During last week’s New York City mayoral debate, the three candidates answered a question about what would be their ideal headline after a year in office.  The Democrat party candidate and Democratic Socialists of America member Zohran Mamdani answered, “Fighting Trump.”  Republican Curtis Sliwa and independent Andrew Cuomo responded with achievements in reversing the city’s slide into street crime and deteriorating public education.

Given the city’s multitude of problems, Mamdani’s pretension of “fighting Trump” is perverse, but Mamdani knows that the slogan appeals to the ignorant young voters who could make him the Big Apple’s next mayor.  Crafting a campaign based on the ignorance of voters is nothing new, but the other element in the campaign’s strategy is troubling: enmity for Americans and our heritage.

Buoyed by his debate performance, the next day, the frontrunner committed a major affront to New Yorkers by cavorting in a photo op with one of the most reprehensible still-surviving imams connected with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing at his Brooklyn mosque.  Imam Siraj Wahhaj was named as a co-conspirator by federal prosecutors in the trial of the infamous blind sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, convicted in 1995 of conspiring to bomb NYC landmarks.  The influential Islamist has told followers that strict Islamic law is superior to American democracy, according to a 2003 account in the Wall Street Journal. The imam’s three children were sentenced to life in prison in 2024 on charges of terrorism, kidnapping, and conspiracy to murder for organizing a jihadist training compound in New Mexico.

Wahhaj is “one of the nation’s foremost Muslim leaders and a pillar of the Bed-Stuy community for nearly half a century,” Mamdani wrote on X, rubbing his own Muslim affiliation in the face of a city still wracked by the 9/11 attack and ongoing........

© American Thinker