Campaign staff for “squad” member Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) denied a media report that a woman, who was arrested after urging her social media followers to attack a public high school that she said has a Zionist student population, worked for the congresswoman in the past.
“This person was never staff on the campaign and any representation of such is false,” Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign stated. “Their comments are appalling, and we condemn threats of violence without hesitation.”
The New York Post reported that Iman Abdul, 27, of Brooklyn, worked on the primary campaigns of progressive politicians, including Ocasio-Cortez and Julia Salazar, a Democratic state senator, in the summer of 2018. Salazar confirmed that Abdul was a paid canvasser.
Abdul’s post was reported to the New York City Police Department on Aug. 7, and the NYPD took her into custody at her Brooklyn home the following day and charged her with making a terror threat, endangering a child’s welfare, aggravated harassment and making a threat of mass harm, the NYPD told JNS.
Abdul has since deleted both her Instagram account and LinkedIn page. The reported post on Instagram included a screenshot of a map with the location of Leon M. Goldstein High School for the Sciences, located in Manhattan Beach, a residential neighborhood in Brooklyn, N.Y.
The area has a large Jewish population, but the public school is secular and is not connected to the Jewish state.
“If anyone needs a public school in NYC to attack for whatever reason,” she wrote in the since-deleted post, which contained several spelling errors. “Lexus-driving, Israehell loving Zionists all attend here.”
“They’ve all gone on ‘Birthright,’” she had added in the post.
Abdul told StopAntisemitism on social media that she “never called for an attack on the school in the sense of mass organization or not even individual people attacking individuals.”
“That’s literally stupid,” she wrote. “I called for an attack on the school, the Zionist institution funded by our public dollars,” she added. “We have every right to verbally attack the school.”
The 31-year-old high school, which had 998 students in the 2023-24 academic year, according to New York state data, is named for the late Leon M. Goldstein, who was Jewish and served as president of Kingsborough Community College, with which the high school is affiliated, for nearly 30 years. It has an extracurricular Jewish heritage club and Israel club, but is not a religious school.
It ranks No. 28 out of 533 institutions in the New York City Public Schools district, per U.S. News & World Report. The school’s student body was 21% Black, 13% Hispanic or Latino and 24% Asian, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander in the 2023-24 academic year, and some 62% of the school’s students were economically disadvantaged, per state data.
