Muslim writer claims Trump-Mamdani meeting reveals ‘most effective antidote to Islamophobia’

This has been a constant theme of “Islamophobia” propagandists for years. It’s based on the false premise that “Islamophobia,” broadly understood as dislike of Islam or Muslims, stems from ignorance and prejudice. One doesn’t know what Islam teaches, or dislikes “brown people” for some reason. Muslims are of all races, as are Islamic jihadis, but that quite obvious fact never enters into these discussions. The antidote to “Islamophobia” is then posited: if someone simply gets to know a Muslim, one will see that they’re just ordinary folks like everyone else. No reason to fear. No reason to be concerned about the sharply rising Muslim population in Europe and the U.S.

Some years ago I was speaking at some university and got into a conversation before the event with three kindly young Muslim students, one of whom asked me in due course if I knew any Muslims personally, and if that relationship made me want to revise any of my writings. That young man was working from the same false premise. He looked surprised and annoyed when I told him no, that I wouldn’t change a thing, because nothing I had written was based on ignoring or denying the fact that Muslims could be good people. I was discussing the ideology taught in the Qur’an and Sunnah, not the people. Articles such as the one below appear to be designed to obscure that distinction, so that no one ever gets around actually to examining the ideology of Islam. Doing so could lead to “Islamophobia,” so it’s much easier simply to try to intimidate people into thinking that the problem is really just one of a racial prejudice that any decent person should be ashamed of harboring in this enlightened age.

“Islamophobia Crushed by Humanising Muslims,” by Sarchi Aziz, S2J News, November 26, 2025:

On 21st November 2025 came a political plot twist no one expected. President Donald Trump and New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani met in the Oval Office. A moment widely expected to be tense, instead turned into one of the most unexpectedly calm and constructive political encounters of the year. Their exchange was measured, direct and largely cooperative. It has already triggered an intense reaction online and across media platforms.

What made the meeting remarkable was largely the shift in tone, posture and interaction between two men who, until now, had publicly criticised each other with sharp rhetoric. In the lead-up to the meeting, Trump regularly invoked London’s Mayor Sadiq Khan when speaking about Mamdani, framing the two as parallel figures. Both are Muslim mayors of major global cities, and both had been targeted by Trump in similar terms. Trump had previously called Khan “a terrible, terrible mayor” claimed London had been “so changed” and suggested that it was moving toward “Sharia law”. The criticism was rarely about policy; it was about who Khan was. A Muslim man.

When Mamdani won the New York mayoral race, Trump revived parts of that same vocabulary. He described Mamdani as “a communist” and implied his win threatened American “sovereignty”, warning that New York could follow London’s supposed decline. The comparison circulated widely on social media, where many repeated the criticism without understanding the real metrics of London’s governance. London’s crime, economic performance and tourism figures showed no such collapse….

The meeting doesn’t guarantee a new political era. But it does offer a glimpse of what politics could look like when confrontation is set aside long enough for leaders to engage on shared challenges. That matters in a climate where the Trump era accelerated divisive politics to an unprecedented degree, going beyond reshaping the United States and feeding far-right extremism in parallel across the UK, Europe and Australia. If anything, the meeting proved that humanisation remains the most effective antidote to Islamophobia.