In their zeal to help elect New York’s first socialist and first Muslim mayor, most of the media have shamefully ignored and downplayed deeply troubling questions

Please, New York, not this guy….

Zorhan Mamdani, New York? Really? This seems like a good idea to you? Since his surprise breakout early this summer the “Democratic Socialist” (a contradiction in terms if ever there was one) has led in polls comfortably. That’s not to say he has anywhere near a majority.

As concerning as Mamdani’s bonkers, neo-Marxist policies are, far more concerning is his — and his parents’ — long record of hateful and bigoted statements and associations. It’s a safe bet that a substantial portion of his supporters don’t know who they’re going to be voting for. In fact, based on numerous troubling reports, he may well be the biggest charlatan in recent U.S. political history.

While it should go without saying, a caveat is in order: Nothing of what follows is a critique of Mamdani’s Muslim faith. It wasn’t so long ago — within my parents’, the Boomers’, generation — that tens of millions of Americans felt that John F. Kennedy’s Catholic faith disqualified him as a presidential candidate. Within my grandparents’ generation dozens of states made it all but impossible for non-Whites, and especially Blacks, to run for office.

All Americans should celebrate the fact that a Muslim is on the cusp of becoming mayor of our biggest city. The problem is, Mamdani is the wrong Muslim.

If it walks like an antisemite and quacks like an antisemite….

Mamdani’s inability to outright condemn antisemitism and violence against Jews is well established. He belongs to a political organization, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) that has steadfastly refused to condemn Hamas’s surprise attacks and atrocities against innocent Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023. Quite the contrary: Last month the organization condemned the U.S. negotiated ceasefire (this prompted a darkly humorous headline in the Babylon Bee: “People Who Have Been Calling For A Ceasefire For Two Years Condemn Ceasefire”). It’s common to see signs at DSA rallies featuring messages like “By Any Means Necessary.”

Mamdani waited until the second anniversary of the Hamas attacks to release an official statement. What took him so long? When he finally did, even the normally pliant CNN acknowledged that it was in part an exercise in equivocation.

Actions, as the saying goes, speak louder than words. In July 2023, Mamdani was filmed leading a pro-Hamas rally in Astoria. As he led a chant calling for boycott, divestment and sanctions (“bds”) against Israel, behind him a protester held a sign declaring “There Is Only One Solution: Intifada Revolution.” Among Hamas supporters “one solution” is a dog whistle echoing the Final Solution, the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews. “Intifada revolution” is a call for violence. Mamdani was perfectly at home in that crowd. This was barely three months before October 7.

As recently as June 30, in an interviewer on Meet the Press gave him three chances to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada,” which is generally understood to be a call for violence against Jews and Christians. He answered with a series of word salads, eventually claiming that mayors should not “police speech.” That Mamdani cannot seem to separate legitimate criticism of Israel, one of the US’s strongest allies, from radical language calling for the Jewish state’s extermination, should send chills down the spines of every single New Yorker.

Mind you, this is the same candidate who has threatened to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should he visit New York. It’s hard to conjure a more draconian effort to police the speech of an entire nation.

Three weeks ago Mamdani’s wife, Rama Duwaji, took to social media to mourn the death of a Palestinian influencer named Saleh al-Jafarawi, who was killed, ironically, during a gun battle between warring Palestinian factions in the Gaza Strip.  She posted “Beloved Jafarawi” alongside four broken heart emojis. Jafarawi’s social media persona was “Mr. FAFO,” which of course stands for “f*** around and find out,” a common threat of violence. He was reviled in Israel for publicly celebrating the October 7 Hamas atrocities. Meta had disabled his Instagram accounts in March for violating the company’s prohibitions on hate speech and calls for violence. Are we starting to see a pattern here? Imagine if Curtis Sliwa took to social media to mourn the death of, say, David Duke, and called him “Brother David.” The calls for him to drop out would be deafening, and rightly so.

It gets worse

Just two weeks ago, Mamdani was photographed smiling gleefully arm in arm with a New York imam named Siraj Wahaj. Wahaj is an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. In 1995 he provided defense testimony during the federal trial in New York of the “Blind Sheikh,” Omar Abdel-Rahman, the former leader of the Egyptian terrorist organization Gama’a al-Islamiyya. Rahman was found guilty of conspiracy to murder Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and conspiracy to bomb the UN headquarters, FBI headquarters and Lincoln Tunnel. Well, then. Oh, Wahaj also has a history of anti-LGBTQ statements, including calling on people to make homosexuals “uncomfortable” until they “turn straight.” He also has called for the murder of homosexuals.

