North Carolina voters make history by electing first Muslim woman to hold office
Nida Allam has become the first Muslim woman to be win elected office in the state of North Carolina.
According to local reports, history was written on Tuesday night when voters in Durham County went to the ballots to elect Allam as their next county commissioner.
Allam said in a statement provided to The Hill that, growing up as a Muslim in the U.S., she never thought running for office let alone winning and making history would ever be a possibility.
I was driven to politics in 2015 after my best friend Yusor, her husband Deah and younger sister Razan were brutally murdered in their home in Chapel Hill in a hate crime committed by their neighbor, she said. This was a heinous act of hate that caused ripples across the world.
Allam was referring to the murders of Deah Barakat, 23, his wife, Yusor Abu-Salha, 21, and her sister, Razan Abu-Salha, 19. The three college students had been living in a condo in Chapel Hill, N.C. when a man, Craig Stephen Hicks, entered their home and killed them.
Local authorities initially claimed the shooting incident was over a parking dispute, but the chief of the Chapel Hill police department, Chris Blue, apologized years later, saying the man who committed these murders undoubtedly did so with a hateful heart.
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/486113-north-carolina-voters-make-history-after-electing-first-muslim-woman-to