Illustration is “Treacherous Attack by Saracens–Chroniques de France ou de Saint Denis Royal” courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.
The candidacy of Zohran Mamdani is an affront to the memory of every New Yorker who died on 9/11, and yes, on February 26, 1993, the first time that Islamic terrorists attacked the World Trade Center. Six people died in 1993, and as we know, nearly 3000 perished on 9/11, not only in New York. Four hundred New York City firemen, police officers and other first responders were among them, marching up into the burning towers knowing they likely would not survive. “Let me give you a kiss. I may not come back,” one firefighter said to an acquaintance of mine before he went into the building. He didn’t come back.
No decent person alive that day can forget the footage of those poor souls clinging to the outside of the Towers as they futilely sought to escape the flames, or of those victims who fell over 100 stories to their deaths as people below watched in horror.
In some places, however, the enemies of the United States celebrated. Palestinian mobs notoriously gathered, cheering and sharing sweets.
And now New York is poised to elect as its 111th mayor a young Indian Muslim man whose family had just moved to NY from South Africa two years before the Towers fell. A man whose sympathies lie more with the perpetrators and celebrants of 9/11, and who shows zero empathy for the first responders, 441 of whom perished, or the civilians. A man who has spun the narrative so that the jihadist side are equally victims, or even more so. A man who has claimed his aunt was a victim for being afraid to wear her hijab after 9/11. In each of his 9/11 anniversary social media posts since becoming an Assemblyman, Mamdani has emphasized the suffering as a result of the foreign Muslims where the US went to war to fight terrorism. The impression one gets is, “yes….but here are the people I really care about.”
His allegiances and instincts are jihadi-friendly:
- On Friday 17 October he met with Imam Siraj Wahhaj, whom federal prosecutors consider an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 bombing. His son is serving a life sentence for having run a training camp for would-be terrorists. When asked about Wahhaj’s comments, Mamdani smirked and got into his luxury SUV, according to the New York Post.
- He is friendly with Hasan Piker, a Turkish-born influencer who called the murder of the Israeli diplomats in Washington earlier this year a possible “false flag” incident and who has said the “US f—ing deserved 9/11.”
- He grew up with a leftist professor father who has been quoted explaining at length that suicide bombers should not be treated as terrorists, but as warriors. His filmmaker mother’s work has been sponsored by the terrorist-friendly government of Qatar. How could Mamdani not have been shaped by the views of these parents at their dinner table?
- During the first mayoral debate, when presumably Mamdani was trying to present a benign façade, he completely ignored questions directed at him about Gaza or the conflict, and responded by raising ‘affordability.’ The act was in itself a condescending dismissal of the interest of many New Yorkers in the issue, not just Jews, a condescension that has fueled and will fuel anti-Semitism and disorder on the city’s streets.
- He has called for “globalizing the intifada,” which only can mean killing Jews and Zionists worldwide. In the last week or two, he has backed off, and only says he “would discourage it.” Sure. Wink wink.
- His 9/11 social media posts have been virtually identical since he entered politics in 2020, suggesting a rote performative exercise. Only in 2024 did he mention the first responders’ sacrifice. Each time he added language implying that 9/11 was unfortunate because of the “millions” who died in “wars” afterwards. This is called moral equivalence. It diminishes the genuine victimhood of those who were deliberately targeted by terrorists and enemies of their country, as opposed to those who were killed in a war, often unjustly, but not intentionally. Mamdani has lost no opportunity to underscore whom he considers the real victims of 9/11: the Muslims of Iraq, Afghanistan, and of course Gaza. Always foreign Muslims. Never Americans.
Mamdani’s energies are geared towards dismissing and excusing jihadism. He is a reminder of the ambition that many Muslims openly voice to conquer the West, by birth and politics if not by the sword. His behavior and words are meant to distract the victim from the criminal who stalks him. If the main victims of 9/11 and 10/7 are actually Muslims, then we have no right to challenge what we imagine to be jihadi-sponsored aggression. As David Bernstein of Wicked Son Press eloquently says, “…it fits quite obviously into the Jihadi playbook, which is to redefine any act of Muslim violence and aggression into a story of Muslim victimization…ultimately it’s an attempt (largely successful across the globe) to prevent anyone from speaking the truth about Islamic violence, handing Jihadis propaganda victories no matter how heinous their actions.”
It should be noted, parenthetically, that the similarly appalling mirror strategy is that of leftist Jews who scramble to show how sympathetic they are to the jihadists by disparaging the State of Israel, the Zionism that is absolutely central to Jewish identity, and engaging in other acts of self-abnegation. We call these Jews the “Asajews,” because their modus operandi is to apologize for the Jewish people, whether “As a Jew, I weep for Gaza,” or “As a Jew, I apologize for my co-religionists who want to survive.” (that’s a joke, but not far off from the truth). Living comfortably in the US, and often with inadequate religious education, they do not know the story of their own people and are unprepared to defend their own interests. They want to be cherished and accepted by other left-wing people, which ends up looking a lot like Stockholm Syndrome. The Jewish community is divided.
