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[Order Robert Spencer’s new book, ‘Intifada on the Hudson: The Selling of Zohran Mamdani’: CLICK HERE.]
I haven’t lived in my hometown, New York, for 27 years, but thanks to the Internet I’ve been able to keep in such close touch that sometimes, sitting at my computer in Norway, I catch myself thinking for a split second that I’m actually still in my last apartment on the Upper East Side, right down the block from Gracie Mansion, where the mayor lives. It’s an easy mistake to make: after all, I write regularly for Manhattan-based publications; I peruse the New York Post website daily for the latest local news and check the New York Times to keep updated on the newest twists in the left’s narrative; I exchange e-mails with New York friends; and I follow old New York acquaintances on social media mainly to monitor their Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Alas, as far as I can tell, these people’s TDS is still going strong. Nor is it just TDS that they’re afflicted with. Since October 7, 2023, many of them have been outspoken critics of Israel and have wrung their hands over the supposed suffering of the supposedly innocent people of Gaza. And in recent months, while the mayoral campaign has been heating up in advance of the November 4 election, many of them have expressed enthusiasm for the candidacy of Zohran Mamdani, who identifies as both a socialist and a Muslim. Yes, he’s made clear his distaste for Jews and his admiration for Islamic terrorists: on October 18, the Post ran a picture of him campaigning with Siraj Wahhaj, “a notorious, gay-hating Brooklyn imam who is an unindicted co-conspirator in 1993 World Trade Center bombing.” Yet a good number of the people whom I used to socialize with back in the Big Apple – many if not most of them Jewish – are likely to cast their votes for Mamdani.
To be sure, Mamdani wouldn’t be New York’s first lousy mayor. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, John Lindsay and Abe Beame turned Fun City into the crime-ridden, garbage-strewn, dystopic nightscape that you can see in Taxi Driver (1976). Ed Koch improved things slightly, only to be succeeded by the hapless David Dinkins, whose sheer incompetence made possible the election of Rudy Giuliani despite hysterical New York Times editorials calling him a dangerous fascist. Of course, Giuliani proved to be the city’s savior, ushering in an era that older New Yorkers remember as golden. (Not to mention that his expert handling of 9/11 led Americans to refer to him as “America’s Mayor.”)
But let’s face it: Mamdani makes Lindsay, Beame, and Dinkins look like Winston Churchill. In any case, despite all the damage they did, memories are short. And they seem especially short in New York City, where old buildings are always being razed and new ones raised, and where longtime New Yorkers move away while every year brings a fresh crop of young arrivals who have no historical memory of the city, and thus no idea which policies have made it livable and which have taken it to the brink of chaos. These newcomers tend to be reflexively left-wing and mindlessly in love with New York’s diversity and even, to an extent, its palpable danger, which they find exhilarating in comparison to the dull – if safe – Midwestern cities and suburbs where they grew up; many are also recent graduates of fancy colleges where they learned to view whiteness as evil and people of color as virtuous victims, whatever the facts on the ground. Between these naive young folks, then, and the aging Manhattan liberals who still believe everything they read in the Times and who feel that voting for a socialist Muslim would be the ultimate testimony to their own nobility of soul, it appears to be likely that Zohran Mamdani will become the 111th mayor of the City of New York.
Astonishingly, even people who’ve been around a long time, who’ve paid close attention to New York politics, and whom one thinks of as old-fashioned mainstream liberals are in Mamdani’s corner. Take 76-year-old Frank Rich, a veteran New York scribe who, in a stunningly fatuous and fawning 4500-word piece in the current issue of New York Magazine, whitewashed Mamdani to a fare-thee-well, depicting him as someone who provides “rare hope” (shades of Obama!) because he’s “smart,” “focused,” “transparent,” “consistent on the core political convictions that guide him,” “not an ideologue,” an “immigrant who fell in love with his family’s adopted city and country,” and “a politician who actually wants to do the job he is running for” – in short, the perfect candidate for upscale voters who are “clamoring for change” and who deplore “the damage that Donald Trump has inflicted on the Republic.” What? What “damage”? Not an ideologue? Transparent? Consistent? Good Lord, how can someone have been around for so long and still be so clueless?
