In the wake of the 25th year commemorating the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. is suffering yet another round of “enemy” targeting. This time, as expected, it’s targeting those who are allegedly of the Islamic faith. Nothing exemplifies this blame-game more than former NYC mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s attack on the current mayor Zohran Mamdani. “It offends me,” Giuliani said in the leadup to the city’s commemoration of the event, that the new mayor, a Muslim, would attend the ceremonies; Giuliani compared Mamdani to the 911 hijackers, claiming that Muslims were “taking over certain parts of America and certain parts of Europe.”
Ironically, about the same time that Giuliani was lambasting Mamdani for being a Muslim, the city released 170,000 pages of previously secret records about the 9/11 attacks. A Times headline reads, “After 9/11, Documents Suggest, New Yorkers Were Misled About Air Quality,” and it reports: “A review of news articles and interview transcripts in the days and weeks after Sept. 11 shows that Mr. Giuliani continued to vouch for the safety of the air quality.”
In response to the documents release, a spokesperson for Giuliani insisted, “It is a shame that Mayor Mamdani is now attempting to score cheap partisan political points by seeming to blame local officials who rushed to the scene, rather than radical Islam, for September 11.” Giuliani has emerged as the 9/11 cover-up king.
In the weeks after the 9/11 attacks, the federal government arrested more than 700 Middle Eastern and South Asian immigrant men from across the five boroughs and beyond, detaining them in jails and prisons in New York and New Jersey. They were arrested for suspected links to the 9/11 attacks; a Department of Justice investigation later found to be tenuous at best.
In 2011, the Associated Press confirmed what Muslim New Yorkers had long suspected: The NYPD had been spying on mosques, student groups, and Muslim-owned businesses across the city, but it never produced any leads or opened a single investigation.
White Americans have been fighting “enemies” since before the nation was established. The website History.com offers a detailed chronology of the “Indian Wars” battles between white European settlers and Native Americans from 1622 to 1890. It was a bloody history.
Among the earliest “war” was the Pequot War (1636–1638) that pitted English settlers against the Pequot, Narragansett and Mohegan peoples in New England. It was followed, in 1675-1676, by the Metacom’s War (aka King Philip’s War) that broke out after the trial and hanging of three Wampanoag men by the Plymouth Colony over English settlements seized prime native lands.
And an “enemy” could be a foreign immigrant. In 1787, Pres. John Adams signed the four Alien and Sedition Acts that included: the Alien Friends Act, which allowed the president to deport any alien whom he considered dangerous; and the Alien Enemies Act, which permitted the deportation of aliens who came from a country at war with the United States.
Catholic immigrants in the Northeast were targeted by Protestants out of a fear that the Pope would have influence in American elections and that Catholics would support Jeffersonian Republicans. New York Protestants were enraged by the threat they saw in the growing Irish Catholic population, which increased from a few hundred in 1776 to approximately 35,000 in 1830; the city’s total population in 1830 was 200,000. In 1831, Protestants, part of the growing anti-Catholic “Know Nothing” movement, burned down St. Mary’s Catholic Church on Sheriff Street.
In 1888, a congressional committee held hearings at the Westminster Hotel at 16th Street and Irving Place over Irish and Italian workers for violations of the Alien Contract Labor Law of 1885 (the Foran Act), which prohibited companies from bringing in low-wage foreign workers to replace domestic labor and break strikes. The Times dubbed the hearings, “The Immigration Invasion.”
Jews have immigrated to New York in three waves. The first were mostly Sephardic Jews and part of the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam in 1654. In the middle of the 19th century, Jews mostly came from Central Europe with their own synagogues and fraternal societies. However, the largest influx of Jews came at the end of the 19th century and in the early 20th century, which increased the Jewish population from about 80,000 in 1880 to 1.5 million in 1920.
