Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”
Zohran Mamdani ran for office promising New Yorkers free everything. And then he asked them to give him $4 million to fund his transition team. In a fundraising video, Mamdani claimed that he only had $1 million to keep paying his “incredible team” for the next 50 days.
He also had to “vet the 50,000 resumes we’ve received” for that incredible team.
Now we know where those millions for Mamdani’s “incredible team” are actually going.
Mamdani has brought on 400 people to his transition team across 17 committees including a committee on community organizing, on worker justice, and on immigrant justice. Despite the claims that the Muslim socialist needed millions of dollars to go through tens of thousands of resumes, the ‘team’ is mostly drawn from his political allies in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), Islamists and other people who were already involved in his campaign.
The Mamdani transition team has a disproportionate number of Arabs and Muslims on it.
For example, the Committee on Arts and Culture includes 5 people from the Muslim world, the Committee on Community Organizing features 6 people from the Muslim world, the Committee on Community Safety has 3 , the Committee on Government Operations has 4, the Committee on Immigrant Justice has 8, the Committee on Legal Affairs has 6, and the Committee on Small Businesses has 4.
And the transition team includes some of the most extreme figures in New York City politics.
During his campaign, Zohran Mamdani had lied and claimed that, despite his past statements calling for the defunding of the police, he was no longer interested in police defunding.
But Mamdani’s ‘public safety’ committee will include Alex Vitale, the author of ‘The End of Policing’ who had called for eliminating the police, legalizing many crimes and using social services to deal with other offenses. Vitale had claimed that “police are violence workers”, described police as “the natural enemy of the working class” and urged that “if you don’t want racism and violence, don’t get the police involved.”
Unsurprisingly, for the transition team of a politician whose signature issue was validating Islamic violence and hatred against Jews through moral inversion, Mamdani’s transition team stands out for the sheer number of members who hate Jews.
That includes Hassaan Chaudhary, a fellow Indian Muslim who headed up Muslim outreach for Mamdani, who had praised Iranian dictator Ahmadinejad for his call to eliminate Israel, and used “Jew” as an insult. Also on the Mamdani transition team is ousted Women’s March leader Tamika Mallory, who had celebrated Farrakhan, and accused Jews of being behind slavery.
Mamdani’s legal committee includes Tahanie Aboushi, a BDS supporter, close friend of Linda Sarsour, and ‘Palestinian’ ‘civil rights’ lawyer whose father was sentenced to 22 years in prison. As Middle East Forum noted, she was involved in an organization that a Hamas front group tried to direct funds to.
Also on the legal committee is Baher Azmy of the Communist founded Center for Constitutional Rights who represented various ‘war on terror’ detainees and is one of the lawyers for Mahmoud Khalil, a foreign national who served as a key figure in the campus terrorist protests with a stated mission of “the total eradication of western civilization”.
Another member of the legal committee is Ramzi Kassem who had claimed that 9/11 was due to the “resentment these terrorists felt towards the United States” as a result of “our country’s policies” and that “the legacy of 9/11 ought to be recounted primarily through the stories of Muslims the world over who have largely paid the price of American power and prosperity.”
Kassem’s clients included Ahmed al-Darbi, an Al Qaeda terrorist and the brother-in-law of one of the hijackers who flew a plane into the Pentagon, and who was himself a key figure in the bombing of an oil tanker.
“Terrorism is but one of many reactions to oppression and dispossession and not their cause,” Kassem had argued.
While at Columbia University, Kassem co-founded Turath, an association of Muslim students, and then Qanun at Columbia Law. A fellow student described these hateful groups as having brought “under the guidance of Mr. Kassem… speakers to this campus that support violence against American and Israeli civilians… defended the genocidal program of Hamas.”
Also on the legal committee is Afaf Nasher, the executive director of CAIR’s New York chapter. CAIR’s founder had celebrated Oct 7.
Hassan Naveed, another member of Mamdani’s transition team, had been fired by the Adams administration from his former role of heading up the New York City’s Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes over the rise of hate crimes during his tenure, who sued claiming that he was fired because of ‘Islamophobia’. According to Naveed, who sued the city for $1 million (and under Mamdani is likely to get it, at taxpayer expense), Mayor Eric Adams had engaged in “discriminatory conduct against Muslims, Arabs, Palestinians and those perceived to be affiliated with these identities” by comparing pro-Hamas rallies to KKK rallies.
The culture committee of the transition team includes Suroosh Alvi, a Canadian ‘journalist’ with Vice, who interviewed Hamas figures, and promoted false claims of ‘genocide’.
On Oct 7, as Hamas was murdering Jews, Lumumba Akinwole-Bandele, of the Malcolm X Grassroots projects, tweeted ‘solidarity’ for Gaza. He’s a member of the transition team.
Also joining the Mamdani transition team is Waleed Shahid, a Bernie Sanders and AOC ally, who claimed that Muslims had been “politically silenced or scared to organize or protest the ‘wars on terror’” and has battled to stop Israel’s campaign against Hamas. Shaheed’s wife, Emily Mayer, heads If Not Now, an anti-Israel BDS hate group that targets Jewish groups.
Other members of the transition team include Christine Marinoni, the girlfriend of Hollywood actress Cynthia Nixon, both of whom engage in anti-Israel activism, supposedly at the behest of Aboushi.
While the Mamdani team pretended that it needed millions of dollars to gather resumes from tens of thousands of people volunteering to fix the city, the truth is that its committees are an incestous collection of radical activists circling around the DSA and allied movements. Many members of the committees have come out of anti-Israel and pro-terrorist organizing.
Mamdani raised $4 million to build a team of the same old radicals he already knew, who have nothing but contempt and hatred for America and for New York City, and who plan to destroy it under the guise of implementing policies that they know are unworkable and insane.
Take Alex Vitale who had written an entire book calling for the elimination of the police. When asked what his solution to violent crime was, he replied that “will we need some kind of state agency that is capable of defending people from violence and exploitation? Yes. Might it look a lot like police look today? Possibly.” Why abolish the police just to replace them with the police?
But the radical Mamdani ally had described the police as a threat to “radical socialist oriented politics” that “will be used to stop us” and claimed that abolishing the police “creates political space for us to do what we need to do.”
This was never about free buses or government supermarkets. It’s not really about defunding the police or any of the other transparently unworkable promises, it’s about the revolution.
And the ‘revolution’ is about seizing power and destroying New York City and America.
