I am neither a Zionist nor a supporter of Israel’s occupation. Neither am I an agent of Mossad and the CIA forged in a Tel Aviv lab and sent to infiltrate and destroy American Muslim communities—although that would be an awesome plot for a TV show.

But that has not kept these activists from pushing organizations to disinvite me, and other MLI participants, from communal events. They use words like ban, stop, marginalize, and remove. Their boycott has been largely unsuccessful, but I give credit where it’s due: They successfully had me disinvited from a CAIR-NYC function last year. (In fact, my presence caused CAIR-NYC to cancel the entire program, a Thanos-level act of destruction.) And I’m not alone. Rabia Chaudry, of Serial podcast fame, had a “Top Muslim Achievers” award rescinded in Chicago, and she was recently disinvited by Harvard’s Islamic Society.

Just last week, some activists tried to have me disinvited from Northwestern University, where I gave a speech about Ramadan. A few months ago in Austin, three young students passed out some leaflets at an ISNA fundraiser where I was speaking with some false, interesting, and amusing accusations about me and MLI. Most audience members had no idea what MLI was. They enjoyed the speech, thanked me for coming, and we all devoured a tasty halal Pakistani dinner together. That was one of three regional fundraisers for the ISNA at which I’ve spoken in the past year alone.

But now, it seems, things have changed.

Activists have ripped statements from their context to provide pretexts for their campaign of exclusion. In October, after a violent Muslim extremist rammed a car through a crowd in New York while yelling “Allahu Akbar,” I took to Twitter to explain how a phrase many Americans associate exclusively with terror is actually an integral part of ordinary Muslim life. In one of my many tweets, I wrote, “I’ve said Allahu Akbar after taking giant dumps.”

I stand by the tweet because there is literally a prayer of thanks both before and after you enter the restroom, because it was important to explain to an audience unfamiliar with or afraid of the phrase that Muslims use it as a way of saying thanks and also in prayer, and, well, because it’s true.

But people spent days debating this tweet. It was the main topic of conversation in various Muslim WhatsApp groups. Various American Muslim leaders were obsessed with what I had written. They demanded and commanded that I remove the tweet; some resorted to threats. Meanwhile, Trump was engaging in anti-Muslim bigotry, promoting his Muslim ban, and recommending an end to the diversity-visa lottery program.

Priorities.

In The Atlantic piece, I wrote: “Throughout the trip and afterward, I kept asking: Is this land worth all the pain and suffering and bloodshed? I couldn’t ask God, because I’m convinced that he’s now an absentee landowner. He sold Abraham’s children a lemon."