OPINION:
Zohran Mamdani, the front-runner candidate for New York City’s mayoral seat, stood side-by-side, arm-in-arm for a photo with a Muslim cleric named Siraj Wahhaj, who’s been linked to the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, as well as to other terror plots. The photo was taken during Mamdani’s visit to the imam’s Brooklyn, New York, mosque — when Mamdani called him a “pillar” of the community.
A vote for Mamdani isn’t just a vote for socialism. It’s a vote for antisemitism. It really doesn’t get any clearer than this.
“Today at Masjid At-Taqwa, I had the pleasure of meeting with Imam Siraj Wahhaj, one of the nation’s foremost Muslim leaders and a pillar of the Bed-Stuy community for nearly half a century,” Mamdani wrote recently in an X social media post.
“Pillar” Wahhaj has reportedly called for “jihad” in New York City; has been identified by prosecutors as an “unindicted co-conspirator” of the 1993 terror attacks at the World Trade Center that killed six and injured hundreds; and has called out the FBI and CIA as the “real terrorists” of the 1993 attack. He denies he’s connected in any way to Islamic terrorists or terrorism. But three of his children were arrested in 2018 for keeping 11 minors in squalid conditions at a New Mexico compound and — as ABC put it — “training them to be school shooters.” On that, Wahhaj said, in part: “There’s obviously something happening, some mental disorder, something, I don’t know what it is. This doesn’t seem like them.”
Wahhaj is also the guy who testified in favor of the “blind sheikh,” Omar Abdel Rahman, the known terror leader from Egypt, and called him a “respected scholar.” What a pillar. Wahhaj also hates gays, considers the LGBTQ community a societal “disease,” and believes men who have sex with men should both be killed, as “the prophet Mohammad” has commanded, the New York Post reported.
A true pillar.
Usually, Democrats and leftists want to hide their true agendas. Usually, they pretend to support freedom all the while disguising their hatred of freedom with carefully worded phrases and expertly crafted messages. Usually, they mask their Marxism and go to great lengths to distract from their antisemitism and-or anti-Americanism and-or anti-individualism and-or anti-God ways. Not so with Mamdani.
He’s about as open a communist-carrying, Israel-hating, Constitution-destroying candidate as they come. His platform is to take from taxpayers to give to those he chooses as worthy to receive. His antisemitism comes by way of drawing moral equivalencies between Israel and Hamas and saying, for instance, as he did while responding to President Trump’s 20-point peace plan for Gaza, that while Hamas “should lay down their arms,” so then should “all parties have to cease fire and put down their weapons” — as if Israel were the aggressor and the Israel Defense Forces are one and the same as terrorists.
And now he’s happy to hang with the unindicted co-conspirator of the 1993 World Trade bombing.
As Trump just said when asked about Mamdani’s photo with Wahhaj: “It’s a disaster waiting to happen. We can’t have a communist in charge of a great supposedly free enterprise, kind of a representative city.” He also said, “I think it’s a shame that particular man [Wahhaj] is endorsing him and very friendly with him. You can see there’s a relationship.”
If you’re known by the company you keep, then certainly Mamdani’s friendships are worrisome to the fate of Jewish residents of New York City.
But if you’re a known Marxist-slash-communist masquerading as a socialist, then certainly you don’t belong in American politics.
Mamdani is very open about his political intents. New Yorkers who vote for him will surely get what they deserve: antisemitism, a destroyed economy, rising homelessness and crime and drug use, and a general atmosphere of despair. That’s what socialists always bring. They just usually try to hide it during campaign season. There is nothing hidden about Mamdani, however.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley. Listen to her podcast “Bold and Blunt” by clicking HERE. And never miss her column; subscribe to her newsletter and podcast by clicking HERE. Her latest book, “God-Given Or Bust: Defeating Marxism and Saving America With Biblical Truths,” is available by clicking HERE.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.