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New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, the new hope of Democratic Party, has a conspicuous habit of surrounding himself with a distinct type of person. Since Mamdani has accomplished nothing in either the private sector or government, those associations offer us many clues to his worldview.
Mamdani’s mother, Mira Nair, a Qatari-funded director best known for attempting to exclude Israelis from film festivals and award shows, maintains that Mamdani has “very much absorbed” the family worldview. That quote comes from a piece headlined “The Parents Who Helped Shape Zohran Mamdani’s Politics.”
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It makes sense. Zohran’s father and mentor, Mahmood, a professor of international affairs and anthropology at Columbia, has spent his life obsessing over the question of white colonizers. The elder Mamdani champions post-nationalism, a world without countries. Zohran’s mentor doesn’t believe the United States should exist.
The professor’s proposal for ending the Israel-Palestinian conflict, for instance, entails the Jews — settler-colonialists in his view — dissolving their state and joining a regional non- “ethno-state” ruled by the majority. Ask the Middle East’s Christians how that arrangement worked out. I suspect that Jews would have about a year before they would be banished or dead. Which is almost surely the point.
Mahmood’s most recent book argues that Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, mass murderer of hundreds of thousands, including perhaps up to 10,000 Asian immigrants, and personal dispenser of torture and rape, was a misunderstood “post-colonial” hero.
Mahmood’s most notorious position is a defense of suicide bombers, like the ones who participated in 9/11 or the Palestinian Intifada. He maintains that “first and foremost,” suicide bombers should be defined as “soldiers,” and the practice “understood as a feature of modern political violence rather than stigmatized as a mark of barbarism.” Of course, when Israel or the U.S. react to suicide attackers as members of an opposing military force, the elder Mamdani will cast the nations as warmongers.”
Mahmood’s arguments are cushioned by thousands of words of tedious pseudointellectual gibberish and moral relativism. But there’s no constituency for Mahmood’s ideas. Yet, the justification for the indiscriminate slaughter of the “colonizers” will be familiar to anyone acquainted with the defense of “globalize the intifada,” a term the younger Mamdani defends. And he has a constituency.
Like Mahmood, Imam Siraj Wahhaj doesn’t believe the U.S. should exist. Last week, Mamdani “had the pleasure of meeting” Wahhaj, one of the “foremost Muslim leaders and a pillar of the Bed-Stuy community for nearly half a century.” The front-runner posted a picture of himself arm-in-arm, smiling with Wahhaj.
Wahhaj, born Jeffrey Kearse, is a champion of Islamic supremacism. Not the trendy brand of socialist Hamas-cheering that Mamdani and so many leftists subscribe to these days. The Imam of the Muslim Alliance in North America, who often hosted the infamous Blind Sheikh and other terrorists in the 1990s, says he would be honored to die for Jihad, and admits his politics are just a “weapon in the cause of Islam.” He defended the 1993 World Trade Center bombers.
Wahhaj supports overturning the system — “I pray one day Allah will bless us to raise an army” — and installing medieval Muslim doctrine. “Islam is better than democracy … Islam prevails over every kind of system, and you know what? It will happen.” Wahhaj believes the U.S. is “filthy” and “sick.” And perhaps Mamdani’s fans agree with that observation.
Mamdani didn’t defend his meeting with the Imam by noting that Wahhaj’s past statements were abhorrent, but rather by pointing out that the “same imam met with Mayor Bloomberg, met with Mayor De Blasio, campaigned alongside Eric Adams, and the only time it became an issue of national attention was when I met with him.”
None of those politicians spent their careers defending terrorist slogans and associating with Jew haters. Bloomberg invited Wahhaj, along with other Muslim leaders, for a meeting. When he found out the imam’s background, the former mayor regretted inviting him.
Another radical figure Mamdani sees no problem appearing with is podcaster Hasan Piker, who has claimed that the U.S. deserved the 9/11 attacks. We are only one generation removed from 9/11, the most traumatic event in modern American history, yet the leading New York mayoral candidate openly befriends a terrorist sympathizer. All because he knows Piker’s listeners are his voting bloc.
Why is Mamdani drawn to a person who suggests Californians should rise against landlords and “kill those mother***ers. Murder those mother***ers in the streets. Let the streets soak in their red capitalist blood…?” Outside the New York Post, the New York media, which is to also say the national media, no one seems to care very much. Mamdani’s image is softened to an extent that few can see the real person.
On political grounds, it’s nearly incomprehensible that a politician could get away with this kind of association. Piker not only believes that the U.S. got what was coming to it on 9/11 but that “it doesn’t matter if rapes f***ing happened on Oct. 7.” It’s true that this kind of talk has been destigmatized on social media. And Piker is no different, morally speaking, than a white supremacist. Imagine the stories we’d read if Mamdani’s opponent, Andrew Cuomo, had an amiable conversation with one.
It took until this week, and only when pressed by Cuomo during a live televised debate, for Mamdani to distance himself from Piker’s 9/11 comments.
Mamdani’s defenders will accuse those who bring these things up of being “Islamophobic,” a word “created by fascists and used by cowards to manipulate morons,” as Andrew Cummins reportedly put it. “Islamophobia” is a cynical manipulation of language. Islam is not a race or a set of people. It is a set of beliefs. The woke Left might view everyone in identitarian terms, but thinking people have the right to question extremist beliefs within any faith. The word is meant to chill speech, and nothing more.
Now, obviously, Manhattan isn’t going to turn into a caliphate any time soon. Big cities often elect absurd mayors. But if you don’t believe the red-green alliance is worth concerning yourself over, you haven’t been paying attention to the disaster unfolding in Western Europe, where the Left allows the sensibilities and traditions of unassimilated Islamic newcomers to trump basic liberal freedoms. ‘Democratic’ socialism is an accelerant for Islamic extremism.
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Until he ran for mayor, destroying the Jewish State was the defining cause of Mamdani’s political life. His loathing of “Zionists” is no secret. But it wasn’t his only cause. In his short political career, Mamdani surrounded himself with extremists. The candidate delivered the keynote address at the 2023 Democratic Socialists of America convention. As James Kirchick details in the Wall Street Journal, the national platform at the time entailed the “nationalization of railroads, utilities, critical manufacturing, technology companies, institutions of monetary policy, insurance, real estate and finance;” “the abolition of police, prisons and border enforcement; “a four-day, 32-hour work week”; “social ownership” of media and internet companies, socialized agriculture and government funding of “gender-affirming surgeries” for minors without parental consent.
Mamdani only campaigns on a few watered-down socialist policies today. His credulous supporters are too wealthy and too safe to be put off by some light collectivism. You certainly can’t shame them by pointing out that Mamdani has no problem with theocrats and violent rhetoric. The colonialist, the capitalist, and the Christian are enemies of “Free Palestine,” and so they are also the enemies of “Queers for Palestine.” It’s not like these people are planning on moving to Gaza. They’re just searching for a new revolutionary cause and some free stuff. For them, a mayor who defends violent slogans aimed at New York Jews is an acceptable price. The biggest betrayal comes from the erstwhile national “liberal,” who normalizes Mamdani, a man who isn’t merely hard left, but, judging from his words, background, mentors, and friends, a fan of the most odious strands of ideology in American politics.
