Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”
Sign up to attend Michael’s talk in Los Angeles on Thursday, November 20: HERE.
Back in 2017, the Internal Revenue Service was found to have hounded patriotic groups not because they had actually violated any laws, but simply because they did not toe the left’s line. At the same time, leftist groups had taxpayer funds lavished upon them. After all, they were doing the work of the good and righteous, right? It has now emerged that the Arab American Association of New York (AAANY), a venomously antisemitic group that leading Jew-hater Linda Sarsour once headed, received over $4 million in taxpayer money from New York City and New York state. At the same time, patriotic groups were struggling to keep their heads above water.
The Washington Free Beacon reported Monday that “the Arab American Association of New York (AAANY), which Sarsour led from 2005 to 2017, received more than $3.3 million from New York City and $854,000 from New York state between Sarsour’s last year atop the organization and 2024.” That is money, mind you, that the city and state confiscated from New York taxpayers under the pretext that the governing authorities were going to use the money to provide for the general welfare.
City officials seemed to be aware that what they were doing was not exactly on the up-and-up, as they seem to have made some effort to cover their tracks. The Free Beacon notes that “the state-level funding came primarily from the New York State Department of State, with $20,000 disbursed from the Office of Children and Family Services. Its city-level funding is much murkier: One $60,000 payment came from the Department of Small Business Services, but the rest of the funding was not attributed to any particular agency, watchdog group OpenTheBooks found.” Hmmm, now why might that be?
Whatever may have been going on, it is unlikely to end anytime soon. Now that Zohran Mamdani is about to become mayor of New York City, the AAANY is likely to get even more public funding. Sarsour doesn’t head it up anymore, but it isn’t as if the group has reformed. The current AAANY top dog, Marwa Janini, according to the Free Beacon, “is no less radical. Janini, a former Students for Justice in Palestine activist, signed a petition in 2021 advocating for global boycotts of Israel.”
With Janini at the helm, the AAANY also “lobbied for Mamdani’s ‘Not on Our Dime’ legislation, which would have prohibited New York-based nonprofits from ‘engaging in unauthorized support for Israeli settlement activity.’” Janini’s AAANY “also backed a ‘Flood Brooklyn for Palestine’ protest days after Oct. 7. The demonstration quickly devolved into a riot, with activists shutting down roads, setting fires in the street, and yelling and throwing eggs at police officers.” Yeah, this sounds like a group that taxpayers ought to be supporting, all right.
Since those activities align completely with Mamdani’s point of view, expect to see more of them. Indeed, Linda Sarsour herself may have a role in New York City’s new mayoral administration, and really, who could be more deserving of a taxpayer-funded job? Sarsour recently revealed that she had been working behind the scenes on Mamdani’s campaign, and that she intended to pressure the new mayor to keep his promise to dismantle the Strategic Response Group, the NYPD’s counterterror unit, which is also responsible for policing protests. “If Zohran’s gonna be the mayor of New York City,” Sarsour vowed, “he’s going to shut down the Strategic Response Group, the SRG, which is what Zohran has committed to.”
Sarsour also recently revealed that she had insider information about Mamdani’s sources of funding, saying just before the election:
Right now I’m a little more quiet, because I’m on the quiet side of this race, but I’m gonna tell you that once November 4th comes around, I will tell the story. The story is not just, uh, you know, that it’s random that Zohran ascended to this place. It is our Muslim-American communities. And I’ll also say that it’s Muslim money. The PACs that have supported Zohran, or a particular PAC that has supported Zohran is probably over eighty percent of Muslim-American donors in this country. High-net donors, grassroots donors. And I wanna make the point that the Unity and Justice Fund PAC, which is the CAIR Super PAC, was the largest institutional door — a largest institutional donor to the pro-Zohran PAC in New York.
So now we know. The Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which has a long history of fighting against counterterror measures and branding foes of jihad violence and Sharia oppression as “Islamophobic,” bankrolled the candidate who pledged to dismantle the NYPD’s counterterror unit.
With that kind of backing, don’t expect the incoming Mamdani administration to cut off the taxpayer funding of the AAANY anytime soon. Or ever.
