It first hit me in February 2025. I was in New York City. I ran into two friends denying the murder and firebombings of Jews. It was easy. We were blithely unaware of, or pleased with, the barrage of antisemitic molotov cocktails, shootings, stabbings, vehicle rammings, arson, terror and mass-murder plots, beatings, death threats, and sexual violence. There was an ease to hanging out. Later, when I bumped into my farm-to-table pistachio fermenter protesting at a synagogue, near the thoroughly passé metal detectors sponsored by Jews who can’t stop complaining about bomb threats, we were just … together. This wasn’t my living room, but it was acceptable, sensually virtuous, to openly hate Jews in the public streets of New York. We finally had the audacity of the Republican party, or my hometown. Just like in the blād, back home, but it was Brooklyn. “Oh yeah,” I said to myself, “there’s no Sharia law in Brooklyn.” Whitewashing that felt powerful, in a way that was different from Tucker Carlson, because I did it while inhaling fresh Karak tea leaves.
This feeling was new. In 2015, when it was tough to be me, Columbia University was ranked America’s most antisemitic university, and my fav professor, PLO spokesman and father-of-modern-terrorism–BFF Rashid Khalidi, harassed Jews on campus. Khalidi supported our vibey crew linked to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood through AMP—Students for Justice in Palestine, now iconic for celebrating decapitation (when beheading is claimed accidental). Our 2015 SJP did integral-grassroots-coldbrew activism, like posting thatJews exaggerated the Holocaust and that we should let Jews burn silently (critique of government). To name-drop hotty Columbia profs I still want to be inside the anus of, Hamid Dabashi said “these people” have “a vulgarity of character bone-deep and structural to the skeletal vertebrae of a culture.” Um, I knew him, that’s not antisemitism; it’s criticism of policy. Vertëbrãe in Arabic means “resistance” and is meant to evoke the mysterious death of Jesus.
Suffice it to say, it was terrifying to be a Middle Easterner, or more accurately SWANA. Oh, what’s SWANA? Let me take a break from sipping out of my artisanal Egyptian ceramic vessel and educate you. I’m presenting SWANA as a decolonial corrective, and in the very same breath, I’m erasing all other indigenous people from SWANA. Sorta like the playbook of a colonizer. The even bigger irony? All the cultures that I so wittingly erased from SWANA were, at one time or place, persecuted and colonized by Arabization or Islamists.
So all these people I demanded aren’t SWANA, technically are, but it’s … complicated. They’re not the cool kind of SWANA. And of course, I’m referring to the cool kind of colonization, where darling words like “conquest” and “expansion” are used instead. You know the one. If Muslim Arabs did it, it didn’t really happen. Kind of like “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” or “it’s not cheating if you’re on vacation.” Arabization and Islamization can’t be colonialism because brown, right?
If Muslim Arabs did it, it didn’t really happen. Kind of like “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” or “it’s not cheating if you’re on vacation.”
I’m redefining SWANA to include the definition I feel comfortable with, deciding that SWANA isn’t a geographical term, but a political ideology. Well, my political ideology—the one that says you cease to have a conscience if you don’t agree with even the fictional part. Caring is nonnegotiable, but, luckily, you can care about lying. Like the lie of reducing the essence of SWANA culture to anti-Jewish narrative to trend in Greenpoint, or referring to Oct. 7th exclusively as the start of Israeli violence, when that day was actually a mass murder of Israeli citizens. Or the lie that antisemitism is only “I hate Jews” and not the recurring manifestation that Jews may live among others as minorities, but cannot possess political sovereignty. That’s why we also redefined the word “Zionism” to mean support of the Israeli government or opinions on war. FYI if you use any Middle Eastern spices, it’s appropriation—and that includes salt.
Keeping it realer than Hamas executing Palestinian civilians, anyone who disagrees with me is a genocide-loving baby killer. My fav Columbia psych prof says that’s not narcissism, but how genocide works. Isn’t that what happened in Darfur? The genocided Sudanese had a centuries-long history of massacring militias before Darfur was even declared a state, and then mass murdered Omar al-Bashir and the Janjaweed? That’s exactly why it’s okay that Muslim regimes massacred and colonized Jews for centuries, long before the reestablishment of Israel.
