New York City was not a cauldron of anti-Islamic hate post-9/11, as cynically declared by mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani.
Quite the opposite.
I remember those dark days after nearly 3,000 souls of all races and ethnicities were murdered by plane-hijacking savages on Sept. 11, 2001.
Good people of this city were determined not to let their grief turn ugly.
I lived at the time near a section of Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn that is home to one of America’s largest concentrations of Muslims.
No one attacked, harassed or as much as flung dirty looks at those wearing Muslim garb, as Mamdani disgracefully asserted.
No.
We worried about the people we lived alongside peacefully.
I attended a vigil in which Jews, Christians and atheists joined hands in multilingual prayer and mourned the dead alongside our Muslim friends and neighbors.
We had all endured devastating losses that awful day in September.
No one of any complexion or religion was unscathed.
Mamdani, a hard-left Socialist and nepobaby born into a wealthy Indian family, is running for mayor as a Democrat on a platform of deep division and promises of free stuff.
He flat-out refuses to acknowledge the unity that ensconced New York after the terrorist strikes that spared no one.
Togetherness isn’t part of his brand.
Instead, the Muslim state assemblyman from Queens, 34, wields claims of Islamophobia like a cudgel.
His declarations of victimhood are his fallback position, his method of shutting down any criticism hurled in his direction.
But now, this twisted tactic may be failing him.
In one of the most despicable performances ever to grace a political campaign, on Friday Mamdani stood before the Islamic Cultural Center in The Bronx to whine about Islamophobic attacks on his campaign by opponents Andrew Cuomo, Curtis Sliwa and current Mayor Eric Adams.
Squeezing out crocodile tears, he conjured an “aunt” he claimed was too terrified to ride the subway after the terrorists struck because she feared being harmed by haters of her religion.
“In an era of ever-diminishing bipartisanship, it seems that Islamophobia has emerged as one of the few areas of agreement,” Mamdani said, before choking up.
“I want to speak to the memory of my aunt, who stopped taking the subway after September 11th because she did not feel safe in her hijab.”
It was a three-hanky opera.
And almost immediately, the touching tale began falling apart under Internet scrutiny.
As it turns out, Mamdani’s one aunt was photographed without a hijab — and was revealed to be living thousands of miles from New York in Tanzania on 9/11.
The candidate called a face-saving news conference Monday to announce that the harassed and frightened relative he cried over was really a cousin of his father’s, a woman he affectionately referred to as his aunt.
Yet he refused to provide the full name of the alleged relative, “Zehra,’’ only saying she had died some years ago.
And still, Mamdani clung to the self-serving prejudice narrative.
He blamed his chief rival, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who’s running for mayor as an Independent, for the gaffe he alone created.
“For the takeaway from my more than 10-minute address about Islamophobia in this race and in this city, to be the question of my aunt, tells you everything you need to know about Cuomo and his inability to reckon with a crisis of his own making,” Mamdani yammered.
Disgusting.
It wasn’t the first time he turned the tables on opponents by branding them bigots.
At the mayoral candidates’ debate last week, he was confronted with his long history of anti-Semitic remarks, his association with Jew-haters, suspected terrorists and LGBTQ-oppressors, his hypocritical cavorting with all manner of scoundrel here and in his native Uganda.
I nearly hurled when Mamdani hit back at legitimate questions about his fitness for office, rationalizing his words and deeds by claiming his detractors went after him simply because he is the first Muslim poised to become mayor of the nation’s biggest and greatest city.
How long he gets away with this dishonest strategy is up to voters to decide.
Zohran Mamdani insults every New Yorker, whether they be non-believers or those of any faith.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
