Anti-cop activist vs. Maloney
‘AOC’playbook
A Muslim activist who wants to defund the police and has accused the NYPD of “state-sanctioned violence” is seeking to unseat veteran Democratic US Rep. Carolyn Maloney — by following the same playbook that propelled Alexandria OcasioCortez into Congress.
Rana Abdelhamid, 27, of Queens — a member of the Ocasio-Cortez-backing Democratic Socialists of America — announced her campaign Tuesday with the backing of the influential Justice Democrats group, which now has a click-through fundraising message for her at the top of its Web site.
In 2018, the left-wing organization helped turn Ocasio-Cortez from an unknown community organizer into the progressive darling who scored a stunning upset victory over longtime Rep. Joe Crowley of Queens, then the fourth-most-powerful Democrat in the House, who had been in office since 1998.
Justice Democrats was also instrumental in Jamaal Bowman’s victory last year over 16-term US
Rep. Eliot Engel, who represented The Bronx.
Abdelhamid is best known as an advocate of Muslim women’s rights — which she has tied to an incident in which a man tried to pull a religious head covering off her head when she was 15. But Abdelhamid never reported the alleged hate crime to the NYPD, of which she is deeply critical.
“It was the surveillance and the stop-and-frisk policies of the NYPD after 9/11 that pushed me to organize,” she once said.
“The Muslim community post-9/11 in New York — my neighborhood, my street — experienced a lot of NYPD surveillance, a lot of state-sanctioned violence,” Abdelhamid said in an interview posted on YouTube in March 2020 by the United Nations Association of the USA.
Following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis last year, Abdelhamid co-authored an essay on the Web site of the Muslim Grassroots Movement titled, “Dear Non-Black Muslims: To Be Anti-Racist Is To Help Defund The Police.” Among other things, it claims
that “we don’t actually need policing.”
She’s also the founder and CEO of a nonprofit organization, the International Muslim Women’s Initiative for Self Empowerment, which runs the Malikah women’s collective Web site. The IRS granted it tax-exempt status as a public charity in 2017, retroactive to June 2014, records show.
A spokeswoman for Abdelhamid’s campaign claimed the group filed short-form tax-exempt returns — which are required for nonprofits with $200,000 or more in annual receipts — for 2018 and 2019.
Spokeswoman Sarafina Chitika provided images of only the first
page of each four-page IRS Form 990-EZ. But even though the forms clearly state “Open to Public Inspection” — and the IRS says charities “must make available” their returns upon request — any and all dollar figures were completely blacked out.
Chitika didn’t respond when asked why that information was withheld or why she didn’t provide the complete documents.
Maloney, 75, has served in Congress since 1993 — before Abdelhamid was born — and chairs the powerful House Committee on Oversight and Reform.
Maloney’s campaign didn’t respond to a request for comment.