New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s latest outrage, with his wife Rama Duwaji, was hosting terrorist sympathizer Mahmoud Khalil for dinner at Gracie Mansion, the official mayoral residence.
Mamdani posted a picture of them breaking their Ramadan fast on the anniversary of Khalil’s detention by federal immigration officers. Khalil faces deportation for lying on his green card application. Mamdani sympathized with his friend’s “profound hardship” and “profound courage.”
Some people say Khalil simply exercised his free speech rights at Columbia University and should not be harassed for his activism by the feds; others argue that he’s an agitator who lied to get residency and should be deported because he’d never have been granted entry if he’d told the truth about his anti-Americanism.
I hope the bum is thrown out, but however his case ends, it’s worth looking at the separate issue of Mamdani publicizing their dinner. Why did he do it? Some pundits suggest it was dumb to post the photo because it triggered condemnation. But this seems a faulty analysis to me.
Provoking outrage was the point. Mamdani wanted to take the photo of his love-in with his anti-American friend and shove it into the public’s face, implying, “Suck it up, America, because you can’t do anything about it. We have the power now, and we’re getting stronger.”
Mamdani’s goal was to normalize the grotesque. The late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a very different kind of New York Democrat, called this “defining deviancy down” 33 years ago in an essay about American culture and society being pulled apart. That’s what Mamdani, Duwaji, and Khalil are doing — trying to pull our culture, society, moral framework, and self-assurance apart.
Like the Islamist forces they support, their deepest desire is to change — that is, destroy — who we are, what we believe, and how we conduct ourselves. That’s why Duwaji posted in joyous celebration of Hamas’s tortures, rapes, and massacres in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. The point of Mamdani’s dinner and photo, of Khalil’s activism, of Duwaji’s delight in slaughter is to repudiate the norms that have always guided public speech and conduct in America.
Hamas terrorists did the same on Oct. 7, normalizing the grotesque. They didn’t just slaughter Jews, but captured their enormities on video — they hacked off the head of one victim with an agricultural hoe — and published the evidence on social media around the world. They calculated, rightly to the shock and horror of many of us, that this would attract rather than repel support.
Horrors, the perpetration of which would once have revolted and alienated every sane person in the West, instead sparked mass support. Hamas terrorists, like their supporters in Gracie Mansion, defy norms to normalize what used to be utterly unacceptable. They seek to wreck the moral parameters of Western civilization. The more that extremists, especially public figures on the Left, reject the traditions of a coherent society, the more they sow doubt in the minds of the population.
It should be disqualifying for the New York mayor to sup with a terrorist sympathizer, but Mamdani wanted to jam his crowbar deeper into a fissure splitting our society. He expected this to encourage his leftist base and demoralize his foes. It probably has. It is a measure of the fantastic success the Left-Islamist alliance has had in its campaign to undermine this country.
