BY LINCOLN ANDERSON | “Racist, fascist, KKK — Donald Trump, go away!” nearly 200 protesters chanted outside the gleaming golden doorway of Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue at 56th Street on the Sunday afternoon before Christmas.
They were mainly Muslims, along with activists from Black Lives Matter and a few Mexican-Americans — one sporting a massive pink felt sombrero and another a green and red poncho. They had gathered outside the Republican presidential candidate’s signature New York City building, in what was billed as a “unity rally against racism, anti-Muslim bigotry, and fascism.”
With his rhetorical bluster, Trump — Muslims at the December 20 protest said — 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 real estate developer and TV personality who has led in GOP polls for the past six months, called for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the US, “until we can figure out what is going on.”
Signs bobbing in the crowd, many with the tagline of the social justice group International Action Center 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,” that last 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 US-born African-American Muslim, told the crowd. “They want to take America backwards.”
He exhorted everyone to boycott Trump’s hotels and casinos and “not buy anything with his name on it.”
Another speaker recalled how Trump took out full-page newspaper ads calling for a return of the death penalty as five suspects in the 1989 Central Park jogger rape case were on trial. After spending six to 13 years in jail, the five men’s convictions were vacated in 2002.
“Those men were found innocent,” the speaker declared. “Donald Trump didn’t take out a full-page ad to apologize.”
Before the group started to march, a female speaker told everyone they could use the restroom 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 was headed down Sixth Avenue to Macy’s in Herald Square, but it first passed by the News Corporation’s headquarters of Fox News, the New York Post, and the Wall Street Journal.
Referring to Rupert Murdoch’s media conglomerate, the speaker said, “They’ve made him the fascist mobilization that he represents.”
For a brief time at the start of the rally, angry pro-Trump supporters verbally sparred with some of the protesters on Fifth Avenue, but police moved in to separate the two groups.
In the crowd, Mohammed Ali, a subway worker who lives in the the Bronx and was 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 a recent New York Times article “Do You Know My Heart?” profiling a cross-section of the city’s Muslims and their reactions to the current climate of suspicion and fear.
The protesters headed down the middle of West 56th Street, going the wrong way into car traffic, before moving onto the sidewalk and then heading south down Sixth Avenue.
“Racist, racist, anti-gay, Donald Trump, go away!” the crowd chanted. (Trump has in the recent past announced his opposition to marriage equality for gay and lesbian couples.)
Wearing a hijab and carrying her young daughter, Maweddeh, in her arms, Jehan Eltazbwa, 23, from Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, 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. Fuck you.’ I was next to her. She thought I was a little bit too close,” Eltazbwa said. “She could have said excuse me.”
Eltazbwa’s 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, an older man who emphasized, “Islam means peace.”
“We hate terrorists,” he said. “I work in real estate too — like Trump!,” though he added he’s just a small businessman.
As protesters moved south toward Herald Square 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, seeming not to know 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 called out 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 GOP 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 resident of the US, 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.”
The media, Nasser said, was ultimately responsible for ginning up anti-Muslim sentiment.
“The American people are very smart,” he said. “It’s the media. How many Muslims are in jail, really? They work hard.”
Nasser’s 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 Quran,” 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. They are brainwashed.”
He added, however, that Israelis kicking Palestinians out of their homes is terrorism, too.
After the march had passed by outside, discussion of Trump continued among a group of chess players in a glass-enclosed public atrium on Sixth Avenue at 42nd Street
“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’s just mouthin’ off because he has money,” said another. “You can’t be saying racist stuff like that if you’re president.”
