The Ground Zero Mosqueification of Zohran Mamdani

The politics of 9/11 may not be strong enough to take down the New York mayoral frontrunner. But they'll burn the social fabric of the city they claim to save

Edited by Sam Thielman

THE SUMMER OF 2010 should be remembered as one of the most infamous in the history of New York City. Right-wing media owned by Rupert Murdoch, specifically Fox News and the New York Post, manufactured an anti-Muslim hate campaign over Park51, a nominally Muslim civic center near the World Trade Center site. They and a host of right-wing politicians, including a preliminary foray into politics from Donald Trump, and accompanied by acquiescent Democrats like Senate leader Harry Reid, transformed a deliberate attempt at Muslim civic contribution into a minaret built in the forecourt of Hagia Sophia. 

The cultivated anger, a hideous exploitation of people's genuine pain over 9/11, on display at a public hearing over Park51 was "the scariest thing I've ever seen in my life," remembered one of the project's developers. Conservative media encouraged its consumers to treat Park51 as a civilizational insult. Meanwhile, the NYPD had become a secret police hunting the city's Muslims. A film student named Michael Enright told his cab driver, Ahmed Sharif to “consider this a checkpoint” and then stabbed him in the throat with a Leatherman.

In such fashion did Park51 become, forevermore, the Ground Zero Mosque. The Ground Zero Mosque was less a place than a violent insistence on missing the point, since accepting Park51 in its intended spirit would mean accepting the equal citizenship of Muslims after 9/11. Better to manufacture endless offense and adopt a martyr's posture of moral blamelessness. 

Something very similar, often from the same outlets, is underway with Zohran Mamdani. In 2010, there was no pro-American position that Park 51's Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf could take to avoid being called a terrorist sympathizer, as, for example, the Republican candidate for New York governor called him. In 2025, there is no position that Zohran Mamdani can promote, no apology for a prior position he can offer, no distance from a slogan he can travel, that will ever offset the manufactured grievance of oligarchs and Zionists to present him as a violent antisemite. 

The difference is that now the oligarchs and the Zionists cannot stop him. But they can poison the city against him. And they must, because in the end, their opposition to socialism—a politics of genuine abundance, enjoyed by those who actually create that abundance—means they offer nothing but division to maintain their power. 

THE PHOTOS ABOVE, sent to me by a friend who requested anonymity, show stickers popping up on the city's lampposts. The ones on the right and the left were taken on the Upper West Side. The Hamas one in the middle is from Greenpoint. 

The one that says "New York Was The Victim of 9/11, Mamdani—Not You" is the one I want to focus on. That's the one that put me in mind of the Ground Zero Mosque. 

The reference here seems to be Mamdani's recent and quite eloquent speech at a Bronx mosque rejecting the post-9/11 politics of what he called "the shadows," the respectability politics those on the margins are expected to perform. Mamdani gave that speech after his main opponent, former New York governor Andrew Cuomo—the man behind the infamous "Vote For Cuomo, Not The Homo" whisper campaign when his father ran for mayor against the closeted Ed Koch—laughed when an interviewer said Mamdani would cheer another 9/11.  Standing beside Mamdani and adding profundity to the moment was Debbie Almontaser, who was run out of her job as a public school principal nearly 20 years ago by the same Islamophobic forces that Cuomo was cultivating. 

You have to be deliberately obtuse, as the Ground Zero Mosque hysteria was, to claim that Mamdani was calling himself the real victim of 9/11. That's because the alternative is to acknowledge what Mamdani was addressing: the post-9/11 decision by the power structure of New York City to aggressively and unapologetically persecute Muslims. Above all, that structure refused to treat them like New Yorkers traumatized and mourning the atrocity that befell their city. Mohammed Razvi, long an influential figure in Brooklyn's Little Pakistan running down Coney Island Avenue, keeps a binder with children's contemporaneous accounts of being treated by classmates and even teachers as a potential member of al-Qaeda. Those who enjoyed municipal power the first 15 years after 9/11 have been so determined to avoid accountability for their persecution of Muslims and those presumed to be Muslims that they paid for a horrorshow of a museum at Ground Zero that writes it out of history. 

