Mamdani’s 9/11 Insanity

We now know the real victim of 9/11. 

Zohran Mamdani’s family members.

Over the course of the weekend, Mamdani decided to talk extensively about 9/11 and his feelings about it.

At a press conference in the Bronx, he decided that the real victim of 9/11, the real true victim of 9/11 — where roughly 3,000 Americans were murdered in the worst Islamist terrorist attack ever — was his auntie, who, according to Mamdani, rode the subway and may or may not have received a mean look.

“I want to use this moment to speak to the Muslims of New York City,” Mamdani proclaimed. “I want to speak to the memory of my aunt, who stopped taking the subway after September 11 because she did not feel safe in her hijab.”

He is such a fraud. The fake tears. If you buy into this fraudulent human, you are a fool.

Zohran Mamdani has somehow transformed 9/11, the worst terror event ever on American soil and the worst event in the history of New York City, into a sad story about American Islamophobia.

Do you understand what he’s doing? The idea is that if he is not elected, the same Islamophobia will be responsible for preventing him from being mayor of New York.

The problem is not his pro-jihadist leanings, which we have detailed multiple times. The problem is not that he has stood for globalizing the intifada, or the Holy Land Five, or that he posed alongside an unindicted coconspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

That’s not the problem.

The problem — according to Mamdani — is all of you who are mean to him about those things because you are Islamophobic.

He’s doing the Norm MacDonald joke in which Norm joked that if there were a nuclear bomb set off by Islamic terrorists in the middle of New York City, he would be afraid for the real victims: the Muslims in New York City.

This is what Mamdani is doing now, and it doesn’t stop there. He’s making this a central plank of his campaign. Many of the things that people think of as bugs in the Mamdani campaign are features of the Mamdani campaign.

People look at Mamdani and say, “What a weird campaign. Why is he running on Islamophobia? Why doesn’t he just run as a normal progressive Democrat?”

They don’t understand. These features are the reason a bunch of left-wing Democrats are going to vote for him — and do so enthusiastically. Without the victimhood, he would be a nothing burger. A nothing burger stacked atop a nothing sandwich atop a gigantic junkyard of nothing.

It is the victimhood alone that has elevated Zohran Mamdani.

Now, you may say to yourself, “Wait, he’s not a victim. Didn’t his family immigrate from Uganda? Not exactly a nice place to live. And he still holds dual citizenship with Uganda. Aren’t his parents wealthy? Didn’t his dad teach at Columbia, and his mom have a career as a film producer? How could this complete, utter, useless human being, a leech on the fat rump of the United States, be a victim?”

The answer is that at some time, somewhere, someone gave him a mean look because of Islamophobia.

The term “Islamophobia” is very often just a cover for “Don’t criticize radical Islam. If you criticize radical Islam, that’s a form of Islamophobia.”

Islamophobia is a weird charge because when you look at someone, unless they’re wearing religious garb, it is very difficult to be Islamophobic. You don’t even know that they’re Muslim. Islam is a religion. Islam is not a race. If you saw Zohran Mamdani on the street, you’d have a hard time pegging his ethnicity, let alone his religion.

But according to Mamdani, the real problem here is for Americans to unravel an unreasoning, irrational fear of Muslims.

Every accusation from Mamdani is an admission. No one has engaged in more bigotry in this campaign than Zohran Mamdani. It is a form of bigotry to endorse “globalize the intifada,” and “Hamas should not disarm.” It’s bigotry against non-terrorists.

Zohran Mamdani is 33 years old. 9/11 happened 24 years ago — he was nine when 9/11 happened.

I’m about eight years older than Zohran Mamdani, so I remember 9/11 pretty well because I was a late teen already, and I remember the extraordinary efforts that the federal government, state government, and city government of New York went through in order to tamp down on “Islamophobia.” George W. Bush gave full speeches about how radical Islam was not the same as normal mainstream Islam, how radical Islam was a perversion of Islam, and that there shouldn’t be any sort of backlash against Muslims. Then the city of New York did the same thing.

Mamdani whining about the treatment of Muslims in a country that is wildly, wildly Muslim-friendly is totally insane. The city of New York, by the way, is now 11% Muslim, which is the same percentage of the Jewish population. We always hear about the big Jewish population in New York. And that’s true. The same exact population is Muslim in New York now.

Is there radical discrimination against Muslims in New York? By what metric?

How is it that Mamdani can talk about 9/11 and not spare one sentence for the actual victims, the people who leaped to their deaths from the 19th story of the World Trade Center, the people who were crushed beneath millions of pounds of molten steel? Not to mention the firefighters, and the people who got cancer years later from all the dust and debris.

Nothing for them, but his aunt, who got a mean look?

No wave of anti-Muslim hate crimes followed 9/11. Not in New York, nor anywhere else.

Without Mamdani claiming victimhood, he’s got nothing. Nothing. His program is trash. His candidacy is smugness and ugliness masquerading as kindness. He hates the things that make America go. He hates capitalism. He hates traditional Judeo/Christian religion. He hates traditional values. He hates America’s role in the world. That’s who this guy is.

And yet, somehow, this guy, who is apparently rich in the coin of victimhood and one of the least victimized people I have ever conceived of, is a victim.

There’s been a lot of talk on the Right about the death of wokeness, how wokeness is dying.

No. Wokeness is in remission. It is not dying. The cancer is not yet dead. Wokeness is in remission because wokeness is rooted in the idea that there’s an internal American victimhood system, and this class of victims cannot be identified by their level of success in American society or prosperity or notoriety. It can be identified specifically by levels of racial diversity and by nontraditional background.

As long as that matrix is undergirding everything that is happening, wokeness is not dead. It’s just waiting. It’s just waiting for a sunnier season to burst through the icy frost that has crossed the woke landscape.

There will be a thaw. Mamdani is the thaw, the green shoot of wokeness springing up beneath that permafrost.

That is what he is.

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