Like any unbiased journalist, I was intentional when referencing Sept. 11th, especially in a magazine titled, “New York.” I made sure there wasn’t one word about the 2,977 victims, their families and communities still reeling from personal and collective loss. I thought it most efficient to omit any other culture—Latinos, Hindus, Bangladeshis, Chaldeans, Indians, Christians, Jews, and other New Yorkers—also targeted because they were perceived to be otherwise “foreign.” Despite the enormous post-9/11 spike in anti-Muslim hate crimes, antisemitic incidents remained substantially more numerous, even in 2001. And after jihadists crashed humans into one of the iconic landmarks of NYC, Jews found (and still find) themselves targets of grotesque conspiracy theories claiming they had foreknowledge or actual responsibility. While none of this diminishes the discrimination, it does make my decision to present the aftermath primarily through Muslim pain feel … complicated. I have to center it entirely on my narrative, never forgetting or omitting the response of my blād, who handed out candy in jubilant cheers after 9/11 in my very intimate town of Nablus.
That’s what “never forget” means, right?
After I totally recognized that my father didn’t get blown up on Sept. 11th, I presented changing his name to make dinner reservations as though concealing one’s ethnicity due to collective suspicion is historically novel or uniquely Muslim. Obviously it isn’t, but I guess I’m just whimsical like my embroidered eyeglasses. Getting high on omission again, I precluded the substantially longer NY history of so many ethnic minorities pressured to be less ethnically identifiable. What a coincidence that it’s also part of NY Jewish history, experiencing an extraordinarily well-documented version of exactly that phenomenon for decades. I guess cosmic serendipity just runs in my vertebrae.
The mutilation of Jewish civilians was truly a kind of cultural renaissance for me and my buddies. So we did what any social justice humanitarians do. We protested, wrote op-eds, and stabbed a Jew outside a Jewish community center screaming “Free Palestine.” We punched, physically assaulted, shoved, and threatened to shoot Jews, chanting “Al-Qassam you make us proud! Take another soldier out!” and “Hamas we love you. We support your rockets too!” We vandalized Jewish homes and “cemented” the sewage system clogging sexy little toilets. We bashed a Jewish head, trapped Jews inside a library, spat on and threw stones at Jews screaming, “go back to Poland.” Our organizations advocated violence and demanded gratitude for not murdering Zionists—thank you!—we barred Jews from campus and hospitalized a man while screaming “dirty Jew.” And that’s just around Columbia University. Ivy Leagues are known for overachievers. That, and being bought by Qatar for billions. I’m not trying to show off, but our pro-Hamas encampments responded comparably to MEK, the Red Guards, the Totskyists, the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries and the Komsomol. Don’t know who they are? Probably because these young people were violently killed, suppressed, or imprisoned by the political movements they helped advance. Big whoop. Shrug, shrug. I support the pattern. Judenrein!
And then, slowly, out of the denial of rape, came our rebirth. A cultural ecosystem started to bloom like a garden of anal worms. Much like Mamdani’s map of cultural enclaves, where he and his team erased Italians, Greeks, Puerto Ricans, Jews, and the Irish, I too, wanted to leave out the very cultures that not only built New York City, but also make up a larger percent of NYC today than almost all the cultures that were included, Jews being the largest in the city. Erasing them was easy, now that Qatar indirectly funds New York Magazine.
Photo: Contributor to MEE, which has documented connections to Hamas-affiliated media
If there is a physical embodiment of the new SWANA scene it’s Barzakh Café in Crown Heights—one of the most historically Jewish as well as currently Jewish neighborhoods in NYC, and frankly, on earth. A woman I call an Arab-Jewish singer (sweet given Arabized Jews weren’t always considered Arab by Arabs) is allowed into Barzakh because she libels Israel. She’s one of the only Jews who deserve to live.
Barzakh deserves all the credit for the NYC qawwali scene—one we’re grateful Islamists didn’t wipe out, so they could properly entertain us. The principled journalist in me couldn’t help quoting a café user; “consider how many Arabic speakers are forced to learn Hebrew as a means of survival.” I didn’t include the number of Muslims in the world—two billion (nearly the same number of Christians), and the over 400 million who speak Arabic, compared with 15 million Jews worldwide, about nine million who speak Hebrew.
