Muslim Woman Challenging Frank Pallone Receives Death Threat

NEW BRUNSWICK, NJ — One of the two people challenging longtime Central Jersey Congressman Frank Pallone for his seat this July is New Brunswick native and Rutgers grad Amani al-Khatahtbeh, 27, who founded the popular MuslimGirl.com website.

This week, al-Khatahtbeh said she received an anonymous death threat; the caller threatened to kill and torture both her and her parents, and listed her parents' home address.

"Last night, I received this chilling phone call. A death threat," al-Khatahtbeh posted on Twitter on Wednesday of this week. She said she received the phone call Tuesday night; she recorded it and put it on her Twitter account.

"This isn’t my first death threat and I hesitated to share it, but it’s necessary to see the common experience of Muslims & minorities when hate is normalized by political leaders," she tweeted.

Al-Khatahtbeh received the threat shortly after a virtual town hall she hosted on Instagram Tuesday evening. She reported the call to New Brunswick Police, said a spokesperson for her campaign.

The call was filled with obscenities, and the caller, a man speaking with a British accent, threatened to kill and torture both Al-Khatahtbeh and her parents, and force feed them vodka and pork.

"Your parents live at (redacted). I will f**king kill them and ... I will torture them and feed them bacon and f**king pork ... you f**king ugly Arab Muslim. You terrorist," said the caller.

You can listen below. Warning: There are many obscenities:

On Thursday, the New Jersey chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-NJ) called on the FBI to fully investigate the call.

“The chilling death threat exemplifies how Muslim candidates are especially targeted during election cycles," said CAIR-NJ's director, Selaedin Maksut. "These death threats have become all too common for Muslim candidates, but we must not allow ourselves to be numbed by their frequency."

Last year, a New York man was arrested for threatening to kill Rep. Ilhan Omar, the first Somali-American Muslim Congresswoman, a figure who Al-Khatahtbeh called "an inspiration."

Who is Amani al-Khatahtbeh?

The 2020 primary election has been postponed from June 2 to July 7, in response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

Al-Khatahtbeh is running in the Democratic primary for New Jersey's sixth congressional district, which stretches from Woodbridge down to Asbury Park. Pallone has represented this area in Congress since 1993 and is considered one of New Jersey's leading Democratic politicians.

Pallone is facing two challengers this July: Al-Khatahtbeh and Russell Cirincione, a government housing litigation attorney and 2013 Seton Hall Law School grad. However, of the two, Al-Khatahtbeh has received far more buzz-worthy attention from the media: So far this April, she's already been interviewed by Katie Couric, InStyle, MTV and Bustle.

Born in Trenton to Jordanian immigrants, Al-Khatahtbeh graduated from Rutgers University in 2014. She founded MuslimGirl.com when she was still a teenager. She remains the site's editor-in-chief and it is said to be one of the most widely read sites about Muslim womanhood in the U.S. In 2016, MuslimGirl partnered with Teen Vogue for a video series about what it's like to grow up as a Muslim woman in America. In 2018, Al-Khatahtbeh was included in a CNN list of the top 25 most influential Muslim Americans.

She is also the author of "Muslim Girl: A Coming of Age," which she wrote about her experience growing up in New Jersey as a Muslim American after 9/11. She has said that she chose to start wearing the hijab as a teenager, in part to fight back against growing Islamophobia in the U.S.

This April, Al-Khatahtbeh announced that she would be challenging Rep. Pallone for his seat. The move makes her not only the youngest woman to ever run for Congress, but also the first Muslim woman in New Jersey to seek a Congressional seat.

She currently lives in New Brunswick, according to her campaign.

Al-Khatahtbeh is running in the vein of defunct U.S. presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, Congresswoman Omar and New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She is a supporter of Medicare for All, student loan forgiveness and says she wants to continue Sanders' movement. Al-Khatahtbeh is also a supporter of the Green New Deal; while at Rutgers, she was part of a student-led movement to push the university to divest from fossil fuels.

"I belong here. This is where I come from. I've lived this experience, and also I went to school at Rutgers University, which the district is home to," Al-Khatahtbeh told Harper's Bazaar in this April 21 interview. "I was part of the student population there, understanding how Representative Pallone's failures to represent our voices on a lot of these issues resulted in a lot of frustration. I know how our communities are being impacted by that."

Al-Khatahtbeh also criticized Pallone for serving in office since she was born, a common criticism of longtime political incumbents.

"He's been in this congressional seat for my entire lifetime. There is absolutely no reason why, in our democracy, we have representatives that have a hold on these seats for an entire lifetime," she told the Harper's interviewer. "That's not the way it's supposed to work ... Also, just over those three decades that he has been in office, he hasn't done enough. Especially when looking at the fact that our student body at Rutgers University has been forming a divestment coalition for us to divest from fossil fuels and really to push for the Green New Deal. It's really ironic that our congressional representative is not only the person that is actually the chair of the Committee for Energy and Commerce, but is also the biggest roadblock in Congress for us to make these policies happen."

"NJ 6" stretches from Carteret and Woodbridge into Edison, Metuchen, New Brunswick and down to Asbury Park. It hugs the Bayshore coastline, including towns such as Aberdeen, Matawan, Hazlet, part of Middletown, Atlantic Highlands and Highlands, Sea Bright and West Long Branch. Marlboro Township is also in the district.

Pallone was challenged in 2018 for the Congress seat by Rich Pezzullo, a proudly-Trump supporting Republican who hoped to identify with fellow Trump-supporters in the area. Pezzullo was not successful in his attempt to topple Pallone.