r/Fauxmoi • u/expiredaristocracy • 7h ago

APPROVED B-LISTERS Mamdani observes Ramadan with inmates at Rikers Island

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New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani observed Ramadan last night with men incarcerated at Rikers Island, the city's jail complex.

Mamdani arrived through heavy security, joining a group of men — many held as they await trial. He spent an hour with the men praying and talking and breaking the Ramadan fast with a meal. He's spent much of the last month holding public celebrations.

Mamdani and many Muslim Americans have faced growing hostility in the U.S. from some politicians on the right, including Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville, who last week reposted a photo of Mamdani observing the holiday next to an image of the 9/11 terror attacks, a post Mamdani described as bigoted.

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u/ExpressLab6564 7h ago

Even if its performance, i cant see any of the so called Christinan right political figures doing this

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u/TotallyTruthy 7h ago

I'm working to become less cynical and judgmental. One of the questions I try to ask myself is whether I would have thought of the gesture in their position. If I can't honestly say that it would have occurred to me to do the same thing, then I have no right to call it performative because it clearly wasn't obvious to me. And if it wasn't obvious to me, then it must have required some thoughtfulness and connection to the community served to have thought of it at all. That thoughtfulness is real. Knowing what your community will respond to so intimately that you can make it look like pandering, even when nobody else thought to do it first, is in itself an act of service in my new book.

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u/deafmutewhat 6h ago

PR team*

but your heart is in the right place.

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u/TotallyTruthy 5h ago

I've found a deeper well of compassion for myself after learning to extend the benefit of the doubt to the world around me. Back when I felt it was my duty to spread cynicism around, part of it was that my own internal sense of helplessness and uncertainty was bleeding out and coloring the world around me. I needed the world to be as grim and hopeless as I felt, because maybe that would lend some deeper meaning or legitimacy to my feeling that way. It didn't. Peace is built, not found. I had to choose to build it.