AhlulBayt News Agency (ABNA): Zohran Mamdani, a 34-year-old politician and the first Muslim to serve as mayor of New York, has sparked widespread political and social reactions across the United States. Alongside celebrations of his victory over Andrew Cuomo, a significant surge of misleading information and anti-Muslim hate speech has spread across social media.
Reports indicate that a recent attack by an Afghan national on U.S. National Guard personnel near the White House, an individual said to have been struggling with mental health issues, has been used as a pretext to amplify Islamophobic narratives online. Extremist users have circulated inflammatory posts targeting Muslims, immigrants, and asylum seekers.
A review of media and online activity shows that several accounts have deliberately escalated tensions by posting and reposting old, decontextualized videos. One example is a 2012 video of congregational Muslim prayer in London, repeatedly shared with the false claim that it depicts “prayers inside Westminster Abbey”. Similar misleading clips from New York have also been recirculated to provoke anti-Muslim sentiment.
Analysts say this coordinated pattern, from anonymous profiles to fabricated networks, seeks to exploit public anxieties and portray Muslims as a societal threat.
Yassin Bouzour, a sociology researcher, noted in an interview that the backlash to Mamdani’s victory continues a historical pattern of “manufacturing doubt and suspicion” toward immigrants and Muslims in the West. According to him, such waves, drawing on long-standing stereotypes about “demographic change” and “identity,” reinforce structural Islamophobia and can influence public perceptions, the situation of migrants, and global narratives about Muslims.
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