The politics of Islamophobia in the U.S. is inextricably linked with the “war on terror,” and yet, in the last few weeks, the world saw a rather strange constellation of events that may bewilder the uninformed observer. An immigrant-born Muslim who is a self-described Democratic Socialist was not supposed to win a mayoral election in New York under a Trump presidency. Neither is the emir of what was once considered the largest offshoot of Al Qaeda supposed to visit the White House under the same administration. Yet here we are, in 2025. Both of these previously inconceivable things have happened in the space of just one week.
Zohran Mamdani, a proud Ugandan-born immigrant, was elected mayor of New York on a progressive platform of fare-free city buses, universal child care, city-owned grocery stores, a rent freeze on rent-stabilized apartments, and a promise to uphold international legal warrants for Netanyahu’s arrest should he set foot in New York.
Mamdani’s win is poignant considering the country’s current political moment of intensifying ICE raids, assaults on academic freedom and the rights of immigrants and international students, and the uptick in Islamophobia in light of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. Mamdani leaned into his Muslim identity, campaigning in neighborhoods with significant Muslim populations and releasing campaign ads in Arabic, Urdu, and Hindi. Young Muslim voters in New York, who grew up under the mass surveillance, social exclusion, and discrimination of the post-9/11 decades, celebrated Mamdani’s win. For it to happen in New York, as one voter described it, was an “indescribable feeling” of joy.
Though many celebrated Mamdani’s victory, it was met with reactions ranging from skepticism to hysteria by much of the political establishment. Pro-business politicians on both sides of the aisle, Trump’s far-right allies, and Zionist politicians all balked at the prospect of a Muslim Democratic Socialist becoming mayor of the global center of capitalism, lobbing outrageous Islamophobic smears at the new mayor-elect.
Yet, many of Mamdani’s harshest and most openly Islamophobic critics recently welcomed Syria’s current President Ahmad al-Sharaa — a former Al Qaeda militant — to the United States with open arms. Compare the Islamophobic and anti-immigrant slanders against Mamdani to the silence and acceptance, if not outright praise, for al-Sharaa across the political establishment as he made two visits to the U.S. in recent months. The contrast is stark.
Until recently, al-Sharaa was known more commonly by his “nom de guerre” (pseudonym), Abu Muhammad al-Jolani. He commanded the Islamist militant group Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), leading a coalition of militias made up of Syrian and many foreign fighters alike, which launched the offensive that toppled Syria’s former strongman Bashar al-Assad in December of last year. HTS’s predecessor organization, also led by Jolani, was the notorious Jabhat al-Nusra — Al-Qaeda’s former official franchise in Syria before they formally broke ties from the globally-designated terror network in 2016 and renamed themselves. Until Dec. 20 of last year, the U.S. State Department had a $10 million dollar bounty on al-Sharaa’s head.
During al-Sharaa’s visit to the White House last Monday, Trump gifted the new Syrian president a bottle of perfume in a bizarre exchange. “This is men’s fragrance,” Trump said to his Syrian counterpart — the first counterpart from this country to set foot in the White House in nearly 80 years. “It’s the best fragrance,” he said. Al-Sharaa laughed uncomfortably as Trump doused perfume onto his and his foreign minister Asaad al-Shaybani’s necks. Trump then said something that may seem incredulous if it wasn’t Trump who said it: “The other [perfume] is for your wife. How many wives do you have?” he asked. Al-Sharaa assured the president he has only one wife (which is the truth). Trump then patted al-Sharaa’s shoulder and chuckled, “With you guys, I never know.”
Setting aside the insulting stereotype-ridden comment about the number of wives of a president of a Muslim-majority state, al-Sharaa’s visit embodies a duality not often acknowledged about U.S. foreign policy. It is this duality that leads Secretary of State Marco Rubio to peddle outrageous Islamophobic lies about Mamdani’s supposed affiliation with the Muslim Brotherhood, while in the same breath, discuss “counterterrorism” in the White House with a man who led an offshoot of the very group that conducted the 9/11 attacks.
Al-Sharaa’s visit to the White House was preceded by an earlier visit to New York as the first Syrian head of state to speak at the UN General Assembly since Nureddin al-Atassi in 1967. Sharaa not only addressed the UN less than a week after the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks in the middle of New York, but his speech coincided with the outbreak of sectarian massacres in the country he now rules, which targeted Syrians from the Druze minority sect in the province of al-Suwayda, the community’s historical heartland. Since September, the province has been under siege by a combination of Syrian governmental forces and allied militants.
Members of Syria’s Alawite religious sect (the minority to which the former President Assad belonged) also continue to face regular sectarian killings (including a series of massacres killing 1,500 across dozens of villages in the space of three days in March) and kidnappings of women and girls in the coastal governorates of Latakia and Tartous. While many Western and Gulf-funded Arab media outlets often referred to the former Syrian regime as an Alawite regime, it was in reality a nominally secular regime bolstered by various power structures and networks irrespective of sect (including those from the “Sunni majority” now “in power”). This makes the al-Sharaa regime’s collective punishment of an entire sect all the more reprehensible.
In Jolani’s first visit to New York, former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director David Petraeus sat down with him for an interview at the annual Concordia Summit. “You have many fans, and I am one of them,” he said to Jolani with a smile of admiration, “Are you getting enough sleep at night?” This is a full circle moment for Petraeus, who was the prime advocate for Operation Timber Sycamore, a multi-billion-dollar CIA program within the Obama Administration to train and arm so-called “moderate rebels” to topple the former regime. The U.S. banned Jabhat al-Nusra from this program that carried on for years beyond public knowledge, yet al-Nusra ended up obtaining many of the high tech weapons the U.S. intended for these “moderates” anyways in 2014. Folks familiar with the history of U.S. imperialism would recall how the CIA similarly launched “Operation Cyclone” in 1979, which armed and trained “mujahideen” fighters to overthrow the pro-Soviet government of Afghanistan. The dominant elements of the insurgency later became the Taliban and Al-Qaeda.
