No, Zohran, Muslims were not the ‘real’ victims of 9/11

Progressives took a break this week from their collective nervous breakdown over President Trump’s White House renovations in order to respectfully mourn with Zohran Mamdani, whose hijab-wearing ‘aunt’ – actually his father’s cousin – felt weird one time after thousands of New Yorkers were evaporated in the 9/11 Islamist terrorist attacks.

Mamdani’s words alone – ‘I want to speak to the memory of my aunt, who stopped taking the subway after 11 September because she did not feel safe in her hijab’ – would have been ill-judged enough. But the way he delivered them was even worse. As he stood outside the Islamic Cultural Centre in the Bronx, his voice faltered, he bowed his head and he choked back tears… just because his ‘aunt’ did not want to ride the Subway?

It was quite a performance. In a city that lost 1,169 residents in that cataclysmic act of Islamic terrorism, he stood in front of a row of people in religious Islamic dress, and had the audacity to pretend that Muslims were the ‘real’ victims of 9/11. It was offensive on so many levels, not least as this post-9/11 wave of hate was largely mythical. As the New York Post lays out, while there was undoubtedly ‘ignorance and malice directed at Muslims’, FBI statistics show that ‘in the decade after the attacks, Muslims suffered hate crimes at a lower rate than blacks, gays or Jews’. Mamdani’s tears for his ‘aunt’ were peak Millennial Main Character Syndrome.

Shockingly, comparing one lady’s feelings with the deaths of more than a thousand New Yorkers is not even the worst thing Mamdani has said. In September 2023, on a panel for the Democratic Socialists of America, he made an even more extraordinary equivalence. ‘We have to make it clear that when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF’, he said, essentially accusing the Jews of being to blame for alleged police brutality. At the same event, he said, ‘The struggle for Palestinian liberation is at the core of my politics and continues to be’. The man is obsessed.

It is hard to imagine how this guy is going to run New York City, but almost no one thinks his opponents have any chance of winning. This marks a potentially seismic shift in Democratic power dynamics, not just in NYC but nationwide, too. Zohran’s main rival, Andrew Cuomo, is a former New York state governor and son of a former New York state governor, but is now widely hated for his appalling Covid policies. He was forced to resign over a sexual-harassment scandal. Despite this baggage, he somehow ended up as the favoured candidate of the Dem establishment.

It’s been really something to watch how effectively Mamdani’s campaign has mesmerised young progressives. He manages to portray an image that’s both twee (see his cutesy Wes Anderson-style TikTok videos) and extreme at the same time – adopting positions that, even just five years ago, would have meant immediate disqualification from any political office.

Some of Mamdani’s ideas are plain silly. But that doesn’t mean they won’t do serious damage. This is a man who has said, with a straight face, that the best way to get rid of crime on public transport is to… make public transport free. He once described the ‘fare box’ on New York’s buses as ‘a site of tension, of conflicts, of assaults’. When you remove that fare box, what you find is a safer experience not just for the riders, but also the operators’, he claimed. So the three bucks it costs to ride the bus is what is driving serious violence in NYC?

And that’s not the only thing that he wants to make free. He is also promising free childcare and rent freezes for millions of New Yorkers. Never mind the cold, hard fact that there is no such thing as free anything – somebody, somewhere, is paying for it. Zohran’s saccharine smile seems to be enough to fend off any awkward questions, like how much will this cost ordinary taxpayers?

Beleaguered American Millennial progressives, loaded down with a six-figure student loan from years of woke indoctrination in fancy colleges, want more than anything to believe in someone like Mamdani. They are so addled with Trump Derangement Syndrome and an ill-founded conviction that their terrible education made them smart, that they will fall for an obvious snake-oil salesman. Like many young liberal-lefties, he has never had a real job. For most of us that’s terrifying. For the younger generation, that’s ‘relatable’.

Although Mamdani poses as a class warrior, his top campaign staff are all, like him, children of the elite. As the New York Post noted last month: ‘Mamdani’s crew, like him, grew up in tony communities and attended posh private schools.’ This includes 26-year-old ‘top ad-maker’ Morris Katz, a Tribeca native who grew up in his parents’ $5million Manhattan apartment. Then there’s 29-year-old Julian Gerson, who attended the ‘ritzy Dalton School and grew up in a multi-million dollar house in Woodstock’. These children of privilege absolutely hate the system that created them.

The rise of Mamdani, and the terrible ideas he is likely about to unleash on one of the most important cities in the world, owes everything to the corrupt and oligarchic Democratic leadership. First, the old guard refused to relinquish power to a rising generation, even as their own popularity and relevance cratered. Then, they embraced woke extremism, thinking they could use it to hold on to power.

Will next Tuesday be the beginning of the end for the Democrats’ old guard? It’s still possible that the blue-collar, non-progressive, outer-borough and non-Israelophobic voters might tip the scales and save New York City from Mamdani. But he should not have got this far in the first place. Never underestimate the establishment’s ability to royally screw things up.

Jenny Holland is a former newspaper reporter and speechwriter. Visit her Substack here.