How self-damning that Zohran Mamdani’s chief takeaway from 9/11 is that it supposedly triggered a horrible wave of “Islamophobia”: What utter dreck.
Of course ordinary Muslims bear no blame for the extremists who carried out those terror attacks, killing some 3,000 innocents: The overwhelming majority of Americans have always understood that, and acted accordingly.
No wave of anti-Muslim hate crimes followed 9/11, not in New York nor anywhere else.
Before and after 9/11, the minority most singled out for hate in America and across the world has always been Jews, in vast disproportion to their numbers.
Notice the experiences Mamdani actually cited.
He recalled how a teacher warned him he might face bullying. Since he attended the ultraliberal, pricey Bank Street School for Children, his progressive educators expected the worst of their fellow New Yorkers.
He did not recall actually being bullied, something he surely would have brought up. Instead, he could only cite his aunt’s supposed decision to quit riding the subways “ because she did not feel safe in her hijab.”
She may truly have had such fears — but only because activist outfits like the radical Council on Islamic-American Relations instantly began warning of rising “Islamophobia” in the wake of the attacks.
As Veep JD Vance notes, that doesn’t make it any less absurd for Mamdani to treat his aunt as a central victim of 9/11 — not in a city where thousands of families of all races and religions lost loved ones.
There was never any pronounced amount of anti-Muslim harassment after 9/11, certainly nothing to justify marked concern about “Islamophobia” except among the CAIR crew, as well as liberals and lefties who pander to it by treating it as a plague on a level with antisemitism.
Yes, Mamdani’s opponents have slammed him as an apologist for terror — because he is one: Refusing to denounce the toxic phrase “globalize the intifada”; palling around with an unindicted co-conspirator from the 1993 World Trade Center bombing; promoting countless smears of Israel and its defensive war in Gaza in response to Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, terror attacks and so on.
He’s not taking flack for his faith: He’s getting hit for at least passive-aggressively supporting the terrorist factions within Islam.
Rather than own up to his own hate, he figures he can instead get away with playing the victim — and that the progressives who dominate New York politics and media will play along.
Cross your fingers that this obscene bit of sanctimonious play-acting wakes up voters he’s managed to deceive until now: This guy is a horror hiding behind good looks and a grin.