On Monday, the Wall Street Journal published an opinion piece by Matthew Hennessey arguing that Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York, has enabled or signaled tolerance for anti-Semitism, despite his repeated condemnations of anti-Semitic hate. It was—unfortunately, predictably—laden with a casual Islamophobia that I, as a Middle Eastern American, have come to expect. Hennessey calls Mamdani a “zealot” and describes him as “a rabble-rouser in a kaffiyeh.”
But what was most shocking was the appalling image that accompanied the essay: a photograph of a man holding an obviously doctored cut-out of Mamdani’s head with a green Hamas headband emblazoned with meaningless markings meant to imitate Arabic script. It’s difficult to imagine that the Journal would be comfortable publishing such overtly racist tropes about almost any other minority group.
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