Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old “democratic socialist”, has just won the NYC Democratic mayoral primary. He is now odds-on to become the Big Apple’s next mayor.
Born in Uganda to Indian parents, Mamdani moved to the U.S. as a child and became a naturalized citizen in 2018. His rise has been rapid—until relatively recently, most New Yorkers had never heard of him.
He’s being lauded as a compassionate warrior for social justice, which is generally a very reliable indicator that the opposite is true. And so it proves in this case.
Here are a few highlights:
- In 2017, Mamdani released a rap track called “Salaam”, about growing up Muslim in New York, in which he expresses his “love” for five men known as the “Holy Land Five”. This is a reference to the heads of the now-defunct Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development—Shukri Abu Baker, Mohammad El-Mezain, Ghassan Elashi, Mufid Abdulqader and Abdulrahman Odeh—who were convicted by a federal jury in 2008 of channelling millions of dollars to Hamas, a proscribed terrorist organisation.
- He’s defended cries of “globalise the intifada” as “capturing a desire for equality”. For context, “Intifada” implies “bloody violence and calls for the death and murder of Jewish Israelis—civilian or otherwise“. During previous “intifadas”, suicide bombers and knifemen targeted civilians throughout Israel at cafés, restaurants full of kids, hotels, wedding ceremonies, shopping malls, nightclubs, and bus stations, resulting in many hundreds of deaths.
- On Oct 8 2023, in response to a jihadist pogrom by Palestinian fanatics that would ultimately claim over 1,200 lives, he tweeted taking aim at …Israeli “apartheid and occupation”. His post singled out Netanyahu and the Israeli government for criticism by name, but didn’t once mention Hamas. This presumably made his father Mahmood Mamdani, an academic at Columbia University who teaches about “the necessity of violence in anti-colonial struggle” (and one of his donors), very proud. Mamdani Senior has called for the “‘dismantling of the Jewish state”, and signed a public letter referring to Hamas’s massacre as “an occupied people exercising a right to resist violent and illegal occupation’. Nice family. What better way to show gratitude to your host nation than by fraudulently depicting it as an oppressive dystopia and making pseudo-intellectual arguments in defence of movements that pose real threats to liberty, tolerance and free thought?
- His voting behaviour raises a few questions to say the least. For instance, why would a man lauded for his supposed commitment to fighting “bigotry” in all its forms fail to sign a State Assembly resolution commemorating Holocaust victims? A real noodle-scratcher…
- In light of the points listed so far, it’s perhaps unsurprising that the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) have allegedly backed him to the tune of many thousands of dollars. CAIR was originally founded in 1994 as part of a broader network linked to the Islamic Association for Palestine, which US authorities identified as a propaganda arm of Hamas in the US. One of its co-founders has stated, quote, “I am in support of the Hamas movement”; its officials have repeatedly refused to condemn Islamist and jihadist outfits including Hamas and Hezbollah in interviews; and it has reportedly teamed up with Muslim Brotherhood-linked preachers (to choose just a tiny fraction of the possible examples—more on CAIR here).
- At the height of the Maoist-style moral panic around race in 2020, Mamdani fanned its flames. He called explicitly for the police to be defunded—despite the near-certainty that this would lead to a sharp rise in violent crime and fatalities within the black community—and pushed to abolish a standardized test used in the admissions process to certain schools, presumably because the only acceptable exam is one that delivers identical outcomes for every ethnic group. He’s also spent years complaining about white privilege (of course).
- He seemingly supports revolutionary communists.
- His campaign political director, Julian Gerson, was revealed to have posted online in praise of Luigi Mangione, who shot UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson—a father of two—in the back and killed him. On Facebook, Gerson suggested that a street should be renamed in honour of Mangione, writing he was “looking forward to driving down Mangione Avenue a few decades from now”. Veneration, in other words, for the use of deadly violence against unarmed civilians for political ends.
- Oh yes, and he fakes his accent (as I’ve discussed elsewhere, this is unforgivable).
In short, the guy is the embodiment of Islamo-gauchisme. He echoes Islamist talking points while simultaneously parroting all the most fact-lite tenets of identitarian progressivism. And he’s got the backing of everyone from AOC and Jeremy Corbyn, to Nazi-praising Islamic YouTubers.
A human groupthink-sponge holds forth
So, what to make of all of this? A few high-level thoughts:
First: some of the loudest criticism of Mamdani is coming from libertarian conservatives focused on his redistributive economic policies. I think that line of attack misses the mark. It’s true that a lot of his proposals on that front are juvenile and unserious. But economic populism—especially when framed as “cheap stuff” for ordinary people—has reasonably widespread support. I wouldn’t be surprised if mockery of things like his proposal for free public transport helps Mamdani more than it hurts him. It also detracts attention from the more profound issue of his embrace of pretty sinister forms of Islamist and neo-racist grievance politics.
Critiques of Mamdani’s economic populism also detract attention from the more profound issue of his embrace of pretty sinister forms of Islamist and neo-racist grievance politics.
Second: his popularity suggests the pundits declaring that “woke is dead” are getting ahead of themselves. Yes, cultish and censorious leftism has taken a battering. But the ideology, or a form of it, remains deeply entrenched—especially in elite academic and cultural institutions. The more pearl-clutching, superficial elements of the movement may be in retreat, but Islamo-leftism is alive and well. Since October 7, 2023, in fact, it’s been on steroids. At the same time, what used to be a fairly consistent conservative opposition to these trends is starting to fracture. A high-profile section of the online and populist/hard right is increasingly on board with a lot of the ideas Mamdani and his ilk espouse (e.g., they share a hatred of Israel/Jews with Islamists, dabble in Holocaust denial/relativism, are reasonably open to the idea of economic redistribution via the state, and so on).
Third: the hypocrisy here is striking. Mamdani’s loudest cheerleaders are elite-left progressives, the same people who’ve spent over a decade crusading against largely imagined forms of bigotry in the hyper-tolerant West. Yet point out that the person they’re campaigning for has proclaimed his “love” for men who raised funds for Jew-hunting Muslim supremacist terrorists, and they brush it off without a second thought. These are people who’ve insisted that everything from microaggressions to mere “silence” constitutes literal violence—yet have no issue with echoing genocidal jihadist slogans that amount, quite clearly, to calls for deadly attacks against non-combatants. It’s deeply cynical stuff.
Mamdani’s elite-left cheerleaders have insisted that everything from microaggressions to mere “silence” constitutes literal violence—yet have no issue with echoing genocidal jihadist slogans that amount, quite clearly, to calls for deadly attacks against non-combatants.
Mamdani’s ascent shouldn’t be seen as merely a local story. The fact that he is now the Democratic nominee for the largest and most iconic city in the world’s leading superpower offers a glimpse of the broader direction in which the left may be heading.
For all that he’s hailed as a moral visionary, Mamdani is firmly wedded to the most toxic orthodoxies of contemporary political groupthink.
