One moment, you’re living your best life, shouting anti-racist platitudes into a bullhorn outside Gracie Mansion in your sensible coat, and the next, someone else living his best life climbs over you and throws a bomb at the police. This is what happened to Walter Masterson as he exercised his constitutional right to signal his virtue outside the residence of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani on March 7. It’s a perfect metaphor for the madness of the last decade, and how performative liberalism runs cover for terrorism, the “propaganda of the deed.”
“As a born and raised New Yorker, we welcome everyone into the city,” Walter Masterson bullhorned at a group of anti-Islam protestors and the NYPD. “You don’t get to come from outside and tell everyone else…”
At this point, Emir Balat did pretty much that by using Masterson as cover and throwing a bomb filled with shrapnel at the protesters and the police. Federal prosecutors charged Balat and his friend, Ibrahim Kayumi, with terrorism, and the duo said they were inspired by the Islamic State.
Masterson was protesting a stunt by Jake Lang, who was convicted of attacking police with a baseball bat at the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot and is, as you’d expect, running in the Republican primary for U.S. Senate in Florida on a ticket that includes banning Islam and using bounty hunters to catch illegal immigrants. Lang organized a rally outside Gracie Mansion called “Stop the Islamic Takeover of New York City” and turned up bearing a roasted pig for Mamdani, America’s most prominent observant Muslim. The performative identity politics of the Left had summoned its mirror image from the Right. It’s Hegel for morons.
Mamdani’s response was to tell everyone that Lang was a “white supremacist,” but the “attempt to use an explosive device” was “even more disturbing.” More disturbing still is that Mamdani made it sound like Lang and his “Islamophobic” followers had thrown a bomb, and failed to mention “terrorism” and “murder.” If Mamdani wanted to give the impression that, as his academic father has argued, he thinks jihadists are a “category of soldier,” and that it’s “Islamophobic” to note their motives, this was the way to do it.
Later that day, Mamdani confirmed that Balat and Kayumi “have been charged with a heinous act of terrorism and proclaiming their allegiance to ISIS.” When Mamdani was running for office last summer, I said he wasn’t so much a hardcore Islamist as a theater kid, a child of the transnational elite cosplaying as a Third-Worldist guerrilla. A hardcore Islamist wouldn’t have sent that second tweet. The passive voice says it all. He’s a fellow traveler, a jaded sophisticate looking for Edward Said’s noble savages.
Does the same go for Mrs. Mamdani, Rama Duwaji? She was born to Syrian Muslim immigrants in Houston and raised in Dubai. But on Instagram, she calls herself an “animator + illustrator from damascus nyc.” Further forays into radical chic include fashion spreads and, the Free Press reported, touching the heart button dozens of times in response to pro-terrorist and anti-Israel material on Instagram after Hamas launched its Oct. 7, 2023, spree of murder, rape, torture, and kidnapping in Israel.
As Dawaji is a feminist, the thought that Palestinians raped and tortured Jewish women gave her the ick, so she liked a post that denied it ever happened. Another post accused Israel of running a “concentration camp” intended to “exterminate Palestinians”; the technical term for this kind of filth is “Holocaust inversion.”
A dozen likes went to Bisan Owda, a Gazan “journalist” who is a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which is banned in the U.S. as a terrorist group. One post showed 12-year-old Yagil Yaakov’s abduction. The boy has been stripped and is being abused. A Palestinian man holds the frightened boy’s head by the hair, as if he’s conducting an impromptu slave auction.
Dawaji got so excited to see Jews being massacred and brutalized, she was jabbing her index at the screen like a drunk at a supermarket checkout. Mamdani refuses to comment because his wife is a “private person,” but she’s not. She’s an artist who trades on her biography. She helped design his mayoral campaign. She leverages his celebrity to advance her status as a fashion plate. It’s a matter of public interest if the first lady of New York City supports terrorism and murder.
THE FRIENDS OF JEFFREY EPSTEIN
The hero of the hour on March 7 was NYPD Assistant Chief Aaron Edwards, who vaulted a barrier and ran towards danger. A normal Hizzoner would have invited Edwards to dinner, posed for the cameras, and locked up the votes of the Outer Boroughs for the next four years. Instead, that night’s guest at Gracie Mansion was Mahmoud Khalil, a Syria-born Islamist who said last year he’s “fighting for the total eradication of Western civilisation.”
Big-city politics is always a dirty business. If the walls of Gracie Mansion could talk, they’d be in the East River wearing concrete boots. But the Mamdanis are not business as usual.
Dominic Green is a Washington Examiner columnist and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Find him on X @drdominicgreen.