The New York mayoral race and the Islamification of the American left
How Zohran Mamdani helped make the marriage of Maoism and jihadism the new "cool" for the Big Apple's urban managerial class
A strange, new worm is taking its turn in the Big Apple, and could very well be a sign of an unimaginable American politics – if not sustained strife – to come.
Call it the Islamification of the American secular left, if that itself doesn’t sound like a rank oxymoron.
It’s the new progressive “cool” from Soho to Queens to the Bronx.
The pundit class has been thoroughly transfixed with the meteoric ascent of an obscure New York assemblyman from Queens named Zohran Mamdani, who happens to be Muslim.
Specifically, Mamdani is a member of the Khoja Twelver community, a subsect of Shi’ite Islam that comprises 10 to 15 percent of Muslims worldwide and is the official religion of the Islamic Republican of Iran.
Mamdani disclosed his affiliation as such on Twitter in November 2019 when he stated that he was “Ithna-Asheri,” Muslim phraseology for Shia Islam.
In barely a few months Mamdani has morphed into the Great Emancipator for every disaffected and deracinated political outlier from Shia Muslims themselves, marginalized even within Islam, to economically precarious Ivy League-educated urban progressives, whom Rob Henderson describes as “raised to expect the world and denied it”.
It is, of course, the latter demographic that turns out to be the electromotive force behind the Mamdani phenomenon.
As Henderson points out, it is the downwardly mobile elites – the so-called “professional managerial class”, or PMC, rather than the struggling and disenfranchised working classes - that are the present day torchbearers for radical “socialism”, a trend sociologist Peter Turchin foresaw accelerating in recent years.
Henderson notes:
Today’s wealthy activists are the meritocratic descendants of this ruling class—and now, they face their own reckoning. Once upon a time, their education and résumés guaranteed them status. Now, as the economy stratifies, many feel themselves slipping. And once again, socialism—or its progressive equivalents—offers a way to explain the loss and to seek revenge on those who have outpaced them. How this pent-up rage erupts is still unclear, but it’s certainly not going to be pretty. The children of privilege may not starve. But their disappointment—sharpened by ambition, magnified by envy, and amplified through elite networks—has the power to unsettle politics in ways that hardship alone rarely does.
But what neither Henderson nor Turchin nor any of their like-minded savants ever anticipated is the conflux of that thin intellectual gruel, which has bewitched the academic left now for a generation and has been misleadingly labelled by its critics as “cultural Marxism”, with full-bore, dyed-in-the-wool, anti-Zionist Islamist jihadism.
The occasion for the bizarre nuptials of these seemingly incompatible political contrarieties was the aftermath of the events of October 7, but the second coming of Donald Trump has been the real catalyst.
It is almost as if the forever thrombosis-churning rage machine of anti-Trump partisanship has in a single political microsecond brought about the most freakish alchemy of conceptual binaries ever to flash across the progressive mindscape since the Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact of 1939.
But that is what is happening in the pubs and parlor rooms of upscale Manhattan as we speak.
Consider the following news bite entitled “The far left says AOC didn’t go far enough against Israel” that appeared last July in USA Today.
“The far left is so far gone,” writes Dace Potes, “that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is somehow seen as not anti-Israel enough”.
Potes is referring to one incidental vote by the Gotham Congresswoman against a proposed amendment by right-wing firebrand Marjorie Taylor Greene (D-Georgia) to defund an appropriation for support of Israel’s Iron Dome defense system. AOC’s vote was obviously tactical, since she did not support the larger bill.
However, Potes notes:
…her vote on the failed amendment was met with backlash from the far left because she wasn’t aggressive enough in her denunciation of Israel. That criticism of AOC makes it clear that even just opposing Israel’s offensive in Gaza is not enough for the anti-Israel left, who demand that you also support stripping Israel of its defenses. They are not interested in peace; they are interested in more dead Jewish people. The far left and far right have something in common there.
As early as June 2025 the same “far left” was denouncing not only AOC but Bernie Sanders as “sellouts” because of their putatively insufficient anti-Israel postures.
Where were these attacks coming from?
They emanated almost exclusively from within the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the very movement that both AOC and Sanders had played pivotal but distinct roles in its dramatic transformation over the past decade from a marginal organization into the largest socialist organization in the United States.
Sanders had provided the ideological scaffolding and mass appeal that legitimized democratic socialism in American politics, while AOC proved that DSA’s electoral strategy could actually translate into concrete political power.
Together, they altered massively the terrain of American progressive politics.
All along AOC and Sanders had been highly critical of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians. Once the Israel-Hamas war began, they were even more critical of Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s infrastructure and the devastation wrought on its civilian population.
But they never identified themselves specifically as “anti-Zionist”, or advocated for the destruction of the state of Israel.
More importantly, they always saw Middle East politics as subordinate to the class-based economic issues that had defined DSA platforms since the organization’s founding in the 1970s.
But that all changed in June 2024.
