By now, many of you will have heard that the next mayor of New York City is Zohran Mamdani, a 34-year-old Muslim man of South Asian heritage and Ugandan background. He is the youngest mayor the city has elected in a century and its first Millennial in the role. Politically, Mamdani is a Democratic Socialist with a deep record of critiquing capitalist and colonial systems. He is also the son of filmmaker Mira Nair and scholar Mahmood Mamdani.
For anyone following the race, the smear campaigns against him were impossible to miss, steeped in anti-Muslim racism, fear-mongering, and hate. While some attacks targeted his socialist politics, largely from billionaires eager to protect their ill-gotten wealth, the most aggressive smears were about his faith. They played on the old, familiar trope that a Muslim in power is inherently dangerous.
There is no doubt that this panic was driven in part by Mamdani’s unapologetic anti-Zionist stance, an ethical position shared by many committed to equity and justice. Yet, as always, critics weaponized the deliberate conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism to silence any challenge to the violence of the Israeli settler-colonial project.
The morning after his victory, right-wing and Zionist commentators filled timelines with expressions of sadness, anxiety, fear, depression, and even grief. I cannot claim to know what was in their minds, but the reaction was undeniably irrational – irrational fear, irrational hate, irrational beliefs, irrational demonization. For some, the idea of a Muslim man holding power in one of the world’s most influential cities was unthinkable. A few even suggested that New Yorkers would flee the city out of fear of Mamdani’s leadership. The online world was full of comments around how New York City would now be governed by sharia law (which is a whole other discussion) and that Jews were no longer safe.
Anti-Muslim racists are terrified of Muslims having any power or influence, especially power that could shape policy or public life.
For more on this fear, here is an excellent discussion hosted by influencer and podcaster Matt Bernstein. It’s a long conversation but I highly recommend it. They get into the Islamophobia/anti-Muslim hate at the root of the fearmongering.
As I watched this response unfold, I couldn’t help but see parallels with my own experience at UPEI. I have written previously about the institutional anti-Muslim racism I faced, but something new clicked into place as I watched the fear around Mamdani take shape.
In late May 2025, the UPEI Faculty Association sent a letter to the University raising concerns about my anti-Zionist and anti-casteist social media posts and questioning whether they could be perceived as “bias.” They asked that I be temporarily removed from responsibilities involving Faculty Association members while the matter was reviewed. A second letter in early June requested that I be excluded from joint equity work with them, from offering EDI education or training to their members, and from applying or administering any policies that might affect them. The complaint was clear – they were fearful of me and assumed me to be dangerous for Jewish faculty on campus.
I am unclear what they assumed I would do to said faculty, considering those faculty were tenured and their jobs safe, while my position had no protection. The most I could do was facilitate education on anti-Zionism.
Even UPEI, in their campus-wide announcement of my firing (see below; even though they didn’t use my name, this move was indeed incredibly callous) suggested that my removal from this position was to maintain safety on campus.
The University of Prince Edward Island’s (UPEI) Office of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Human Rights (EDIHR) reflects the University’s commitment to advancing systemic change, improving institutional accountability, and fostering a culture of equity, respect, and human rights.
In keeping with this commitment, I am writing to inform you of a recent workplace assessment of the EDIHR office, which commenced in April 2025 and was initiated by the interim Vice-President of People and Culture to provide the EDIHR team with a safe and structured opportunity to share their experiences and identify both the strengths and barriers within their work environment.
The assessment revealed concerns about workplace culture and leadership that fell short of our values of diversity, equity, and inclusion. UPEI is implementing recommendations from the assessment, including changes to leadership. We are committed to fostering a safe, respectful, and inclusive environment for every member of our community and to upholding the highest standards of leadership and workplace culture. (emphasis mine)
I began to understand how that story – the myth of the threatening Muslim – had shaped my firing at UPEI. There was no warning, no justification, no due process, no clear rationale. The decision was abrupt to the point of absurdity. Indeed to the point that even my coach, hired by UPEI to assist me, was shocked. But it becomes legible when you recognize that they had already cast me as a threat. That narrative allowed them to bypass fairness and move with a speed and severity that would never have been used on someone who wasn’t Muslim, and certainly not on someone who wasn’t openly anti-Zionist.
Watching the panic around Mamdani helped me finally understand something I had been circling for months. Fear does not need truth. It only needs a story—and the story of the “dangerous Muslim” has been circulating for generations.
It is a story that lifted strangers into hysteria at the thought of Mamdani leading their city. And it is a story that allowed UPEI to remove me without warning, without reason, without dignity. They acted as if something urgent and catastrophic needed to be prevented. They acted as though I were a danger that required swiftness.
I was never that danger. None of us are.
But this is how anti-Muslim narratives work: they make the impossible feel plausible, the implausible feel necessary, and the irrational feel reasonable. They don’t just distort public discourse, they distort reality. They turn fear into policy and suspicion into action. They turn ordinary Muslim people – leaders, educators, neighbours – into something monstrous in the imagination of others. And they enable actions that would otherwise be unthinkable. And until those narratives are dismantled, Muslims who hold power, even gentle, principled, justice-oriented power, will always be treated as threats.
The story was never true. But it was powerful enough to shape both a mayoral election and the end of my time at UPEI.
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