Antisemitism is New York begins with the arrival of the first Jews to New Amsterdam. In 1654, colonial governor Peter Stuyvesant sought to block the first group of Jewish refugees fleeing the Portuguese Inquisition in Brazil but was blocked. During the first nine months of 2026 – that’s nearly four centuries since the first Jew arrived in New York – the police report Jews were targeted 181 times out of 325 hate crimes city wide.
In 1619, the first African slaves were brought to what was known as the Jamestown Colony, VA. Less than a decade later, in 1628, the Dutch West India Company put enslaved Africans to work in its colony of New Netherland. In 1664, the English to over the colony and renamed New York and, according to PBS, “in 1655, the first large shipment of slaves directly from Africa arrived at New Amsterdam.”
Between July 13 and 16, 1863, Irish and other white New Yorkers rioted – dubbed the “Draft Riot” –in opposition of the recently adopted Civil War draft of white men aged 20 and 35, but allowed for a $300 exemption fee. In reaction, they attacked homes of the well-to-do as well as the Ninth District Draft Office, setting it on fire. In addition, the rioters attacked the African American community, singling out the Colored Orphan Asylum; a total of 120 people were killed and over 2,000 injured.
In 1613, Juan Rodriguez (aka Jan Rodrigues) was the first mix-race Hispanic/Black or mulatto to arrive in New Amsterdam from Santo Domingo (aka Dominican Republic) aboard the Dutch merchant Jonge Tobias.
Mexico boarders the U.S. and after the U.S. annexed Texas in 1845 and the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848, the U.S. absorbed 55 percent of Mexico’s territory into this country. Today, the U.S. Census Bureau estimates that over 68 million Americans (20%) are of Hispanic origin.
Sadly, anti-Hispanic violence has long been part of American life. For example, in 1918, white Texas Rangers, U.S. soldiers and local vigilantes shot and killed 15 unarmed men and boys in Porvenir, Texas. They justified the killings by calling the Mexican-Americans “bandits” and criminals. According to Juan Cartagena, president of the civil rights group LatinoJustice, Anti-Latino hate crimes carried out by individual people are often closely connected to anti-immigrant polices and the broader public debate over immigration.
An undated U.S. Congress report found, “The number of Puerto Ricans in the mainland United States—numbered at 1,513 in 1910—swelled tenfold by 1920 and grew another 500 percent in the following decade.” It added, “By the 1950s, the flow of Puerto Ricans to the mainland United States had increased so drastically that historians dubbed the phenomenon the “Great Migration.” An estimated 470,000 people—or 21 percent of the island’s total population—left Puerto Rico for the United States between 1950 and 1960.”
In 1926, an estimated 20,000 Puerto Ricans living in East Harlem — what was called “El Barrio” – and tensions rose with the pre-existing Jewish. It was a hot July leading to what the Times called “the Harlem Riots” broke out on 115th Street between Lenox and Park Avenues. It noted, “For a week there have been street fights and arguments between the old settlers and the new residents, with occasional bottle-throwing from roofs.”
Two decades later, on March 1, 1954, four Puerto Rican nationalists — Lolita Lebron, Rafael Cancel Miranda, Andres Figueroa Cordero and Irving Flores Rodriguez – entered the U.S. Congress and fired handguns from the visitors’ gallery onto the House floor. They shouted “Viva Puerto Rico libre!” and unfurled the Puerto Rican flag and surrendered to authorities. To this day, Puerto Rico remains a U.S. colony.
And anti-Hispanic violence persists. According to a Guardian report, “Latino residents of the suburb outside New York City have been repeatedly attacked by white residents.” A 2001 Times story notes, “residents of the suburb outside New York City have been repeatedly attacked by white residents. In 2000, two men with white supremacist tattoos hired two Mexican day laborers for what they claimed was a job, drove them to a secluded building, and stabbed them.”
And then there was the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida, in 2016, when 49 people were killed and 58 others were wounded. The Pulse was a popular salsa nightspot that welcomed gay and straight white Americans but also Americans from Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Mexico and elsewhere. The gunman was Omar Mir Seddique Mateen who proudly insisted, “My name is I pledge of allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi of the Islamic State.” He was killed.