Others have explained why Mamdani’s campaign has flourished despite indifference towards the New Yorkers who died on 9/11 and in 1993. First, there is genuine concern about the “affordability” of a city that has become prohibitively expensive, and only Mamdani has addressed that, if not convincingly. Second, those New Yorkers who remember 9/11 have been steadily leaving the voter rolls, whether by dying or moving elsewhere. The trifecta of Irish, Italians and Jews that formed the white demographic bedrock of the 1960s and 1970s is no longer preeminent, at least not in the city itself. Since 1965, when the US lifted its barriers to immigration from the developing world, massive flows of people from Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa have transformed the city. The city is now about 38 percent foreign-born (it was 18.2 percent in 1970), and probably another 20 percent or so are their children, the products of New York City public schools where civics, US history, and critical thinking are probably not high on the agenda.
New York has always been a city of immigrants, the gatehouse for assimilation and success by those who wanted to join the American enterprise. In 2000, according to city statistics, the foreign-born percentage was 35 percent, virtually the same as today. But what has changed are the demographics of those foreign-born people. Most striking is the decline in the percentage of the Europeans as part of the immigration group. According to an official city publication called The Newest New Yorkers (2013), in 1970, Europeans were 64 percent of immigrants in New York City. By 2011 they were only 16 percent. The only European country in the top 10 of immigrant sourcing was Russia. Muslims are 9 percent of NY’s population now; Jews are roughly 10-12 percent. In 1910, Jews were a quarter of the city’s population.
Polls have shown that 40 percent of New Yorkers born in the US support former Governor Cuomo in the mayoral race; Mamdani comes in second with 25 percent. However, foreign-born New Yorkers overwhelmingly support Mamdani (64 percent), whether because of affordability issues or because they simply have never connected with the New York version of patriotism that imbues our memories of 9/11. Or because he looks like them.
The upshot is that the younger, browner, and poorer classes are more preoccupied with free stuff than with pro-jihadist rhetoric. Or they are fine with leftism and jihadism, having been indoctrinated in the NYC public school system as its traditionally Jewish teachers have retired. They are less likely to be interacting with Jews as neighbors than in the past, especially not the wealthy professionals of Manhattan or the ultra-Orthodox of Brooklyn. Nobody challenges the logic of assuming that ongoing leftist management of New York’s economy will be remedied by doubling down on the same under a man who openly calls for the “seizing the means of production.”
Much ink has been spilled on Mamdani’s relationship with Jewish New Yorkers. But it is a red herring. Enough leftist New York Jews are deluded enough to embrace their latest nonwhite redeemer (if you remember Barack Hussein Obama) who doesn’t love them back. Mamdani doesn’t need to win over any more of the Jewish vote. His visits to notoriously self-flagellating leftist synagogues simply keeps the Asajews in line.
The issue that not enough observers comment on is what Mamdani’s indifference to the victims of 9/11 says about him, or about New Yorkers today. Yes, there is a striking lack of empathy that would have been easy to fake for a silver-tongued politician—if he wanted to. He does not want to bother. He does not need to bother.
Empathy need not be zero-sum. But his moral equivalence on this issue tells you he does not care about the New Yorkers—many of whom were foreigners or immigrants—who died at the hands of the jihadists. He cares more about the jihadists, and Muslims in distant places who support those jihadists. He does not care about the Americans who died, or about protecting the city and America from those Islamic killers. He is not patriotic. As a Democratic Socialist, he by definition wishes to sweep the current system aside: our economy, meritocracy (as promising to get rid of NYC’s specialized schools), our national security measures. He celebrates our declared enemies.
His lack of patriotism, his communism, and his consistent backing of our national and civilizational adversaries will resonate throughout the city if he is elected mayor: in its schools through the curriculum and DEI measures; by selectively enforcing regulations, or by defunding and handicapping the police who keep our streets safe. His lack of real-world business or management experience, married to communist aspirations, means he does not understand how to achieve affordability except through coercion. We know from history that it will not work, and New York will be poorer and more dangerous after a Mamdani mayoralty than ever before. Fasten your seat belts.
Paula Weiss is the author of The Antifan Girlfriend and The Deplorable Underground. She was born in Manhattan and raised in Queens and suburban Westchester. She still has relatives in New York, and a daughter who insists on moving there next summer, so this is more than an armchair exercise for her.