Does your brain hurt? Let’s give you a migraine. Arabic is the official language of 22 countries, spread through the Arab-Islamic conquests and Hebrew is the state language of one country. Now to make your brain truly blow right off, of the 400 million Arabic speakers, many are from imperial “expansion.” Hebrew? Approximately zero. Finally, to sh-t on your brain bits, Arabic has special legal status in Israel and is taught in Israeli schools. Barzakh couldn’t find one Arabic speaker forced to learn Hebrew for survival. Go Barzakh!
Does your brain hurt? Let’s give you a migraine. Arabic is the official language of 22 countries, spread through the Arab-Islamic conquests and Hebrew is the state language of one country.
I had no idea why Iranians and Arabs were cast as enemies, until God came to me in a dream to tell me that heartthrob-Hamas are proxy terrorists for the Iranian regime. Yes, that Iranian regime—mass murdering Iranians who don’t comply with Sharia law. Yes, that Sharia law, the one from the blād. I even met the ghost of one Iranian boy who was raped with a hosepipe while being forcibly disappeared commenting, “my Farsi’s going haywire, anyone wanna practice?” The ghost whispered about how tens of thousands of Iranians had been killed by the IRGC in just days (nearly half the Gaza death toll over years of war) and the war I claimed was “on Iran,” was actually on the IRGC. “Oooooh, that’s why you can’t find Iranians and hijabis sitting together— because Iranians don’t want to sip Sadaf with fans of their family’s terrorists, many murdered over a hijab, or chortle with politicians using socialism to enact a 1979-style Islamist takeover. Oh, that’s right, 1-9-7-9 … I knew that number was important, I just thought it was the combination to the lock on our spice cabinet. Regardless, our inclusive café does let in ghosts, just not Zionists.
When exactly SWANA became the popular-homophobic-bully-quarterback-at-school depends. Maybe around the murder of George Floyd and BLM? Seems fated: The Muslim-Black connection goes back to the trans-Saharan slave trade, where Arabs enslaved Africans for over 1200 years, playing a significant role in today’s Black Muslim populations. And the same ideology is responsible for the current African slavery in Qatar. Black people are still enslaved in Muslim-majority countries, including Mauritania, and Sudan and Arab states have the highest prevalence of modern slavery including race-based slavery. Islamists murdered nearly 18,915 Nigerian Christians in the last six years. So when my article alleged black people respond to oppression with coolness, my community can take credit for that oppression. We appropriate the oppression of many minorities. Except the dirty Jews who control everything being 0.2% of the entire world, even antisemitism, because it helps them get cash and eat babies.
Although he’s not SWANA in geography, or reality, I want to hyper-focus on Zorhan Mamdani because he’s SWANA in his hatred of Jews. As an assemblymember, he sat with his role model dad who contends suicide bombers are soldiers, the CIA created “American Jihad,” Abe Lincoln’s policies are just like Hitler’s, teddy bear Butcher of Uganda should be defended, and that Germany’s postwar Jewish absence proved Hitler’s “Final Solution” worked. This is right after Mamdani’s “hip-hop” “career,” when he “sang” lyrics praising a “charity” convicted of funneling money to Hamas. What can I say, he had the humility of a rapper whose mommy put his “great” song in one of her movies. The humble smile of a nepo-baby blaming the FBI for the Al-Queda terrorist whose death President Obama deemed a “significant milestone” against terrorism. Definitely, like, fight the power, but with a fake African accent.
While an unremarkable assemblyman, Mamdani made the cool conspiratorial claim that Israeli military influence is embedded in, or is the origin of, American police brutality and racism. Ironic (cool ironic) that the collaboration was because of 9/11, training from counterterrorism experts. But I couldn’t blame Mamdani for the lie, he had cultivated a chic, avant-garde commandeering of police brutality against the black community.This year, Mamdani came as the mayor.
How progressive.
It softly empowered him to back a candidate blaming 9/11 on Islamophobia and white supremacy, decline to sign a resolution condemning the Holocaust, and have a personal and political bigoted frat-brosef with Nick Fuentes’s twin, who flaunts the Twin Towers exploding, in his home studio. “I believe that any state that privileges one religion over another is one that I can’t tell you I support,” Mamdani said about Israel, which has no state religion, but is a homeland for Jews, a f–king ethnic group, by DNA evidence, where diverse communities have freedom of religion. One might ask, why then did Mamdani attend the Pakistan Day parade? You heard that right—the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, where they quite exactly privilege one religion over another, and religious minorities face discrimination and straight up murder for not being … Muslim. Not hypocrisy, or even utter bullshit, but resistance. That honorable word perfectly explains waving the Pakistani flag in the light summer breeze like a true shill of oppression.
