Dozens of women activists, leaders, and lawmakers have joined a petition denouncing a death threat against congressional candidate Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, the first Muslim woman to run for federal office from New Jersey.
The 27-year-old is the founder of MuslimGirl.com, an online magazine with a global audience. After hosting a virtual town hall on Instagram, she said someone called her phone, and using racial slurs against Muslims, threatened to kill her and her family.
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"It's unnerving for anybody to hear somebody threaten their family, let alone have their actual personal information and detail how they would go about doing that," Al-Khatahtbeh told The Associated Press news agency via video conference.
"But for me, the most important thing was to not confirm any of the information that they had, not try to encourage them, that you know, that I was even scared by them, because in the face of hate like that, a lot of times if you get scared, it's like they win."
Al-Khatahtbeh published a recording of the April 21 death threat on her Twitter account on Wednesday. An open letter condemning the threat was signed by many supporters, including Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza, US Representative Rashida Tlaib, and fellow Democrat Representative Ilhan Omar.
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