Let it be said that for anyone who’s not clueless, who cherishes American liberty, and who truly loves New York City, the idea of Mamdani as its mayor is deeply depressing. One of those people is Robert Spencer, author of the wonderfully titled and supremely timely new book Intifada on the Hudson: The Selling of Zohran Mamdani. In it, Spencer makes the case against Mamdani with a comprehensiveness that certainly must be unmatched. Spencer starts with Mamdani’s parents, both of them “postmodern leftist cosmopolitans” – Mahmood Mamdani, a “firebrand leftist academic” from Uganda who taught government at Columbia University, and Mira Nair, an Indian who developed an interest in “political street theater” before becoming “an internationally successful filmmaker.” (Until reading Spencer’s book, I was unaware that Zohran’s mother was the director of the execrable 2012 film The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which even leftist critics found “heavy-handed” and “flabby” in its relentless message-mongering.)
Because of his father’s Columbia gig, Zohran Mamdani was raised in New York. A pious Muslim in his early childhood, Zohran later lapsed; but after 9/11, the boy, now eleven years out, embraced the notion that Muslims were the real victims of that day and returned to the fold. The senior Mamdani, for his part, responded to 9/11 by writing a book, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (2004), in which, claiming that jihadist violence had nothing to do with Islamic scripture, he depicted it as a legitimate reaction to U.S. imperialism and colonialism. He also defended terrorist attacks on Israel, including Hamas’s invasion of October 7, 2023. And Zohran grew up sharing his father’s opinions.
You might think that Zohran Mamdani’s parents, having thrived in the U.S., would be grateful to the system that made it possible. But no: both of them drilled it into his head that their extraordinary success was an aberration – as was the privilege with which Zohran grew up. Attending New York’s Bank Street School for Children (described by one of its graduates as a “progressive teaching laboratory”), the Bronx High School of Science (one of the best secondary schools in the country), and Bowdoin College (the alma mater of Longfellow and Hawthorne), Zohran was in fact an exceedingly entitled young man, yet he saw himself – and continues to see his younger self – as cruelly oppressed.
It was at Bowdoin that Zohran became – like father, like son – an ardently anti-Israel revolutionary. It was there, too, that he fell under the spell of The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon, whose simple lesson that whites are always oppressors and non-whites always victims has shaped the minds of college students for decades. After graduation, Zohran volunteered for the left-wing group MoveOn in Seattle, for the left-wing group TexPIRG in Houston, and for the political campaigns of a couple of New York socialists. When he finally did land a real job, the employer was his mother, who hired him to work on a movie. Then he became a lousy hiphop artist, rapping inanely about Muslims as victims of oppression and singing the praises of terrorists. His CV isn’t exactly Fiorello LaGuardia’s.
In 2020, Mamdani ran to represent a district in western Queens in the New York State Assembly, his pitch being that, as Spencer puts it, “New York, the most cosmopolitan city in the world, was…a hotbed of systemic racism” – a problem that, in Mamdani’s view, could only be addressed by a surge in government-owned housing. Declaring the need for “political revolution,” Mamdani explained that socialism “doesn’t mean stealing money from the rich” but “taking back money the rich stole from everyone else.” It worked: in the Democratic primary, he beat the incumbent by 8,410 to 7,986 votes; in the general election, he ran unopposed and won. After his victory, he spoke ambitiously of “build[ing] a socialist New York” and “seizing the means of production.”
To be sure, when he entered the mayoral race, Mamdani walked back some of his more extreme socialist views and decried opponents for bringing them up. (Andrew Cuomo, he snapped, was “far more comfortable in the past” than in the present.) In an interview, he praised ex-mayor Bill de Blasio, under whom the city had begun its latest slide into anarchy, for “end[ing] stop and frisk” and “tax[ing] the rich.” He promised to “tax people on the basis of race” and to open “city government-run grocery stores.” (To quote Spencer: “Anyone who knows what food stores are really like in socialist regimes is more than skeptical of Mamdani’s promises.”) He also said, “I don’t think that we should have billionaires” – even though he wants to run the city with the most billionaires on earth.