This wasn’t some youthful misstep or a lapse of judgement that occurred years ago. Mamdani grinned his grin with this peddler of hate barely three weeks before election day. It strains credulity past the breaking point to suggest Mamdani is unaware of who Wahaj is. Indeed, he defended the meeting and photo, pointing out that Michael Bloomberg also met with him in 2009. He conveniently left out the fact that Bloomberg subsequently apologized, saying he wouldn’t have taken the meeting had he known who Wahaj was.  Whether or not Bloomberg was telling the truth is irrelevant to Mamdani’s enthusiastic embrace of a hatemonger.

That photo wasn’t a one-off. On July 31, during a trip to his home country of Uganda, Mamdani and his father posed with a Ugandan politician named Rebecca Kadaga. Like Wahaj, Kadaga has a long history of anti-LGBTQ hate, except that as a senior minister in her country she’s actually been able to put her hate into law. In 2017 she introduced a bill that made homosexuality a crime punishable by lifetime imprisonment. Uganda subsequently passed a version of Kadaga’s bill that makes consensual homosexual sex a crime punishable by a minimum of 14 years and up to life in prison. 

Mamdani, who has made his Ugandan birth and citizenship central to his political identity, has never publicly disavowed his home country’s policies toward its LGBTQ population. As in his picture with Wahaj, he’s smiling like it’s his birthday.

A spokeswoman for Mamdani offered what may be the weakest, lamest non-apology imaginable. “Zohran Mamdani ran into the First Deputy Minister while he was at Entebbe airport waiting to board his flight back to New York City. She asked to take a photo. If he was aware she was the architect of this horrific attack on queer Ugandans, he would not have done so.” 

Asking people to believe that Mamdani, who retains his Ugandan citizenship, has close ties to his birth country, and whose family owns a four acre gated compound in Kampala City’s suburbs and has substantial investments there, was unaware of Kadaga’s policies is like asking them to believe water isn’t wet. 

Cuomo’s campaign released a statement calling Mamdani’s defense “laughable,” noting that Kadaga’s crusade against Uganda’s LGBTQ community has been condemned around the world for well over a decade. The statement concluded that “Any serious public official, particularly one from Uganda, would know exactly who she is.”

Lord alone knows how many other cancerous figures Mamdani has palled around with over the years.

Obviously, I don’t claim to know what’s in Mamdani’s heart when it comes to LGBTQ people. He’s marched in New York’s Pride parade and has apparently supported pro-LGBTQ legislation as a state assemblyman. Since the photo with Kadaga came to light his campaign has leaned into the issue, including promising to make New York a sanctuary city for trans people (this isn’t particularly meaningful, as New York is already a sanctuary state). 

Then again, politicians routinely take public positions that conflict with their personal beliefs. Can his campaign rhetoric be reconciled with his dual citizenship in and outspoken support of a country that has one of the most brutal track records on LGBTQ rights in the world, and his willingness to interact with public figures who call for violence against that community? 

As noted, Mamdani has publicly supported the bds movement against Israel over that  country’s policies and actions in Gaza. Where’s his righteous indignation over his own home country’s genocidal laws against homosexuals and trans people? Mamdani can do virtually nothing to affect Israeli foreign policy. In contrast, if he were to loudly condemn Ugandan LGBTQ policy, he may very well be able to help bring about change. Yet he and his family are silent.

Speaking of his family, Mamdani’s parents are all aboard the hate train. His mother has said he is “not American,” and referred to Americans using the Hindu word “firang.” In India, that word is often considered a derogatory slur against foreigners, particularly Caucasians.  His father has called the United States “the root of all evil,” and compared Abraham Lincoln to Hitler. Yet in his book published just three weeks ago, Mamdani senior defends Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, who was responsible for as many as half a million deaths, most of them Christians, during his eight year dictatorship. He wrote that the idea that Amin was a “Hitlerite presence in Africa” is a “media-driven preconception.” 

Yet the mainstream media have had nary a peep to say. The vast majority of stories linked in this post are from places like The New York Post and Fox News. Why? They go collectively berserk when a conservative state so much as considers a law to, say, require boys and girls in middle and high school to use the bathrooms corresponding with their biological sex or prevent biological men from entering women’s spaces like locker rooms. Yet one of their own can be openly buddy-buddy with people who have literally called for life imprisonment and even death for gay people, and apparently it’s all good.

And that should give everyone in New York — and the United States — pause.