Two men were arrested for throwing two improvised explosive devices at a group of anti-Islamification protesters in New York City, New York, on Saturday, 7 March.
Right-wing activist Jake Lang, who also took part in the 6 January 2021 Capitol riots, organized an event titled ‘Stop the Islamic Takeover of New York City’ in front of newly elected Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s residence. Mayor Mamdani himself is a Muslim.
However, Lang’s protest only drew a few dozen people, who were soon surrounded by a much larger group of counterprotesters. A man from the group tossed a homemade device made up of a jar filled with nuts, bolts, screws, and a ‘hobby fuse’ at the demonstrators, police say. But, thankfully, it failed to detonate. Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch later confirmed in a social media post that the device did have the capacity to detonate and ‘could have caused serious injury or death’, it was not just a mock explosive meant to scare the protesters.
The moment when the counterprotester lit his explosive and ran at the anti-Islam protesters with it in his hand was captured on camera and shared on the social media site X.
A second improvised bomb was also thrown at the protesters, but it did not go off either. In addition to the two arrested for their conduct related to the improvised explosives, four other people present at the event were also taken into custody.
Mayor Mamdani responded to the events that took place in front of his residence in a lengthy post on X. In it, he referred to protest organizer Lang as a ‘white supremacist’ and described his protest as ‘rooted in bigotry and racism’.
However, he also condemned the counterprotesters who threw the improvised bombs, writing: ‘What followed was even more disturbing. Violence at a protest is never acceptable. The attempt to use an explosive device and hurt others is not only criminal, it is reprehensible and the antithesis of who we are.’
The victory of Zohran Mamdani in the Democratic primary of the New City mayoral election in June 2025 caused a nationwide stir, for multiple reasons.
Mamdani had previously made odd, far-left progressive proclamations in the past, such as ‘Queer liberation means defund the police’ and publicly supporting the decriminalization of prostitution. Despite that, he was able to beat former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo in his party’s primary and was eventually elected Mayor of New York City in November.
Also, Ugandan immigrant Mamdani is the first Muslim Mayor in the most populous US city’s history. Due to the 11 September 2001 attacks by the Islamist terror group Al-Qaeda on the World Trade Center in New York City, many people assumed that there would be some level of apprehension towards the religion of Islam from the locals for generations to come.
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