In Intifada on the Hudson, Robert Spencer has given us the definitive account of a man who most assuredly should not be elected to any office anywhere. If you want an idea of what a Mamdani-run city would look like, suggests Spencer, you need only get a load of London, which under the Muslim socialist Sadiq Khan (mayor since 2016) has declined to such a point that, unlike Beame- and Dinkins-era New York, it may well be beyond rescue. Under Khan, notes Spencer, “crime has skyrocketed, the native population has fled the city, and the situation of Jews…has become increasingly precarious.” Are the Jews who plan to pull the lever for Mamdani even aware of this?
“Mamdani,” observes Spencer wryly, “may ultimately have been more comfortable being mayor of East Berlin, where there was a wall around the place, and ruthless armed guards all too eager to murder anyone who tried to escape to freedom.” Fortunately, there’s no wall around New York City – only bridges and tunnels on which the traffic can, admittedly, get very heavily backed up, but that even Mamdani won’t be able to close entirely – so that New Yorkers who don’t want to go broke or get murdered can relocate before the moving trucks pull up to Gracie Mansion.
Can Intifada on the Hudson keep Mamdani from being elected mayor? Probably not. In any event, even if Mamdani does lose somehow, his political career will almost certainly survive. As Spencer points out, he is, along with Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Hakeem Jeffries, and Jasmine Crockett, part of a growing cadre of young non-white socialist Democrats, many of them Muslims and many of them foreign-born, who are quickly replacing their party’s old guard at every level of U.S. government. It’s a terrifying development, and if fatuous New Yorkers are determined to hand their city over to this enemy within, non-New Yorkers should redouble their efforts to keep their own little corners of America from falling prey to the socialist Muslim menace.
I have little to no hope for the future of the city where I grew up and loved New York City has become in parts unrecognizable and New Yorkers seemed determined to take that road to hell where Mamdani will gladly lead them.
I can’t wrap my mind around how Jews continually vote for satanic worshiping muslims across America?
Do they not understand what satanic islam stands for???
Why???
Do they want America turned into the problems Israel faces everyday? Here in their own cities?
Why?
Do they hate America? Their own lives?
What is with them???
NYC Jews make up approx 12% of the population there. The last poll showed 43% pf Jews will vote for Mamdani. Most people raised in NY are very liberal. Those who claim to be Jewish notoriously vote Democrat. I’m guessing it’s the Stockholm Syndrome.
But, the NYC demographics have changed drastically over the decades due to the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act which brought in people from Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East. Throw in the wonderful welfare programs in NYC, which attracted parasites from around the country. American whites, their values and traditions have been slowly eroded.
Unfortunately, Mamdani will win. Like I said in a previous article Mamdani is transparent. Taxing whites more, defunding the police (although now he’s walking that back a bit), gov’t run grocery stores, rent freezes. etc. So, there is no surprise in what NYC gets. There is no small writing in the contract. Yet, NYers will vote this socialist in.
The wealthy will flee, major businesses will move to Texas or Fl, and the tax base will dwindle. There will be no money left. Then NYC will turn into Detroit.
No, Jews are not voting for Mamdani
The NYT/Siena poll, the only actually reliable poll, showed Jewish support for Mamdani at 6
https://x.com/Sultanknish/status/1980274438601150750%
Ok. I’ll take your word for it. But, you know it was actually one of the writers here that cited that 43% polling a few weeks ago.
Jews have always been their own worst enemy, regretfully.
Daniel, all of us who know your writings love and admire you.
But… “ No, Jews are not voting for Mamdani”. ?
Jews whose Judaism consists of an occasional folksy Yiddishism and consumption of bagel with a schmear, while attending an “Upper West Side Manhattan/Park Slope Jews for a Second Holocaust” meeting, will no doubt be voting for Mr Mamdani.
And then, of course, there are the sane ones like yourself, who will not be voting for him. Nor would I be voting for him, if I were still living there. But… I flew the coop forty years ago.
