Review by Paula Weiss
Who would have guessed that a mere two decades after al-Qa’ida terrorist-piloted planes killed 3000 New Yorkers, the leading contender in New York’s mayoral election would be an unapologetic terrorist sympathizer? Who claimed that longtime extremist Anwar al-Awlaki was driven into the arms of al-Qa’ida only because of FBI surveillance? Whose official statement immediately after the Hamas atrocities of 10/7/23 was to blame the Israeli government? Mamdani’s father, a professor at Columbia, has argued that a suicide bomber should not be stigmatized as a terrorist, but rather seen as a “soldier.” Mamdani has not given any indication he rejects his father’s view in this city, of all cities.
Who would have thought that after a destructive downward spiral under Bill DeBlasio, New York voters would embrace an underemployed 32-year-old from a rich family openly advocating the end of private property? In Mamdani’s case, leftism and Islamism go hand in hand. But as Asra Nomani, the author of Woke Army knows, this partnership is one of the most striking political trends of the 21st century so far.
Nomani, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and Muslim self-described reformer herself born in India, has been a stalwart advocate for an Islam consonant with the American civic values of open debate, compromise, and tolerance. Her Woke Army warns about a campaign of several decades by immigrant and first-generation Muslims to build a political apparatus in the US to wield political power, to sideline and demonize more liberal Muslim-Americans, and to manipulate and insinuate itself into the US mainstream through leftist intersectional politics. All along it has gained momentum and funding from leftleaning foundations and organizations—the amounts Nomani mentions are astounding. Nomani herself has been attacked by American Islamists for many years, (e.g., “Zionist media whore,”) ever since she argued fruitlessly for women to be allowed to enter through the front door of her West Virginia mosque. She was a good friend of Wall Street Journal colleague Danny Pearl, who was beheaded by Pakistani terrorists in 2002. In Fairfax, Virginia she is best known for having opposed the Fairfax County School Board’s lowering academic barriers for entry to elite STEM-focused Thomas Jefferson HS as the Board sought to diminish the Asian American majority presence in the school.
Woke Army documents the six-decade story of Muslims affiliated with the faith’s most regressive elements, who have sought to establish themselves in American political life, and the alliances that they brokered with the political left to catapult to success. If these Muslims loved America, as Nomani convincingly states she does, and sought to participate in society for the betterment of all, she would join them. But from the beginning, Nomani argues, these ideologically Salafist Muslims have operated with the ultimate goal of imposing sharia on America, and in the short term, demonizing Jews and Israel, and somewhat more cautiously, the United States. They have refused to acknowledge that radicalization exists, let alone taken responsibility for addressing it.
Nomani traces the beginnings of the Muslim community in Northern Virginia to academics and businesspeople arriving in the 1960s when President Lyndon Johnson opened the door to non-European immigrants. These Muslims purchased land, and set up various interlocking businesses and mosques. They created a network of various organizations, the most prominent being the Council for American Islamic Relations (CAIR), the unindicted co-conspirator of the Holy Land fundraising for Hamas case in 2008, the largest terrorism financing operation in US history. The ringleaders were convicted of sending $12 million to Hamas. In Nomani’s telling, CAIR is the 800-pound gorilla that presents a respectable face to US politics, mouthing civil rights while supporting extremism in private. Nomani reminds us that as early as 1993, the FBI wiretapped radicals who were plotting to make the new Palestinian terror group Hamas acceptable to the American mainstream. Among themselves, they agreed to refer to Hamas as “Sister Samah.”
During the 1990s, the advent of social media led to an explosion of Muslim websites and online commentators. The latter usually hid behind false identities as they wielded poison pens against reformers such as Nomani, ex-Somali Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Syrian-American Navy Lt. Commander Zuhdi Jasser. One of the strengths of Nomani’s book is her exhaustive reporting skills; she meticulously notes and connects the IP addresses, credit card charges and website registrations that allowed her to uncover the real identities of the trolls.
About half of Nomani’s book focuses on the growth of various Muslim organizations, most with anodyne names, such as the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, and their resistance to American influences as they pursue jihad against reformers. Even as radicalization took hold at home and abroad, what she calls “the Honor Brigade” have refused to acknowledge it, claiming Islam is a “religion of peace,” and instead have chosen to weaponize charges of “Islamophobia” against even constructive critics.
The alliance between the Marxists and the Islamists gained momentum under President Obama. He notoriously claimed Americans needed to get off their “high horse” about religious extremism, “invoking the Crusades, the Catholic Inquisition, and US slavery, and insisting that the Islamic State (ISIS) was not religiously inspired.” As it waged the War on Terror, the US government consulted with Muslim organizations to avoid potentially offensive terminology such as “Islamist.”
The turn to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in major institutions was a boon to professional Muslims, who seized on Marxist derived “critical race theory” to insert their religion into the intersectionality ideology of the 2010s and early 2020’s. They insisted that Muslims were also victims of racism and should be treated on a par with blacks, Asians, and Hispanics. Islamic activists advocated for and got the Obama Administration to back a category called “Middle Eastern and North African descent” alongside the usual racial classifications in official documents. According to Nomani,
“Muslim leaders were leveraging identity politics to play a very dangerous game and split Muslims from the American majority by convincing them that they were hated by others and needed to band together with the downtrodden against a racist and hate-filled Christian and white nationalist majority.”
