Anyone wondering why people think the New York City Council is such a joke need only consider that Shahana Hanif was the co-chair of its Task Force To Combat Hate, which is every bit as sick as the way the United Nations keeps empowering the likes of Iran and Cuba to protect human rights.
The Park Slope Democrat’s latest low came as two Muslim women spoke at a protest of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s Israel-bashing and anti-semitism: Hanif publicly begged her god to “condemn” them to “Jahannam,” the hottest part of hell in the Quran.
She routinely presents herself as a model of loving tolerance even as she promotes hate.
Amid rising antisemitism, the council in April 2023 overwhelmingly voted to establish April 29 as “End Jew Hatred Day”; Hanif was one of two “nays,” citing supposed “harmful rhetoric” behind the resolution, “no matter how well-intentioned its wording may seem” and insisting that she “vehemently” opposes “all forms of hatred.”
Six months later, Hanif responded to the Oct. 7 atrocities by condemning “the illegal, immoral, and unjust occupation of the Palestinian people.”
A few weeks later, she got arrested protesting against “apartheid and genocide.”
(The Palestinian population has boomed in all the decades that Israel’s supposedly been slaughtering it, and Gaza’s has grown despite the Hamas war; those Jews are really bad at genocide.)
Then-Speaker Adrienne Adams named Hanif to co-head that anti-hate panel largely to help the hater clean up her reputation; in typical Clown Council fashion, the task force took two years to hold all of five roundtables with public school students to discuss “students’ experiences with hate crimes” — and conclude that the city needs to “move away from punitive approaches like detention or suspension” to respond to hate and instead “foster meaningful conversations.”
So when thousands of people rallied last Tuesday to protest Mamdani’s tolerance for antisemitism, it wasn’t a huge surprise that Hanif was outraged that two Muslims joined in: Don’t they know what side they are supposed to be on?
Julie Menin, the new speaker, is striving to turn the City Council into a responsible legislative body; one way to measure her success is to watch if this self-righteous, hateful hypocrite gets sidelined.
Any organization that fails to treat Shahana Hanif as an embarrassment deserves no respect at all.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