I bet you believe not much from mainstream media but on this point, where you can blame Jews, insult Jews, you fall for the lies. It reflects deep hatred you have within. MSM statistics on how Jews vote are unverified statistics. They cite some fake polls. And you go off hating.
I cannot believe Christians vote about 50/50 for Democrats. Lets blame them, harp on it and vilify them.No? Then why pick on Jews?
More than half of Jewish voters who voted in 24 voted for Trump- that statistic seems to be true. Jews are not one group, are not monolithic. Speaking of them this way is hatred. They have the right to vote for whomever they please. No one in my family or among my friends votes Democrat. My 3 rabbis, present and past, do not vote Democrat (and they are from different denominations).
This you ignore.
Are you addressing me? First off, the “fake” poll you claim is the same poll one of the writers used here on FPM a few weeks ago that showed 43% of Jews are voting for Mamdani. Second, all the exit polling showed Biden received 70% of the Jewish vote. If Jews don’t vote overwhelmingly Democrat why do Dennis Prager and Ben Shapiro speak on that topic at length? Further, if all these polls are fake please show me the real polling contradicting the other polls. I’ll stand by and wait.
I know nothing of your family, or three rabbi’s, but my first wife was Jewish and everyone in her family blindly voted Democrat.
Did you read the rest of what I wrote regarding how the demographics changed? Or, the moment you saw the word Jew you went right into a meltdown?
You sound very paranoid. Do you think everyone hates Jews because they make an observation?
It is said that 4/5 of Israelites stayed behind in Egypt at the Exodus. They were too assimilated. I see similar statistics today.
Simple. Despite their native intelligence, too many Jews are fucking idiots. And yes, I’m Jewish.
I believe that Islam is the Anti-Christ and Mohammad the false prophet referred to in the Book of Revelation in the Bible. They certainly fit the description.
I wouldn’t go that far.
Why not? I’m not even a Christian (or any religion) and I’d go that far — and farther.
Frantz Fanon’s 1961 “The Wretched of the Earth”, with an introduction by Jean-Paul Sartre spitting his contempt for the Western society that made him rich and famous, is the koran of hate against white people. “Wretched” provided the blueprint for killing the West from without while Edward Said’s 1978 “Orientalism” groomed the white traitors who would kill it from within.
Mamdami’s base of liberal white women flaunt their “revolutionary” hijabs at women’s marches like sexy lingerie to proclaim their proud submission to their new brown male masters. These traitoresses are harbingers of the wave of Western white females about to convert en masse to islam not for “religion” but as a twisted anti-white self-loathing sex fantasy.
Moving in leftist circles his whole life, Zohran knows well that white liberal females are “down with the brown” and intoxicated by the islamic males who will dominate them. Feminism will end in islam’s embrace and the waiting arms of the non-white Wretched Other that liberal white women so desperately desire.
The scary fact is that even if Mamdani loses this has been a spectacularly triumphant trial balloon for the Islamists.
So even if he were to lose this trial balloon shows you America is ripe to be taken over by the Islamists.
Or ripe for another civil war as half the country is duped (or simply ignorant or stupid enough) into voting for Marxist-Islamists.
So since you are into doom and gloom conspiracies what are you going to do? Since Objectivism is not going to stop an Islamic takeover or a civil war the only thing left for you is to clutch your pearls. Maybe you could listen to some early soothing 50s pre-rock. How about Lawrence Welk or Perry Como?
Personally I would prefer a civil war and a major house cleaning of the left and the islamists.
A civil war? Is it fantasy Monday again already? The recipe for Republican success is to win elections. Not exactly rocket science.
Much of what Ayn Rand prescribed would help the U.S. deal with its fiscal problems. When we look at the large number of Republicans who benefitted from the expansion of Obamacare. we should recognize even Republicans do not want to give up what they falsely claim they are entitled to at others’ expense. Not particularly Randian.
Anyone who thinks tariffs will raise the revenue necessary to address our fiscal problems should put down the crack pipe. Anyone who thinks the assertion “trade wars are good, we can win them’ is brilliant should dust off their photo of Smoot and Hawley. We could use more Ayn Rand logic.