The Woke Army has taken advantage of every opportunity to promote the narrative of persecuted Muslims: The election of President Donald Trump’s in 2016 and the so-called “Muslim ban” that was anything but. The Women’s March in 2017, conceived of by a soon-ostracized Jewish woman in Hawaii became a moneymaking enterprise headed by headscarf-wearing Vogue magazine celebrity Linda Sarsour. The killing of career criminal George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020 fueled DEI initiatives in schools and corporations that carried along Muslim interests. A flood of foundation money buoyed Muslim and leftist organizations, extensively but not entirely from billionaire George Soros. Personnel and funds have been moving efficiently from leftist and progressive causes to Muslim activists—Nomani documents all of these salaries, sometimes double salaries, in deep detail.
The book ends in 2023, but Nomani would doubtless trace the post 10/7 campus protests, in all their nihilistic law-breaking and antisemitism, to this Woke Army alliance having matured, with its generous streams of leftwing billionaire funding still intact (where DID those hundreds of fancy tents in the encampments come from?) That the campus and urban riots against Israel and Zionism began virtually simultaneously with the Hamas atrocities suggests that the infrastructure for campus takeover had been in place beforehand—and a full month before Israeli troops even marched into Gaza. Foreigners took advantage of generous and lax student visas to energize the riots and turn campuses into hostile environments for political opponents and particularly Jewish students. University presidents and administrators sucking on the DEI tit were soothed into complacency, at best. “Free Palestine” has become a mantra for those non-Muslim youth who want to prove their leftist bonafides without the need to learn anything about the region.
Many other Muslims are beginning to run for public office, almost entirely as Democrats. One exception was Zuhdi Jasser, Nomani’s reformist ally, who lost a Republican primary for Congress in Arizona last year. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib are the most notorious for their reflexive anti-Semitism and radicalism. This year, in Minneapolis, a young Somali-American is favored in the city’s mayoralty Democratic primary—victory in which would be tantamount to election in the left-leaning city. Ghazala Hashmi, born in India, is the Democratic lieutenant governor candidate in Virginia. Aspiring to political office is the logical extension of the layered approach to seizing political power that began with websites and organizational platforms, and the blue territories are the most vulnerable.
In some ways it is surprising that Muslim Americans are running almost entirely as Democrats, given the party’s obsession with socio-sexual issues. But the Republicans demand conformity with a traditional patriotism and pro-Americanism that may stick in the craw of those looking to transform America into somewhere more Islamically friendly or socialist, or both.
If Americans still need to be warned about the dangers of Islamic extremism at home, they need look no farther than Europe. A half dozen major cities in Britain are governed by Muslim mayors. Many neighborhoods in Europe since the mass migrations of 2015 are no-go zones occupied by large Muslim families on the public dole. Rapes have escalated in European countries that have welcomed large numbers of Muslim migrants—but not in Poland or Hungary that have resisted migrant flows and whose leaders are protective of their countries’ Christian and European culture. Spain has announced or and President Macron says France will shortly declare its recognition of a “Palestinian” state, and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is under pressure to do the same, with social media lice blaming his Jewish wife and inlaws for his resistance. Make no mistake: this is where this modern Muslim Brotherhood and their radical associates want to take us, isolating our ally Israel and stoking anti-Zionism, which is for all purposes anti-Semitism, and intimidating Jews and Christians from expressing support for Israel.
In January 2025, Nomani wrote an article for Fox News about the self-proclaimed grassroots ANSWER coalition that was fomenting protests against the incoming Trump Administration. https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/asra-nomani-woke-army-retreats-d-c-protest-pivots-fight-back-gaza/
She shows that contrary to their claims, they are “Astro-turfed,” with their mobs organized by commercial entities for hire. The question arises again, as it did with the acres of high-end tents at the pro-terrorist encampments at universities: who is paying for this? The coalition is almost entirely socialist and or Islamist in orientation. The communists are happy to use “Palestine” as a convenient hook for the communists to sow unrest, but fighting Israel is the very raison d’etre of the Islamists. And authoritarian socialist governance is completely consonant with the radical Muslim agenda. So the alliance continues, for now, even though Nomani describes a careful, almost comical waltz between both sides when social issues such as women or LGBT rights arise. The left invariably excuses the Muslims from having to conform on social issues.
The second Trump Administration is fighting the Woke Army in our midst. President Trump’s enforcement of immigration law and methodical confrontation of some universities shows that he understands the threat. The hysterics of the left in turn suggest that his aim is true. Causes for longterm optimism include the ethnic diversity of American immigrants, unlike in Europe where they are overwhelmingly Muslim. Also, many Americans have lost patience with intersectional privilege drama and Trump has given Americans the courage to call racial and ethnic victim grievance-mongering what they often are—grabs for money and power that can and should be resisted.
Woke Army fills an important void on the bookshelf of anyone who is concerned about anti-democratic trends in American politics, and wants a comprehensive overview of the network of leftist and Islamic groups that threaten democratic freedom for the majority. But even if its research borders on encyclopedic, the book itself is a straightforward and passionate read.
Paula T. Weiss is the author of The Antifan Girlfriend and The Deplorable Underground.