To acknowledge what New York became after 9/11 would be to recognize the institutionalized injustice that so many New Yorkers—both those with power and those without it, who compensated by choosing cruelty over solidarity—inflicted upon their neighbors. It would expose the emptiness behind their posture of innocence. It would show them and not their quarry as the uncivilized ones. It would concede that the social, economic and political levers of persecution are wielded by those who claim to be in danger of persecution through the "dhimmitude" that the sticker asserts Mamdani to represent. (Like the Ground Zero Mosque, dhimmitude is another concept that this cohort isn't prepared to understand, since its manipulation is so useful, but that's a story for another time.) 

That's why there are pieces in Murdoch outlets deliberately misconstruing the way that cultures that show respect to their elders use terms like "auntie" and "uncle." It's to make Zohran seem like a liar as he explains the reality of the post-9/11 Muslim New Yorker experience to an audience that refuses to recognize it. It's why these stickers are on the lampposts, why the ads from Cuomo and Fix The City are on the air and why, as Peter Beinart explains, prominent Jewish leaders are jettisoning more principles than they may understand in slandering Mamdani as a threat to people like me. The reality of Mister Cardamom exposes the politics of 9/11 as predatory grievance-mongering from people who keep New Yorkers impoverished, exhausted and less meaningfully free than we deserve. 

The main reason their attacks are failing is because they are a means to keep New York City unaffordable. But another reason is that Zohran is more authentically a New Yorker than any of his critics. He's ludicrously New York, able to move in so many different New Yorks, from Cubby Hole to Little Flower to the taxi drivers' strike to Madison Square Garden with the Kid Mero very far from courtside. He lives like New Yorkers live, not like the Bill Ackmans or Andrew Cuomos live. Zohran's willingness to champion his fellow New Yorkers is why so many of us, vastly more than I have ever seen in 45 years, have volunteered since the spring to elect him. The attacks on Zohran are attacks on everything that make New York City worthwhile. Come June, when he leads the parade for the 2026 NBA Champion New York Knicks down the Canyon of Heroes, it'll mean more coming from a mayor who represents persevering through the dark times of the early 2000s.

Should Mamdani win, as I expect him to, then it will become time to hold his feet to the fire. I'm particularly concerned about his embrace of NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch, which I consider a serious early mistake (and more on that in an upcoming edition). We have no tradition here of patience with our mayors. That's a good thing, whether Zohran ends up liking it or not. 

But at the same time, the New York of the Ground Zero Mosque will always be there, determined to retake power. It is up to us, throughout Zohran's mayoralty, to stop it—not only today, but forever. What New York became after 9/11, and indeed after 2010, is what led to the ICE kidnappings we see today. It is past time that we rolled it back.

Go vote for Zohran today, so we can finally begin. Justice for his and every auntie. 

OR, if you prefer, just read every word of this Molly Crabapple essay. 

I WROTE THIS PIECE yesterday. I woke up—or, rather, was woken up by a certain journalist friend texting me—to the news that Dick Cheney has died. It was a perfect, cloudless Tuesday morning in New York and the polls were set to open. With Zohran looking like the next mayor, the air carried the scent of poetic justice. 

Thanks to my Rumsfeld and Kissinger obituaries, many, many people started asking me today if I had a Cheney obituary on deck. I did not. I probably should have, but I did not. But it wasn't long before The Nation commissioned one from me. And so, rather than me shoehorning Cheney stuff into this edition, you can click over there for an obit I headlined—which The Nation accepted without changes—"His Works Completed, Dick Cheney, Mass Murderer of Iraqis and American Democracy, Dies." 

The trilogy can be accompanied by my Colin Powell obituary here at FOREVER WARS. But the set won't be complete until The Decider joins his cohort below. I should probably start writing that piece.