The mayor warned of “dark money” and “a time of monsters,” but only named names with one single group. Guess. Which. One. Only by coincidence, they’re Jewish. Mamdani doesn’t see Jewish. His best friend is Jewish. He voted for Bernie Sanders. Villainize any other lobby group? Like CUSEF, as the U.S determined China committed genocide against Uyghurs. Are USINPAC not monsters as India is accused of torture, extrajudicial killings and persecution of minorities? Nah, we define democracy the way it suits us. That’s the privilege of soft, cuddly power relegated to mourners of Hamas snipers.
At a basic funding level, are the organizations nearly identical? Not in my cosmic universe. CAIR-linked PACs provided financial support for Mamdani, but that’s for the profoundly legitimate reason that CAIR’S documented historical ties to the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood network constitute light money? Light equals good. Dark equals Jew. AMP itself effectively suggests declining direct donations isn’t ideological, or an aversion to engage politically, but to offer donors tax deductions. Is it undemocratic that AIPAC uses the same money and political tools as Planned Parenthood, United Federation of Teachers, NYC Labor Council, climate lobbies like Sunrise NYC and Sierra Club Atlantic, Service Employees International Union—all of whom were either financially relevant or spent independently on his behalf? Not according to NY’s fakest Knicks fan.
Lobbying to keep half the world’s Jews alive (while rocketed from four terrorist systems) makes you pro-genocide and of particular politics. Again, it’s not hypocrisy, but sort of like attacking New Yorkers for buying vacant property, while owning vacant property in Uganda, worth about 50–250 times what most Ugandans earn in an entire year.
Listen, the mayor doesn’t hate Jews all by himself; he supports BDS, a movement with documented overlaps linked to U.S.-designated terrorist organizations. He advocates for the caricature-esque, Soviet style antisemitism of the DSA and supports his private person modeling for the cover of one of the world’s most famous magazines. Mrs. Private Person works for public authors calling Jews “vampires,” demons” and “gouls,” listens to “Israel gon’ die bitch” (policy critique), celebrates October 7th and political violence, and denies mass rape of Israelis. You know, the ones where Hamas chopped off a girl’s breast while raping her, or shot a girl in the head while raping her, genuinely making it look fun to be SWANA adjacent.
While it has all been beautiful to witness, none of this means we’re not still the cool victims. Even with all our velvety fluffy power, we still have to withstand xenophobia, Islamophobia, and Zionism—do you see what I did there? I structured the sentence carefully. I used legendary propaganda from the 1918 White Army and Soviet disinformation from the 1970s to make a tenet of Jewish indigeneity and survival synonymous with racism and colonialism—the world’s greatest evil. My shining moment, Qatar and my professors are too proud. Maybe I’ll get to write another think-piece on casually invoking the Six-Day War as a grassroots Palestinian survival philosophy, instead of how it truly started—with Palestinian guerrilla groups attacking Israel, Egypt moving a massive military force and closing the Straits of Tiran, Syrian artillery fire, and diverting the headwaters of the Jordan River.
It all comes down to entitlement. Jews feeling entitled to autonomy, indisputably just like every other ethnic group in the world, is something that my community has to endure. The entitlement of one Jewish majority country, among the mere 27 Islamic states, and the 50 Arab-majority countries, not one a democracy. It’s what I decided democracy is—my quiet refusal to disappear, while loudly disappearing others. Much like the man Mamdani said he was (mis)quoting, Antonio Gramsci was notorious for underestimating levels of antisemitism in a specific community. The community Gramsci defended ended up allying with the Nazis. Resistenza! I wonder what the community we defend will do.
I can’t tell you, because I’m presuming you don’t speak the native tongue of the centuries-old colonial culture currently assuming NYC, but I can say that it will be cool. And cool is king. King of Habibi City.
Alexandra Ozeri is a Los Angeles-based writer whose work has appeared in Reductress, The Belladonna, The Foreigner, Flexx, Robot Butt, and the Jewish Journal. She is currently developing a pilot with the Jewish Writers Institute.
