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.
The excited coverage of Zohran Mamdani’s win in New York City’s mayoral race has suggested that there is a “wave” of new Muslim officeholders. There isn’t. In the first place, Mamdani did not win in a landslide as many had predicted; he squeaked through with 50.4% of the vote against a very weak candidate, Andrew Cuomo, who had been tainted with scandal, having been forced to resign as governor in 2021 after eleven women had charged him with sexual harassment.
Second, the only other Muslim to win a significant office in last week’s election was Ghazala Hashmi, who was elected lieutenant governor of Virginia.
Third, the other significant race involving a Muslim candidate was for mayor of Minneapolis. That candidate was Omar Fateh, a Somali whom Ilhan Omar backed. He lost to the Jewish incumbent, Jacob Frey. Fateh, whom many had thought had a chance to win, lost decisively with only 31% of the vote.
His dubious financial transactions may have had something to do with his loss. Fateh’s salary as a state senator is $51,000, Fateh’s net worth of $6.1 million is, therefore, extraordinary. He bought a house valued at $1.7 million; he has $1 million in the bank; he has foreign assets worth about $1.5 million. He also has $2 million in annual income, which is cause for amazement and alarm. Who has been paying him such a large sum? Has he, for example, received sky-high honoraria for speaking engagements in Qatar, one way that Doha supports Muslims running for office abroad? Or perhaps CAIR has arranged well-paid speeches for him to deliver before Muslim audiences in this country. The source of Fateh’s wealth deserves to be investigated.
More on Omar Fateh’s loss to Jacob Frey can be found here:
After a high-profile race in which he was billed as the “Zohran Mamdani of Minneapolis,” anti-Israel candidate Omar Fateh lost the election for mayor of Minneapolis, Minnesota. Fateh, 35, a Democratic state senator known for his anti-Zionist views and harsh criticism of Israel since Hamas’ October 7, 2023, attack, was defeated by incumbent Mayor Jacob Frey — a Jewish Democrat who has held the post since 2018 and has now won a third term.
Frey led from the first count with 41.7% of the vote, compared with Fateh’s 31.6%. Because no candidate achieved an outright majority, the city’s ranked-choice voting system was activated, and Frey secured a majority in the third round, confirming his reelection.
Fateh, a Somali-born Muslim, has in recent years become one of the most recognizable figures associated with the Democratic Party’s progressive wing. After the October 7 attacks, he wrote that he was “overwhelmed with sorrow for the victims of this violence as well as anger towards both the Israeli Government and Hamas who have senselessly injured and killed thousands of people in a matter of days.”
Thus does Omar Fateh “equally” deplore Hamas, that swept into Israel and proceeded to rape, torture, mutilate, and murder 1,200 innocent Israelis, and the IDF, for entering Gaza to destroy Hamas’s threat to the people and the state of Israel. This is like putting on the same moral plane Imperial Japan, for its sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, and the American government, for declaring war on Japan as a result.
In the city’s Jewish community, the results were met with a mix of relief and unease. “The threat passed this time, but the discourse has clearly changed,” said Rachel Jacobs, a local community activist. “We’ve all learned that Israel is viewed very differently by the younger generation.”
The “Minneapolis Mamdani” could not even win one-third of the vote. His decisive defeat tells us that the “Muslim wave” does not exist. The Mamdani victory itself is being talked about as if it were a landslide; it was instead the narrowest of victories against the weakest of opponents.
And as for Mamdani himself, given his policy proposals — the free buses, the universal childcare, that will be free no matter what the parents’ income, the prohibition on raising rents of rent-stabilized apartments — that, if carried out, will bring about an economic degringolade, with an enormous exodus of the well-off, and of companies, too, from the city and into nearby suburbs, how long do you think he will continue to be popular among that little over half of the electorate that voted him in?
