My take: New York Magazine is sanitizing an ideological takeover of New York by presenting Islamist and far-left politics as authentic “SWANA” culture, even when the people elevated as its symbols are not from the region, and the minorities from the places who fled such ideologies are are pushed outside the tent.
What’s at Stake
I have spent years in the Middle East watching what happens when political Islam stops being a slogan and starts determining who belongs. Persia was conquered by Arab Muslim armies in the seventh century. Egypt’s indigenous Coptic civilization survived conquest and centuries of Arabization. Amazigh communities across North Africa are still fighting to preserve languages and identities pushed aside by Arabization. Today, the Islamic Republic persecutes Bahá’ís, Christians, Jews, Sunnis, Sufis and anyone who challenges its state-enforced interpretation of Islam.
That history makes the language of “Habibi City” particularly grotesque. The author, Zaina Arafat, describes a supposedly inclusive “SWANA” community, then explicitly defines membership through political beliefs: supporting Palestinians, Gaza is a “genocide”, social welfare outranks capitalism, and “to care is nonnegotiable.” Later, she writes that SWANA New Yorkers face “xenophobia, Islamophobia, and Zionism,” casually putting Zionism alongside forms of bigotry — which of course is not a neutral description of a diaspora, it is an ideological loyalty test.
The Mamdani section of the article exposes the game. Arafat acknowledges that Zohran Mamdani is a Ugandan-born Indian American Muslim and is “not technically” from Southwest Asia or North Africa. Yet he still becomes the political climax of an article about SWANA power because he is Muslim, vocally anti-Israel and culturally adjacent to the scene she celebrates. She even describes activists expanding the acronym to include South Asians as Muslim political coalitions grow. So what exactly is being represented here: a geographic diaspora, or a religious bloc whose borders expand according to its colonialist ambitions?
The same contradiction runs through the article’s treatment of Jews. Arafat praises a café where Palestinians mingle with Jews, but specifies “anti-Zionist Israelis” as examples of acceptable coexistence. Meanwhile Zionism, the civil rights movement for the Jewish people, is itself listed among the forces supposedly threatening the community. Consider what that means for the enormous number of Jews whose families come from Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Morocco and elsewhere in the region. They are a part of the same geography this new acronym claims to embrace, yet Jewish national identity becomes the contaminant. Inclusion apparently extends to Jews only after they disavow the political identity most Jews actually hold. This is textbook Islamist gaslighting — and the New Yorker is promoting it.
Supporters will say this is simply immigrant communities finding confidence after decades of discrimination — and parts of the article genuinely are about that: bookstores, Arab restaurants, art, music, and immigrants building community in New York. I have no objection to any of it. But there is a world of difference between preserving culture and turning political orthodoxy into the price of admission. Iranians who fled compulsory hijab, Bahá’í persecution or the Islamic Republic’s theocracy should not arrive in America only to be told that their “community” is defined by an Islamist Marxist ideological movement that they never consented to.
The West has a habit of treating Islamism as authentic Middle Eastern “culture” while treating the people who resist it as inconvenient exceptions. Islamism is not “culture.” It is a toxic, violent, and dangerous ideology. That is why some of the fiercest opponents of Islamist rule are Iranians, Arab liberals, Kurds, Christians, ex-Muslims, secular Muslims, Bahá’ís and Jews who know exactly what religious supremacy looks like when it acquires institutional power. These people did not come to America because they wanted Tehran, Cairo or Beirut recreated in Brooklyn. They came because America promised something different: individual rights that do not depend on your religion, tribe or politics.
What’s next?
American media need to stop giving Islamist politics a free pass because it arrives wrapped in the vocabulary of “decolonization,” “solidarity” and “community.” It is the opposite — as history shows time and again. Additionally, the media must stop treating anti-Zionism as an admission ticket for Middle Eastern authenticity. It is not. Jews are an indigenous community to the Middle East, specifically the land of Israel, and to oppose that (i.e. “anti” Zionism) is in and of itself racist and antisemitic to say that only the Jews, as an indigenous MENA community, have no right to self determination. Finally, the West must stop allowing activists to erase Persians, Jews, Copts, Assyrians, Amazigh, Kurds and other minorities while claiming to speak for an entire region. They don’t.
There is nothing progressive about replacing one alleged hierarchy with another movement that seeks to subvert and oppress religious and ethnic minorities as political Islam does. There is nothing “decolonial” about flattening dozens of ancient peoples into a political identity organized around fashionable Western activism and hostility to Zionism. And there is nothing pro-immigrant about importing the ideological battles that drove many immigrants out of the Middle East in the first place.
New York belongs to Muslims, Jews, Christians, Iranians, Arabs, Israelis, secular people and everyone else who accepts the basic American ideal: you are free to practice your culture and your faith, but you do not get to dictate for others what they do, say, or believe.
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