New York City Faces the Threat of an Antisemitic Mayor
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Zohran Mamdani glorified Hamas members in his rap music, embraces a podcaster who insists that America deserved 9/11, wants to “globalize the Intifada,” and is a proud anti-capitalist socialist. 





Obviously, if you have a problem with that, you are Islamophobic. 

That is the message being blared out by the Pravda Media, which, when forced to choose between criticizing MAGA and criticizing an anti-American Islamist, will always choose the former. MAGA is evil. Islamists? It’s bigoted to notice that whole Sharia thing, the massacres of Christians in Africa, the ethnic cleansing in the Middle East, the terrorism, and the rape gangs in Europe. 

I don’t happen to think that all Muslims are Islamists, or that the worst aspects of a religious movement represent the totality of a religion or its adherents. There are plenty of moderate Muslims who have Westernized well enough, and Islamism in its current form is actually pretty modern. Tehran in the 1960s looked European and aspired to be. Even Kabul was civilized. 





Zohran Mamdani, to be fair, is not an Islamist as we tend to think of them. In fact, his affinity to Islamists is of the same kind as the “Queers for Palestine,” and his apparently comfort with 9/11 has more to do with his embrace of Communism than of Sharia law. So, I suppose, you could say that his being Muslim is beside the point. Make his religious background Christian, and he would embrace the same evil people he does now. 

He is not FOR Islam, but against the West. Since the Islamists are with him on that, he is with them. He is with any radicals–a Critical Theorist to the core. 

But he is WITH the Islamists, and has said so many times, and he is running to get the Muslim vote by appealing to his Muslim roots. And many of those Muslims he is appealing to are Islamists. 

Any sane person would criticize this, and it is not Islamophobic to do so. It isn’t even Islamophobic to oppose Islam becoming a dominant force in American culture. All cultural groups prefer their own culture–it is what makes a culture a culture–and it is perfectly reasonable for Americans to reject the idea that New York City should look more like Mecca or Tehran. 





Living in Minneapolis, it is jarring to see so many women wearing niqabs. Covered head to toe with only an eye-slit, women are erased. If a Christian did that, every one of these commentators would excoriate them as misogynist, but criticize a Muslim for the same practice, and you are a bigot. 

We should be able to criticize Muslims as we would criticize anyone else, and when an offensive or dangerous practice is deeply associated with the adherents of a religion, we should be able to criticize that too. 

Mamdani is a Muslim in the way that Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, is a Muslim. He is not an Islamist, but an advocate of all anti-Western ideologies. He welcomes Islamists as he welcomes Queers, which is hardly Islamist, although he clearly sympathizes especially with his cultural tribe in too many ways. 





American cultural elites see in Mamdani one of them–hostile to American culture and politics, but in the right way. The accusation of Islamophobia is almost a tic. Were he gay, we would be accused of homophobia. Transgender? Transphobia. It’s all the same: you, the hoi polloi, are bad. 

This is the essence of the modern left: all cultures are to be embraced, as long as they are illiberal. At least until liberalism is killed off and the next phase of the revolution can begin. Mamdani is more the product of Bowdoin than of Uganda–his birthplace. His father is a professor and his mother a filmmaker. 

When he embraces “globalize the intifada,” it is not that he wants America to become Tehran, but that he wants America to become anything but what it is now. Londonistan is fine by him, of course, but any version of anti-Western communism would be as well. 

The key to understanding the Critical Theory frame is realizing that the key categories are “oppressor” and “oppressed.” Western cultures, in their view, are based on enforcing the dominance of the oppressors and holding back the oppressed. White heterosexual males are oppressors, and therefore anybody who doesn’t fit that category–which is primarily an ideological category–is to be elevated. 





That includes Islamists, of course. 

Mamdani really does embrace the Hamas-style of revolution, and is willing to latch onto it for political reasons, building a coalition of all the malcontents. He embraces the alphabet folks, too. And Antifa. It is perfectly OK to criticize him for that. Just as it is perfectly OK to criticize Islamists. 

The threat of Islamists is real, as is their penchant for terrorism, which is also real. Mamdani is fine with them. It’s not Islamophobic to point that out. Generally speaking, he would be fine with any anti-American violence. 

Embracing Western culture requires rejecting other, anti-Western cultures. Westernized Muslims don’t scare me in the least, but all anti-Western cultures are fair game in my book, including Islamism. 





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