Sharaa (Jolani) was not just some regular militia leader. His crimes are well-known to people familiar with the Syrian War. This is a man whose group, as recently as 2020, advocated “car bombs … suicide bombers” to target civilians as a deliberate war strategy. Like the deceased former leader of ISIS Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Jolani was a graduate of the American internment facility Camp Bucca in Iraq. With the onset of the Arab Spring protests in 2011, Baghdadi quite literally dispatched Jolani across the border from Iraq to Syria to found Al-Qaeda’s Syrian branch.
Jolani’s militia kept a low profile. Far more disciplined and well-funded (largely thanks to Qatari funding and Turkish intelligence support) than other rebel factions, it possessed an extensive propaganda and recruiting network, and strategically opted not to conduct attacks outside Syrian territory. It thus gained a much larger base than its Iraqi counterpart. It also moderated its implementation of Sharia law and publicly eschewed the Al-Qaeda label. Nonetheless, the group espoused the ideology of takfir — an Arabic term denoting the violent excommunication of fellow Muslims as alleged apostates. It thus subscribed to an ultraconservative, ahistorical interpretation of political Islam that promoted the genocidal subjugation of non-Muslims and heterodox Islamic sects.
Jolani called for indiscriminate targeting of Alawites in 2013, leading to a series of massacres in the Latakia countryside, described by Human Rights Watch as constituting “war crimes.” This was just one instance out of many massacres in the course of fourteen years of war, which targeted Syrians from many sects. The group, like the former regime in Syria, deployed indiscriminate weaponry, used torture and enforced disappearance on thousands of Syrians, journalists, and other political opponents as a tactic in the regions it ruled. It rampantly used child soldiers, including employing them as suicide bombers and even executioners.
In Idlib, the governorate where Jabhat al-Nusra (later HTS) ruled for years outside of the former regime’s control, it sanctioned public executions, including stoning for the alleged crimes of adultery and blasphemy. It massacred a village of Druze in 2015; it seized thousands of Christian properties and banned the open practice of their religion; it forcibly removed the entire province of its Shia and Alawite populations, all the while maintaining a monopoly on fuel and electricity services that suffocated one of Syria’s poorest provinces economically.
But, why does Jolani visit the White House now? His visit comes as Syria, having spent decades under harsh international (particularly U.S.) sanctions, seeks to break out of economic and diplomatic isolation by the West. The U.S. justified these sanctions as punishment for the former Assad regime’s war crimes during the war. But since Jolani has taken power, more than 10,000 people have been killed, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), including 8,000 civilians; that’s higher than the death tolls in Syria in the years 2024 and 2023, combined. In response to Jolani’s visit to the White House, the Treasury suspended sanctions against Syria.
So what’s the trade off? The U.S. did not put Syria through years of economic misery leading to one of the worst hyperinflation crises in the world and a staggering 90% poverty rate because it cares about human rights in Syria. In recent months, officials from the U.S., Israel, and Syria have all expressed desire for a peace and security agreement between Syria and Israel. Jolani’s visit to the White House coincided with Syria agreeing to join the U.S.’s “anti-ISIS coalition,” as if the irony couldn’t get any worse. HTS and ISIS are sworn enemies, to be sure. But the recent political maneuvers by the new regime in Syria point towards Syrian acquiescence to U.S. interests as Jolani seeks to make Syria a willing client state that could eventually normalize relations with Israel. After all, former U.S. envoy to Syria under the first Trump administration, James Jeffery, openly admitted in 2021 that Jolani and his group were an “asset” to the U.S. strategy in Syria.
Although certain people in the media and think tanks claim that Sharaa and his militia have “moved on” from their extremist past, Sharaa openly praised the 9/11 attacks as late as February of 2021. “Anyone from the Islamic or Arab world who tells you they weren’t happy at the time is lying,” he said in an interview with PBS frontline, one of many in a series of media pieces that sought to whitewash the former emir of al-Nusra. This claim is historical revisionism, since the attacks drew widespread condemnation and mourning by statesmen and citizens of Muslim-majority states.
In short, the concerted effort to whitewash Jolani’s legacy is arguably intertwined with the establishment’s desire to sideline left-wing, pro-labor and pro-immigrant movements — in activism and electoral politics (the latter epitomized by the recent attacks against Mamdani’s electoral victory). The last two years of U.S. policy on Gaza have ripped the mask off of the U.S.’s supposed regard for international norms, democratic values and human rights abroad. But a closer look at the U.S.’s history in foreign affairs reveals a far longer history of coups, civil wars, and arming counterrevolutionary, right wing movements, from Nicaragua to Afghanistan (and now Syria) for the sake of securing its interests. In doing so, it has destabilized entire regions, caused the deaths of millions, and empowered many of the same reactionary forces that “blowback” against it, most notably with 9/11.
9/11 ushered in an era of unprecedented pro-war politics, surveillance, and a rampant rise in islamophobia domestically. But Jolani’s visit to the White House truly brings this cycle of violence full circle. A man who was a posterboy for the U.S. “war on terror” has just shook Trump’s hand in the Oval Office whilst the U.S. seeks willing clients in the Middle East to appease its pro-Israel policy. Whether this strategy would bear fruit in the form of a full normalization agreement between Syria and Israel is for the moment, speculative, but there is an undeniable geopolitical convenience at play. This duality is only made possible by historical amnesia promoted by the political establishment and media. In my opinion, this is more irony than we should collectively accept.
