Zohran Mamdani’s smiley meeting with terror-linked imam is just his latest full embrace of radical Islam

It’s hard to believe that 24 years after 9/11, New York City is on the brink of voting in a Uganda-born Islamist mayor who campaigned last week with an unindicted co-conspirator in the first World Trade Center terrorist attack that killed six New Yorkers.

Three weeks before the election, polling says that the runaway front-runner, the perpetually smiling democratic socialist candidate Zohran Mamdani, 33, will be this city’s first Muslim mayor. And not just any Muslim, but an unapologetic Islamo-Marxist who appears to have been carefully constructed for electoral success in the same political laboratory as Barack Obama.

Mamdani is so cocky that he boasted on social media about his Friday visit to radical Imam Siraj Wahhaj at his Bedford-Stuyvesant mosque, despite Wahhaj’s links to terrorists, and his openly homophobic rants.

Wahhaj is “a pillar of the Bed-Stuy community for nearly half a century,” Mamdani wrote on X posting a photo of himself and the imam with their arms around each other on Friday.

The imam, who wants Shariah law imposed on the US, is “one of the nation’s foremost Muslim leaders,” according to slippery Mamdani.

For military veterans like Mark Lucas, 43, who answered the call to defend this country after 9/11, Mamdani’s ascent is a kick in the guts.

Iowa vet’s response

“There’s a lot of emotions,” says the father of three. “This is tearing open wounds for veterans all across America.

“I’m a small-town Iowa guy. For a while I didn’t believe [Mamdani could win], I thought there’s no way this is going to happen,” he said. “Then after the debate last week I saw his numbers go up and I saw all these black-pilled people online giving up on New York . . . I can’t stand people who give up. We can’t write off the city that is the most visible icon of the United States of America.”

Lucas, who grew up in Wilton, Iowa, was 19 on Sept. 11, 2001. He had just embarked on a career in tech and was about to win election to his local council when he walked into his office that morning where a TV was showing the Twin Towers on fire.

”I knew my life had changed,” he says of that moment.

Like so many patriotic Midwestern boys whose families have a long history of military service, Lucas felt a calling to join what George W. Bush called the “War On Terror,” and was deployed to Afghanistan in 2003.

“I wanted to avenge what happened . . . to kill the monsters responsible for that horrific terror attack,” he said.

He didn’t even like New York City, but after 9/11, “We were all New Yorkers.”

Now he wants to use his voice as the founder of Veteran Action to raise the alarm and urge other veterans to speak out against the Islamist threat Mamdani poses.

The grassroots advocacy group for veterans was influential in the confirmation of his friend, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.

“My combat experience opened my eyes to how incompatible Islam is with American values,” Lucas says. “I think for a lot of people, when they realize the story behind Mamdani meeting with that radical cleric, that will open up a lot of eyes . . . It may be the wake-up call that New York needs.”

In contrast to Lucas, the privileged Mamdani, who migrated to New York from Uganda at age 7 in 1998, and only became a US citizen at age 27, sees 9/11 in self-engrossed terms, as in how it affected his life.

‘Illusions’

In a 2019 video unearthed on social media Mamdani portrays himself as a victim of that day, saying that his teacher pulled him and a fellow student out of class to warn them that they may be bullied because they are Muslim.

“There is still this illusion, partially a result of settler-colonialism, that all of us can become New Yorkers . . . and yet there would be these moments where I would be reminded by someone . . . that you do not belong,” he recalled.

Mamdani’s leftist Columbia professor father Mamood’s reaction to 9/11 was to write a book blaming the US for bringing the attack on itself and complaining about Islamophobia.

In fact, Mandani’s entire political career is centered on his Muslim identity.

“Commie Mamdani” as President Trump calls him, advocates socialist redistribution of wealth, taxing “millionaires” — those who haven’t fled the city — emptying jails, replacing cops with social workers, laying on free buses, subsidized grocery stores and forcing cheap rents on landlords.

His motto is “affordability,” but the subtext is Islam, and how to harness the latent electoral muscle of the fast-growing Muslim population of the city, who he’s banking can be mobilized to the polls by imams like Wahhaj.

New York City has the largest Muslim population of any American city, estimated to be anywhere from 750,000 to 1 million residents, or about 9% of residents.

Mamdani reportedly was persuaded to run for mayor last year at a Yemeni coffee shop called Qahwah House in Astoria “that served as his local hide-out and unofficial scheming headquarters just blocks from his apartment,” said The New York Times in a recent puff piece.

He “saw an opportunity to form a coalition [of] Muslims, South Asians, renters, young people and progressives,” the paper reported.

Where there’s a will

Backing Palestinians in the war on Gaza was crucial to this demographic.

This is why Mamdani is sticking to his absurd vow to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu next time the Israeli prime minister comes to New York.

It’s why he has tried to resist entreaties to say that Hamas should lay down its weapons.

It’s why he told the Times that the moment on the campaign that he felt most connected to the city was during Ramadan, in March, when he made the rounds of mosques.

It’s why in the mayoral debate last week, Mamdani berated a curiously meek Cuomo for not visiting more mosques.

“It took Andrew Cuomo being beaten by a Muslim candidate in the Democratic primary for him to set foot in a mosque. He had more than 10 years and he couldn’t name a single mosque at the last debate we had that he visited,” he said.

So what?

Instead of telling the pipsqueak to pull his head in, Cuomo flapped around defending himself as being a big fan of “the Muslim community.”

Mamdani is dangerous, as shown by his unabashed embrace of his Islamist radical mentors and his barely contained disrespect for the NYPD, which he has branded “racist, anti-queer,” and whose defunding he advocated in 2020.

We can’t let the city sleepwalk its way to disaster.

The vile Cuomo and the plucky but electorally challenged Republican Curtis Sliwa seem doomed. But as Lucas says, we can’t quit on New York.

Where there’s time, there’s hope.