A faction within the DSA calling itself “Emerge” published a manifesto entitled “Against Cowardice: Palestine Charts the Path for DSA”.
DSA Emerge had described itself three years earlier as “a caucus of NYC-DSA members building a red New York City” – in other words, a self-proclaimed communist cadre seeking to transmogrify the Democratic Socialists of America into its own image.
But Emerge’s 2024 broadside demanded that its 21st century “red” brigades take on an even more idiosyncratic coloration – namely, that of the Hamas-style zealot who engineered the October 7 attack on Israel.
Slamming not only AOC and Sanders, but then Democratic “Squad” member Jamaal Bowman who lost the 2024 Democratic primary to Westchester County official George Latimer, Emerge trumpeted that “’progressive except for Palestine’ carries a political cost, and DSA must exact it”.
Emerge warned: “DSA has a choice: cut off those members enabling genocide or bear the political cost with them.”
In other words, Palestine über alles.
Emerge wrapped up its tirade against the progressive icons with the following:
Palestinians, generation after generation, remind us with their resistance that our socialism can only be a movement for humanity and liberation. They demand we overcome despair and fight back. Palestine does not cower in front of the world’s imperial armies. Her children assert dignity and strength by breaking the might of the world’s most technologically-advanced and well-resourced armies, defeating them militarily, politically, in resolve and in humanity. Palestine holds the greatest threat to the empire. The sacrifice asked of us is nothing compared to the monumental sacrifices Palestinians are forced to make. We must fulfill our duty in this global struggle of many fronts. We must strike the ruling class in the imperial core and stand proudly when they strike back. We must confidently meet the moment ahead. We must hold the line for Palestine. From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free.
This past July Emerge was finally able to have its platform adopted as a nodal point for DSA messaging with its so-called “Springs of Revolution” agenda. At the August 2025 DSA National Convention in Chicago, Springs of Revolution was successful in winning four of the 16 elected seats on the National Political Committee.
They also were successful, according to a report by the National Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), in persuading the national body to pass Resolution 22 entitled “For a Fighting Anti-Zionist DSA”.
Resolution 22 requires that DSA members and elected officials endorsed by the organization may be expelled if they opposed the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, affiliate with any pro-Israel groups, voice support for Israel’s right to defend itself, or help provide Israel with material or financial aid.
In its “letter” introducing the “Springs of Revolution” agenda and also Resolution 22 authors Ethan Eblaghie, Ahmed Husain, and Francesca Maria wrote:
Our proposals align DSA with the Palestinian national consensus represented by the demands of al-Thawabit: the Palestinian peoples’ right to resistance and self-determination, the recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine, and the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homeland. It also expands expectations that our elected officials honor a principled commitment to Palestine, building a powerful counterweight to the formidable pressure of the Zionist lobby. Some of our most compelling campaigns, including Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for New York City mayor, have been won due to a relentless commitment to Palestine, not in spite of it.
It is significant, of course, that the letter mentions Mamdani’s campaign in the same context as the “demands of al-Thawabit”, the so-called “redlines” of the Palestinian “national consensus” that entails the dismantling of the state of Israel.
For almost half a century there has been vigorous debate among Palestinian resistance groups concerning whether al-Thwabit should be based on international or Islamic law. Since the turn of the millennium the balance of power has clearly swung toward the Islamists, especially Hamas.
It is Hamas’ enlarging shadow over the DSA that has prompted many of the latter’s long-time secular left protagonists to distance themselves from their newfound colleagues.
The views of DSA founder Maurice Isserman writing in The Nation immediately after the October 7 atrocities resonate with this trend.
In an article entitled “Why I just Quit the DSA”, Isserman laments that “an organization that can’t take a stand condemning a right-wing terrorist group that set out to murder as many Jewish civilians, including children and infants, as it can lay its hands on, has forfeited the right to call itself democratic socialist.”
Mandami’s effusive embrace last week of Brooklyn Imam Siraj Wahhaj, a radical Islamist arrested in 2018 for allegedly training children to carry out school shootings and named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, has stoked a political uproar among the liberal Democratic establishment about where the DSA is taking New York City and ultimately American politics as a whole.
Former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, who trails Mamdani in the mayor’s race, also called the latter out for de facto endorsing the controversial imam’s extreme and intolerant position on homosexuality.
The “red New York” about which the increasingly radicalized elements of the DSA gush represents a consummately weird hybridization of long-festering, but quarantined strains of militant Maoism within the American left tracing back to the Vietnam era with the kind of metastatic Islamo-fascist ideologies that gave us 9/11, Hamas, and the ISIS.
It is most ironic that these grotesque amalgam of utterly irreconcilable pseudo-political fantasies could not only drive an election for mayor of the city that historically has been the very emblem of America itself, but claim to represent a mobilization of the “working class” against the elites whereas the opposite is actually the case.
Get ready for an unprecedented lightning storm in the next few weeks.