Thank you………
The conditions in the US and the world were far different at the time of the Smoot-Hawley tariff. The US was then a major exporter that had suffered from years of European recovery that depressed the agricultural sector. That was before the Wall Street crash and the poor policies of the Fed, Hoover, and FDR caused the Great Depression. Today, the US is the major importing nation suffering from the tariffs and regulations of others. Tariff revenues are important, but not the main idea which is to bolster American production and employment.
You can push your Randian cartoon philosophy all you want. It won’t stop the jihadists and the leftists. A civil war is coming. You can’t stop it because the Jihad and Leftism are on the move.
I’d make preparations if I were you.
Oh Shut Up Intrepid…
“A civil war is coming”???
We’re tired of you playing a muslim prophet…
“Oh Shut up Intrepid.” Very mature.
Actually you are tired of it because I won’t go away. And I am way smarter than you.
Who’s ‘we’ anyway?. Judging from the amount of downvotes you get you don’t exactly garner much support around here except from the mental patients from the rubber room crowd.
Why does it upset you if I think a civil war is coming. You are so caught up in your fantasy satanic lifestyle you can’t see it. Better go buy a gun tough guy. No one is coming to save you.
Yeah… Shut up intrepid!!!
Your constant attacks on commentators and bogarting articles with your harassment is ruining FPM’s possible donations…
You are a terrible, selfish, narcissistic of a human… you allah worshiper…
It’s madness that Mamdami holds any public but with the DeMS-13 party, all CRIMINAL things are possible. Fact, the violent Islamist will win and NYC is on mass formation psychosis suicide watch. They took Kubrick and Orwell literally and learned to “love the bomb” in an inverted dystopia ɯopǝǝɹℲ sᴉ ʎɹǝʌɐlS
Never, ever look at or think of Mamdani without thinking of God.
Because – Mamdani ultimately wants his god, Allah, to prevail
over us. That’s what his political aspiration – his globalist-Islamist
backed ascendancy to Mayor of New York – is really all about.
Islam dominating the Earth – one city, one country at a time –
is a spiritual battle, not a political one. The battle for peoples’
souls.
Which god do you want – because you’re in this battle up to your
eyeballs whether you want to be or not. Do you want the god who
encourages rape and torture – abuse, subjugation and even murder
of non-Muslims – severe punishment, even death for any questioning
or daring to leave his religion? Or the true God who as your thinking
conscience beckons you to learn to love – to thrive, to grow, to think –
to self govern – to be free?
Never Forget! Not just 9/11 when Muslim allies of Mamdani slaughtered
almost three-thousand of us including in his soon to be home, New York.
But in never forgetting almighty God and our allegiance and trust in Him.
A sincere comment, but “souls” have nothing to do with islam which is an ideology of violent totalitarian population control. As for choosing between gods, three US presidents since 911 have publicly made that choice. Bush, Obama and Biden have all sided with islam (for lots of islamic oil money) even though all three have claimed to be Christians — though Obama dumped Christianity for islam so he could purchase his muli-million dollar compound in Hawaii with islamic corruption money. I’m not even American but I cannot forget Obama at the UN in 2012 proclaiming: “The future cannot belong to those who slander the prophet of islam.” The Democrats made their god choice long ago. Mamdammy is the result of this choice.
Stick a fork in New York, it’s done. On the one hand, it’s sad to see a once-great city fall, but on the other hand I have little sympathy for the arrogant airheads who are going to put the final nail in the city’s coffin. Goodbye, New York.
What happens in New York doesn’t stay in New York, brother. The decay and collapse of a great nation begins in its great cities and then the rot spreads to every small town in America.
Even the great state of Texas, once upon a time the most Red state in America, is being invaded and slowly overtaken by Marxists and Islamists.
Could Mamdani’s election be a foreshadowing of the Islamic wave of the future about to take over America? Only if Americans allow it to happen.
You live in a once great city. What are you going to do about it. Have some meetings in your walk up about how great Rand’s literary genius is .Wax on about how great Rand some more..
