Why right and left wing bigots are attacking NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani

Get the Point!

The United States is not a Christian nation…

As I watched Zohran Mamdani emerge victorious in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary last week, I was not in the least bit surprised to see many Republicans and even some Democrats launch into anti-Islamic overdrive in a way that would have ill informed people believing that if elected, he will persecute Jews and Christians while establishing an Islamic caliphate in City Hall.

Zohran Mamdani

After news of Mamdani’s victory circulated last week, right on cue, President Donald Trump, a New York native, called him a “lunatic” and a “communist,” slights that will surely get worse closer to the general election.

On the left, Democrats like former NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo and U.S. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries have criticized Mamdani’s “globalize the intifada” references, a nod to the Arabic term for Palestinian resistance of Israeli occupation—as if the same is always tantamount to armed resistance instead of peaceful resistance!

But with truth being stranger than fiction these days, I find it important to note that while such slurs aren't based in realistic facts, they provide yet another sickening indictment of the well established fact that far too many of our fellow Americans cannot read or comprehend beyond a sixth grade level—a reality that leaves most vulnerable to adopting whatever the television, Tik-Tok/Instagram reels, or their personal pastor or rabbi (with an agenda) tells them to think about Mr. Mamdani.

What's funny—and hypocritical—about Mamdani’s right wing critics is that most MAGAs call for “identity” markers such as race, sexual orientation, and religion to be eliminated as factors for, well, anything, but here they are, hurling racial slurs and making anti-Islamic comments on a daily basis instead of judging this leading mayoral candidate “for the content of his character.” 🙄

What's funny—and hypocritical—about Mamdani's left wing critics is that many of them are caping harder for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's right to kill Palestinians indiscriminately under the guise of “self-defense” than they are for Mamdani's right to express his well reasoned policy based concerns about those indiscriminate killings.

What’s not so funny is that whether from the right or left, Mamdani’s critics who claim that he is an “anti-Semite” are too shallow to realize that Arab Muslims are Semites, too, and that making bigoted remarks about Islam and its role in the lives of adherents is just as flawed as what they claim to defend with respect to Judaism! More crucially, in a time when domestic terrorism from white so-called Christian males is back on the rise, such hateful rhetoric places Muslim public servants in danger of being in the cross hairs of some foolish incel with a firearm and a grudge!

The United States is not a Christian nation…

Zohran Mamdani is a Muslim, but as the late Army General and Secretary of State Colin Powell once said in 2008 when asked about then presidential candidate Barack Obama’s paternal family being Muslims, “So what? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer's no, that's not America.”

Indeed, Mr. Powell!

What’s most important about Mamdani, 33, is not how he prays or who he prays to, but whether the policies that he advocates are best suited to address housing costs that are forcing New Yorkers to leave the boroughs in droves, inflation that's leading to food and medicine insecurity among the masses, and crime rates that are directly ties to poverty and lack of educational opportunities.

What's also important to note is that Mamdani has secured a great deal of support from Jewish voters who, like Ol’ Hobbs, reject this idiotic but increasingly popular notion that criticizing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s military policies in Gaza, Iran, and Lebanon is tantamount to being anti-Jewish. Nothing, and I mean absolutely NOTHING could be further from the truth!

But to get to the truth, you have to realize the critically important role that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) plays in filling the coffers of Republican and Democratic politicians across America who have turned a blind eye towards the thousands of Palestinian civilians who have been slaughtered during Israel’s war with Hamas. AIPAC sponsored politicos are the main folks leading the charge against Mamdani, while their not so well read followers post and repost false claims that he is a “terrorist” that should be “deported” as if he is an illegal alien, as opposed to being an American citizen whose mother, Mira Nair, is an Academy Award nominated movie director (film credits include Mississippi Masala, The Namesake, and Monsoon Wedding), and his father, Mahmood Mamdani, is a longtime international affairs and anthropology professor at Columbia University.

Meet the Mamdani’s

Now, the historian in me knows that religion as a political scare tactic is one of the oldest tricks in the book as almost 100 years ago, fears that Democratic New York Governor Al Smith, a Catholic, would be beholden to the Pope in Rome, helped destroy his presidential candidacy against Republican Herbert Hoover in 1928.

Democratic nominee Al Smith's Catholicism was a hot political issue in the 1928 presidential race…

32 years later, the same anti-Catholic sentiment arose when Massachusetts Senator John Kennedy faced Vice President Richard Nixon in 1960, but Kennedy narrowly won and set the stage for another Catholic, Joe Biden, who won the presidency 60 years later in 2020.

Just as neither JFK nor Biden served as extensions of Vatican City during their administrations, Mamdani, if elected, will not govern according to Sharia law or call for the eradication of Israel as a sovereign state, as some blissfully ignorant types are typing on the Internet on a daily basis.

As such, when you realize that Zohran Mamdani epitomizes what has historically been called the “American Dream,” why, then, should his religion even be mentioned as an impediment when, let's say it in unison:

The United States is not a Christian nation!!!

Later this week, as Americans celebrate the 4th of July and the Declaration of Independence and whatnot, the author of that manifesto, Thomas Jefferson, will be praised across the nation for inscribing the document that led to this nation's founding in 1776.

Thomas Jefferson

Eleven years after writing the Declaration of Independence, during the summer of 1787, future President Jefferson helped a fellow Virginian and another future president, James Madison, draft what would become another storied document—the U.S. Constitution. Lest we forget that in the Constitution's first amendment within its “Bill of Rights,” the Founding Fathers, still reeling from the role that the Church of England played in influencing British monarchs like King George III, established in very plain English the “Free Exercise Clause” which mandated that the American government would neither “establish” a state religion, nor prevent the “free exercise” of any religion by its citizenry!

Thomas Jefferson, in fact, was known to keep a copy of the Holy Quran and Holy Bible on his desks, and reputedly was just as adroit with quoting Christian scriptures as he was with citing Islamic suras!

But most crucially, Jefferson, as Founding Father and president, insisted that religion had no place in governing or the rule of law! In 1801, then President Jefferson took time out of his schedule to personally respond to a letter from the Danbury Baptist Association of Connecticut to allay their written fears that the new American government would persecute citizens based upon their religious beliefs. Jefferson wrote:

“…Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between Church & State…” President Thomas Jefferson, October 1801

As a baptized Christian since 1982, I submit that the importance of separating church and state is that far too often, man's worst acts towards his or her fellow man have come from some person using their personal religious beliefs to justify their tolerance for mass inhumanity.

As I often express to my fellow Christians, if God made “man” in his image, then ALL human beings are his children, period—full stop! To me, the idea that one group is preferred over another is tribal and exclusive—no matter how its's written in man made theological texts—and has been used to justify atrocities including European colonial exploitation, the Trans-Saharan Slave Trade, the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, the so-called “Manifest Destiny” European genocide of Native Americans, the German Holocaust genocide of Jews and Roma, the “Killing Fields” in Southeast Asia, ethnic genocide in Southern Africa, and yes, the genocide of Palestinian civilian men, women, and children in Gaza.

Ergo, Zohran Mamdani’s speaking out against political policies that lead to current atrocities in Gaza doesn't make him a monster to be feared, rather, it makes him a man—a thinking man—who sees what's wrong in that part of the world as well as his own part of the world, and is seeking to do his part to ameliorate suffering of varying sorts among the masses.