The first Chinese sailors arrived in Baltimore on the ship Pallas in 1785, but it wasn’t until the California Gold Rush of the post-1849 period that a significant Chinese population grew. In 1862, Congress adopted the Anti-Coolie Act
Imposed “a tax on Asian Americans who attempted to work in manufacturing factories as well as to employers who hired Asian Americans.”
However, anti-Chinese racism grew during the post-Civil War era, leading to the adoption of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. According to. U.S. State Department report, the Act “suspended the immigration of Chinese laborers (skilled or unskilled) for a period of 10 years.” In 1871, in the wake of a Chinese gang war in Los Angeles, a police officer was killed. This led to “hundreds of white and Hispanic people attacked LA’s Chinese community …” Nearly 20 Chinese people were lynched, including a 13-year-old boy and a prominent physician.
In addition, the Act “required every Chinese person traveling in or out of the country to carry a certificate identifying his or her status as a laborer, scholar, diplomat, or merchant.” It reminds readers, “The 1882 Act was the first in American history to place broad restrictions on immigration.” It adds, “The Chinese Exclusion Acts were not repealed until 1943” because of World War II.
In 1885, an anti-Chinese riot took place in Rock Springs, WY, when “white miners attacked Chinese miners, set fire to their homes, and killed approximately twenty-eight people; on the following day, all 500 Chinese miners were driven out of the town.” The following year, “White workers rounded up virtually every Chinese person in Seattle on February 7, 1886 and violently expelled them, forcing them to board a waiting boat for passage out of town.” And the next year, “A gang of white men ambushed and murdered thirty-four Chinese gold miners at Hell’s Canyon, OR.” In New York, in 1909, “Elsie Sigel, a young Christian missionary working in New York City’s Chinatown, for which a Chinese person was suspected and blamed, led to anti-Asian violence.”
According to a Queens College report by Dr. Hsiang-shui Chen, “Chinese sailors began settling in lower Manhattan around the 1830.” Chinese immigrants settled initially on Mott, Park and Doyer Streets in lower Manhattan. By 1898 “Chinatown” expanded to include Chatham Square, and Bayard and Baxter Streets. Today,” Chinatown covers more than 20 streets.” Iin Queens, “Chinese vegetable farms and hand laundries emerged during the 1880s.”
Perhaps most frightening and much like today’s Islamophobia, Pres. Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942, that authorized the “evacuation” of all persons deemed a threat to national security from the West Coast to relocation centers further inland. As Stanford reports, “Over 120,000 Japanese Americans, including both resident aliens from Japan and US citizens, were forcibly relocated and confined in ten isolated, fenced, and guarded internment camps during 1942-1945, in California, Arizona, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and Arkansas.”
In 2020, Pres. Donald Trump identified COVID [coronavirus] as the “Chinese virus.” In response, anti-Asian attacks swept the country. According to one report, “Police in at least 13 states, including Texas, Washington, New Jersey, Minnesota and New Mexico, have also responded to reported hate incidents.” Those were in additional to what was going down in California and New York.
One group, Asian Americans and Pacific Islander (AAPI) (STOP AAPI HATE) reports 1,710 incidents of anti-Asian violence of which 15 percent of those cases involved physical assault or being coughed on or spat at; 133 incidents of anti-Asian discrimination recorded by the New York City Commission on Human Rights; and 14 Asian-bias hate crimes investigated by police in New York.
According to the New York Post, “Before those [“China Virus”] attacks, not a single hate crime against Asian Americans had been reported to the NYPD in 2020. But by the end of that year, there were 30 — a 900-percent surge from just three recorded in 2019.”
Today’s “enemies” also include the undocumented immigrants, Jamaicans and others losing their Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and transpeople. They play a political role in deflecting public attention from those in power to those who are essentially powerless. So, who will be the next “enemy”?
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