Lets hear about your two bass guitar collection…
We need a good laugh… your so rich… <<< Hahahahaa
Leftists get elected by meeting the people at various events, up close and personal, go to their houses etc.. It’s called mobilising voters.
Righties publish articles and hope someone reads them then wonder why people don’t vote or vote the wrong way.
Hopefully the spirit of Turning Point USA will change this situation.
Excellent article.
Yes, all signs point to Mamdani winning the election and it’s too late to stop him now, barring divine intervention. Let his election be a lesson to NYC and the rest of the country. Mamdani is not about socialism per se, he’s about ISLAM having a foothold in the biggest financial center of the world. Bawer is spot on in this article: Wake up America and prepare for the menace that Mamdani is about to unleash.
I have trouble believing that Mamdani is a true-believing Muslim. I strongly suspect that his embrace of Islam is a branding maneuver, establishing his public face as a hip antiWestern radical. It makes him more appealing to Left-wing women. It also gives him automatic status as a presumptive victim of “Islamophobia.”
First, Muslim politician Zohran Mamdani is on record as saying that he “Globalize the Intifada.”
Second Muslim politician Zohran Mamdani, who might soon the Mayor of NYC is a very strong of the the subject of the sly and subtle as well as disingenuous non-violent methods of the goal of advancement of Islam with its Sharia in the United States, by the means what is known and called the “Stealth jihad.” By this technique, the Muslims who are the stealth jihadists are able to infiltrate the United States, and gradually, “inch by inch” and likewise “step by step.” Further, archive progression for their Islamic agenda for the advancement of Islam and to establish Sharia in the United States in place of the US Constitution.
To put this in another way, with America they would like to, if they can, enact Sharia as the law land instead of the US Constitution. Realistic or not, this is their objective.
To this end the stealth jihadists will and do use the Islamic of Taqiyya, which the modus operandi of speaks and printing lies that are very deceptive.
As explained in a more detail by a former Muslim and Hezbollah member who now a Christian .In his book he reveals” Lying , treachery and deception became Islam’s key tactics in conquering others. Those tactics are gathered in a doctrinal statement called “Taqiyya” which is one of the most effective arms for the spread of Islam. It means “Holy Deception” which means the use of every lie you can in order to spread Islam or to win the war against the enemy.” [1]
]1] Islam and the Son of God by Daniel Shayesteh , page 41.
This meme about MadMommy MadMoney or whatever his name is that I don’t want to speak or know his name is what is waiting for NewYorkers
https://substack.com/profile/14820964-truman-butterfield/note/c-168336409?r=8tnxg&utm_source=notes-share-action&utm_medium=web
Maybe Mamdani will win and will begin his bersion of peacew and love for all (except Jews, of course……….oh yeah and except for Christians when he has perverted law and order). But I believe that the reaction to him and his foolishness will be absolutely ferocious. I think the Muslims are in for nasty times eventually.
I couldn’t quantify, but only a tiny fraction of the comments / articles i read about Mamdani (and i read quite a few) mention his total lack of managerial past.
How that goes down with anybody – is beyond my comprehension.
Mamdani was labeled a “breath of fresh air” from the start. Apparently that’s all voters care about, that his smiling face. What’s business experience got to do with it? Good luck New York.
So just whom is his Partners in Crime?!
Can we call him Ishmael? The name of Herman Melville’s philosophizing protagonist in Moby Dick. Melville was much in old New York
If elected, Mamdani will not be able to act on his prejudices other than in hiring (soulmates over competency). His job will be to take the city, in all its respects, to a better place; and who is to say that he won’t pull it off. My sense is that he wears his Muslim hat when it’s pragmatic, just as Obama wore his black hat (jive tongue) when he needed community support. London’s immigration incontinence mostly happened before Khan, who is left with the mess.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned the 1981 John Carpenter movie “Escape from New York”, to see what a post Mamdani New York will look like. A humorous (if you don’t like New York) depiction of New York’s future. New Yorkers will recognize the 70’s look of Carpenter’s New York. Never a dull moment in this most prescient of New York movies.