Two Muslim women running for local office in Massachusetts say they have had their campaign materials vandalized this month, in what they describe as targeted attacks.
In Cambridge, City Council candidate Ayah Al-Zubi woke up last Tuesday to find that her bike had been stolen and that some of her campaign flyers had been shredded to pieces. “Fuck you” was written across the destroyed material left outside her apartment.
A few days later, in Worcester, which is less than 50 miles from Cambridge, City Councilor Etel Haxhiaj said in a social media post that her home had been hit with a baseball and that the campaign signs outside her house had been knocked down.
Muslim Americans have jumped into politics in record numbers in the last several years. During the 2018 midterm elections, many of them ran in response to former President Donald Trump, who targeted Muslims during his campaign and signed the Muslim travel ban into law as one of his first acts as president. More than 180 candidates who identified as Muslim were on 2020 ballots across 28 states and Washington, D.C., according to one report from a group of social justice organizations.
But Muslim Americans, particularly Muslim women, have faced backlash, bigotry and even violence as they’ve run for positions ranging from local office to Congress.
Just this week, a Massachusetts woman was sentenced to six months probation for calling Maya Jamaleddine, a hijab-wearing Muslim woman on the Melrose City Council, a “terrorist Arab” and telling her “to go back to her country.”
“I’m learning that when you have all these intersectional identities, let alone like just one, that you really become a threat to the system,” Al Zubi told HuffPost.
Al-Zubi, a 22-year-old Harvard alum, launched her race for Cambridge City Council over the summer and has been door-knocking since. She said people have slammed the door in her face when she has introduced herself and her volunteers, who are predominantly…
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