BY LINCOLN ANDERSON | “Racist, fascist, KKK — Donald Trump, go away!” nearly 200 protesters chanted outside the gleaming golden doorway of Trump Tower on Fifth Ave. last Sunday afternoon.
They were mainly Muslims, along with Black Lives Matter activists and a few Mexicans — one sporting a massive pink felt sombrero and another a green and red poncho. They had gathered outside the presidential candidate’s signature New York City building, in what was billed as a “unity rally against racism, anti-Muslim bigotry and fascism.”
Really, in one word, it was a rally against Trump, who, Muslims at the protest said, with his blustering rhetoric, has been demonizing them and their religion, and poisoning people’s minds against them.
In the wake of the recent Paris and San Bernardino terrorist attacks, the surprising Republican front-runner recently called for temporarily banning Muslims from immigrating to the U.S., “until we can figure out what is going on.” Signs bobbing in the crowd, many with the International Action Center’s tagline at the bottom, bore slogans like “Wall Street is our enemy. Not Islam,” “Trump is a capitalist pig!” “Ban real estate speculators, not Muslims” and “Islam has been in New York 400 years,” showing an illustration of a Colonial-era African man wearing a toga-like garment.
“They say they want to take America back,” one speaker, a native-born African-American Muslim, told the crowd. “They want to take America backwards.”
He exhorted everyone to boycott The Donald’s hotels and casinos and “not buy anything with his name on it.”
Another speaker recalled how Trump took out full-page newspaper ads proclaiming the guilt of the five suspects in the 1989 Central Park Jogger rape case. After spending six to 13 years in jail, the five men’s convictions were vacated in 2002.
“Those men were found innocent,” he declared. “Donald Trump didn’t take out a full-page ad to apologize.”
He went on to call for everyone to boycott the holiday shopping season “in its entirety — to show that we can have significant impact.”
“Uh huh! Hit ’em where it hurts!” a woman in the crowd chimed in.
Before they started to march, a female speaker told everyone they could use the restroom, if they needed, inside the mogul’s shiny edifice.
“So everyone knows, there is a public restroom in Trump Tower,” she said, adding, “It’s the only appropriate thing to go in that building.”
The march would head down to Macy’s, but first pass by the headquarters of the New York Post, Fox News and The Wall Street Journal.
“They’ve made him the fascist mobilization that he represents,” she accused of Rupert Murdoch’s media conglomeration.
At the start of the rally, pro-Trump supporters briefly angrily verbally sparred with some of the protesters on Fifth Ave., but police moved in to separate the two groups.
In the crowd, Mohammed Ali, a subway worker from the Bronx, originally from Bangladesh, stood wrapped in an American flag.
“I’m here to stand with the city of New York,” he said. “What Donald Trump said makes no sense.”
Ali was featured in The New York Times’s recent article “Do You Know My Heart?” profiling a cross section of the city’s Muslims and their reactions to the current climate of fear and suspicion.
He was confronted about the flag by Paul Gilman, a member of the New York City Green Party who ran for state Senate in Queens last year.
“When did it stand for justice?” Gilman asked. But Ali stood his ground, wrapped in the stars and stripes.
How about World War II? a reporter offered.
Gilman promptly whipped a book out of his bag, “The American Axis: Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and the Rise of the Third Reich.”
The march headed off down the middle of W. 56th St. going the wrong way into car traffic, before moving onto the sidewalk and then heading south down Sixth Ave.
“Racist, racist, anti-gay, Donald Trump, go away!” the crowd chanted. The G.O.P. polls-leader has also said he does not support gay marriage.
Wearing a hijab and carrying her young daughter Maweddeh in her arms, Jehan Eltazbwa, 23, from Bensonhurst, said the words of Trump and the other Republican presidential candidates are infecting people’s minds with hate.
“Just today in the supermarket, I was cursed at and I was mistreated by a woman and it was very clear it was because I was a Muslim,” she said. “Trump is adding more flame to the fire.”
She said the woman told her, “ ‘Go back to your country. F— you.’ I was next to her. She thought I was a little bit too close,” Eltazbwa said. “She could have said excuse me.”
Her husband walked by her side with their other two children. Eltazbwa said her mother was Jewish and her father Egyptian. She decided on her own to convert to Islam.
Also among the marchers was Akhtar Hussain, a senior who emphasized, “Islam means peace.”
“We hate terrorists,” he said. “I work in real estate too — like Trump!” he said, though adding he’s just a small businessman.
As the protesters moved along down Fifth Ave. chanting, “Dee-port Trump! Dee-port Trump!” the mostly white holiday shoppers from out of town, along with various furry-costumed characters and Mickey and Minnie Mouses, were pushed to the sidelines. The tourists stood blank-faced, not really knowing what to make of it. Some held up camera phones to snap shots. There were only a few faint bemused smiles among them.
“Go Trump!” a man lightly mockcheered as he passed by the march, heading uptown.
A food vendor at a halal cart blaring funky Arabic beats shimmied and smiled as the march passed by. Another vendor, a woman from Senegal selling hats and scarves, was handed an anti-Trump flier by a demonstrator.
“Thank you! I like it!” she told them.
Asked what she thought about the potential presidential nominee, she said, “I no like Trump!” and swept her hand out in disgust, as if to fling him away.
As the marchers passed Fox headquarters, a woman wearing a paper Statue of Liberty crown with one half of its face a white skull and carrying a “Make America Hate Again” sign, paused to give the building the finger.
Adam Nasser, 47, was carrying his five-year-old son, Hussein, on his back and marching with his wife and other two children.
“I think he’s going to run the country down the drain,” Nasser, originally from Yemen and a 34-year U.S. resident, said of Trump. “He’s just doing this for his own agenda.”
Nasser, who installs security alarms, stressed that he loves America.
“It’s the greatest country for many, many years,” he said. “Muslims don’t hate America.”
He accused the media, ultimately, of ginning up anti-Muslim sentiment. “The American people are very smart,” he said. “It’s the media. How many Muslims are in jail, really?” he asked. “They work hard.”
His little daughter Lubna, 8, was walking next to him, wearing a hijab and carrying a small white sign on a wooden stick with the handwritten words in black, “Muslims against ISIS.”
“There is a phrase in the Koran,” her father said, “‘If one man takes a man’s life, it’s like killing all humanity. Nobody has the right to take anybody’s life. Those are bad guys,” he said of the ISIS terrorists. “They are brainwashed.”
At the same time, he felt compelled to add, Israelis kicking Palestinians out of their homes is terrorism, too.
Sorry, what was that? he was asked amid the din of the marchers’ chanting.
Yes, that’s what he said, he said with a smile.
After the march had passed by outside, the discussion about Trump continued among a group of chess players in a glass-enclosed public atrium on Sixth Ave. at 42nd St.
“He’s a little bit full of b.s., everyone knows that,” commented one of them, who gave his name as H.C. Muffkie. “He’s all talk.”
He quipped that as a youth he was on the Sheepshead High School basketball team, where he played “bench.”
“He’s just mouthin’ off because he has money,” said another. “You can’t be saying racist stuff like that if you’re president.”
