“Terrorism” first entered English to describe a government, like France’s post-revolutionary Republic of Virtue, terrorizing its own citizens. Now it’s a word governments use to determine who counts as a threat.
In the final episode of FAQ NYC’s special series, A Knickerbocker History of America, Christina Greer, Katie Honan and Harry Siegel sat down with Asad Dandia in front of a live audience at P&T Knitwear to dig into the history of terrorism in New York City.
For Dandia, the Brooklyn borough historian, that history includes a decade in which he went from being a CUNY student who learned he was being surveilled by the NYPD to being a part of Zohran Mamadani’s kitchen cabinet:
https://feeds.fireside.fm/faqnyc/rss?terror
I had started a charity delivering food and groceries to poor families in my neighborhood. My friends and I would meet at our local mosque during Friday prayers, and we’d each chip in about 10 to 15 bucks. We were all teenagers, so we didn’t have a lot of money, but we gathered enough to buy some groceries to bring to families we knew needed help. And we kept doing this on a weekly basis and it sort of blew up with people volunteering and community groups wanting to get involved.
I was 19 years old when an elder in my neighborhood sent me a very ominous text message: “I need to speak to you at your earliest convenience.”
So I meet Mo, we’ll call him, at evening prayers. And we’re walking to his car, and Mo asks me if I have my phone on me: “Can I see it for a second?
He takes my phone, shuts it off. He takes his phone, shuts it off, wraps them both in a cloth and throws the cloth in his trunk: “I have to speak to you without these present.”
Mo happens to be a police officer, and he was off-duty at the time. This is a guy I know and I trust, so we get in the car and he asks, “How is your organization doing?”
“We’re doing great. We’re servicing close to a dozen families. We’ve got events planned. I’m managing this huge volunteer base. It’s looking really good for my resume, and all of that.”
And he said, “There’s no easy way for me to tell you this, but you’re being watched.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Asad, I just came back from the precinct. There’s a file with your name and your photos in it. The police are trailing you as we speak.”
And that is when I realized that the NYPD was surveilling not just the Muslim community in the abstract, but me and my friends specifically.
He dropped me off at home, and I had a panic attack. I’m not going to tell my parents. I come from the type of community where if you come home with a B on your report card, mom’s gonna go to the hospital. You don’t come home and say, “Ma, I think I’m being spied on by the cops.” It’s not something you want to do…
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