young man with a progressive policy full of hope clashed against the decomposition gods of the establishment, with their giant funding and their networks and amendments of democratic scions, and won. In another, in a appalling paroxysm of racism and Islamophobia, a Muslim anti-Semitic has taken over the most important city in the United States, in order to impose a socialist / Islamist regime. Like effluents, spines and maculates, anti-Muslim hatred spread without control and undisputed after Mamdani’s victory. It takes a lot in the United States to shock these days, but Mamdani has managed to stir or expose, an obscene degree of integrated prejudices.
Politicians, public figures, members of the Administration of Donald Trump and the Cesspit of Social Media Clout-Chasers have all combined to produce what can only be described as a collective self-induced hallucination; An image of a burqa wrapped the statue of freedom; Deputy Chief of the White House, Stephen Miller, declaring that Mamdani’s victory is what happens when a country fails to control immigration. The member of the Republican Congress Andy Ogles decided to call Mamdani “Little Muhammad” and asked to have it distorted and expelled. He was called a “Hamas terrorist sympathizer” and a “jihadist terrorist”.
It is a measure of how the reaction was racist that Donald Trump calling Mamdani a “communist madman” seems to be retained in comparison. Some of the answers were so hysterical that I could not often say what was real and what was parody. Because the idea that Mamdani, whose style is, above all, seriousness, was an agent of a sinister Islamist sleeper is clearly a joke.
But this is not a joke, and if this is the case, it is on me for again, after all these years, underestimating what Muslims in the public sphere make people of people. And how much many are comfortable with anti-Muslim hatred. And why shouldn’t they be? To date, the most senior personalities of Mamdani’s own party, Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, have not called this attack, and the politicians and the personalities who have made them suffer either censorship. Because, fundamentally, anti-muslim hatred, like all racism when it normalizes, prosperous when there is a systemic blessing by not even recording its offensivity.
But apathy towards assaults against Mamdani is because it is a foreigner in a more significant way, not only in its religious origin. His crime is not that of the audacity to be a Muslim and a politician – he could have been “adopted” if he was a conventional democratic system – but to have strong opinions on the economy and politics that mark him as a challenger of traditional orthodoxies concerning capitalism and Israel.
Given his leftist opinions on taxation and rent control, and objections to the Massacre of Palestinians on the Sou in the United States, a reaction to Mamdani was still likely. But he did a lot to counter him. He made in -depth explanations of his abhorrence of anti -Semitism, his commitment to fight against all the crimes of hatred and the fact that his economic program is based on the city of the city, from his food to his child care, more affordable.
His offense was in his reluctance to sweeten his principles, without making the line on Israel, and not making frankly embarrassing affirmations, like those who run against him, that Israel would be his first foreign trip. He refrained from getting rid of himself by serial convictions of sentences which have been arbitrarily erected as decisive tests of the acceptability of a Muslim in the public domain.
Mamdani’s refusal to reject the expression “globalizing the intifada”, on the grounds that he expresses “a desperate desire for equality and equal rights to defend Palestinian human rights” has been seized as an indication that he supports a sort of violent jihad – a reading that ignores his frequent affirmations which have the right of Israel and to condemn to any violence. What are we doing here?
There is no degree to which Mamdani could have become acceptable Muslim while holding these opinions – even if they are clearly universal enough to receive emphatic support from New Yorkers, including Jews who voted for him, and the Jewish candidate Brad Lander, who approved him. He cannot be sufficiently secular, quite American or enough elite, as the son of a filmmaker and a teacher, to hold a policy that will not be reduced to his intrinsically suspicious identity.
Even in behavior, he explained how he must constantly measure his tone, lest he be spread like a “beast”. And in this, he reflects a broader and exasperating reality – where Muslims and Pro -Palestinians are condemned as threatening, when there is a colossal attack against their rights and their security around the world, simply to oppose an undeniable crime perpetrated in Gaza. Detention and expulsion procedures against activists such as Mahmoud Khalil in the United States, the dissemination and securitization of speech and pro-Palestinian activism in the United Kingdom and Europe, the messenger is killed, then supervised as an attacker.
But smear and scandalous diversions and extrapolations will not change the facts on the ground, which are that the Israeli State occupies the West Bank, samping and killing the Palestinians in Gaza and accused of war crimes and genocide, all with the sponsorship of the United States and the support of Western regimes. In this sense, Mamdani’s victory East A threat, because it reveals how finally, all attempts to maintain an indefensible and intolerable situation have lost their grip on the growing number of people who think by themselves.
Mamdani is not even mayor yet, and he will probably face a growing campaign using his identity as a means of discrediting his beliefs, both economic and political. And this is where the response to his victory is both alarming and potentially propulsive, like the moist accumulation of the final rupture of a fever. Mamdani is where he is because he is not alone. Not by a long time. And by drawing such a naked and explicit anti-muslim hatred, Mamdani inadvertently revealed the ugliness and the weakness not only of his opponents, but of the broader political establishment, as well as their anti-democratic pulses.
By pulling them, Mamdani has shown how prejudices rarely concern individuals, but the fear that the opinions of marginalized minorities can ever become powerful majority. In this breed mayor, from Palestine to local police services, anti-Muslim hatred is not only a repulsive phenomenon confined to Mamdani, it is a barricade against the desires of the voting public. Once people start to establish this connection, it’s really over.
