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After Zohran Mamdani castigated Cuomo for not visiting a mosque, he showed him how it was done by visiting the Al-Taqwa Mosque and posing smilingly with its Jihadist Imam Siraj Wahhaj.
Mamdani, running to be the city’s first Muslim mayor, had already visited a great many mosques, some, like the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge, already notorious for its support for Hamas and cursing Christians and Jews, but had saved the worst mosque for last.
The progressive candidate openly embraced an imam who not only supported terrorism, but had called for the full application of Islamic Sharia law “If Allah says cut off their hand, you cut off their hand. If Allah says stone them to death” and the execution of gay people “kill them both” at a mosque whose spokesman had denounced women who wear perfume as “deviant”.
Mamdani was betting that the media would keep quiet or play defense for his campaign and he was right. The New York Times swiftly accused Cuomo of ‘Islamophobia’ and defended Wahhaj, claiming that the imam had told followers not to personally go out and kill gay people.
Seven years ago, the New York Times had cautiously noted that Wahhaj “has for decades been the imam of Masjid at-Taqwa, which several people connected to the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center either attended or visited around the time of the attack.” Now it’s a campaign stop.
Long before the Mamdani photo op, the Al-Taqwa Mosque had been a known intersection for Islamic terrorists including the Blind Sheikh at the center of the World Trade Center bombing and Farooque Ahmed who tried to help Al Qaeda blow up the D.C. Metro.
Mamdani, who had pledged to defund the NYPD, spoke at the mosque which had been under NYPD surveillance because, in the words of a legal filing by New York City, the mosque’s Imam was “named as an unindicted co-conspirator in a plot to bomb a number of New York City landmarks”, “illegal weapons trafficking by members of the mosque’s security team” and that “the assistant Imam had earmarked portions of over $200,000 raised in the mosque to… terrorist organizations.”
But what was grounds for NYPD surveillance a decade ago was the scene of a political rally by Mamdani complete with chants of “Allahu Akbar” as Mamdani doubled down on his support for Islamic terrorism. Then Mamdani posed for a grinning photo with Imam Siraj Wahhaj.
Imam Siraj Wahhaj had previously endorsed Mamdani and donated to his campaign, but now the mayoral candidate had decided to publicly embrace an imam who had championed the most brutal forms of Islamic sharia law, endorsed terrorism and called for a takeover of America.
“If you get involved in politics, you have to be very careful that your leader is for Allah. You don’t get involved in politics because it’s the American thing to do,” Imam Wahhaj had preached. “You get involved in politics because politics are a weapon to use in the cause of Islam.”
“Wherever you came from, you came to America. And you came for one reason—for one reason only—to establish Allah’s deen,” Wahhaj had told Muslims and predicted that, “democracy will crumble, and there will be nothing, and the only thing that will remain will be Islam.”
“If 6-8 million Muslims unite in America, the country will come to us,” he predicted.
Mamdani’s mayoral campaign is in many ways the fulfillment of Wahhaj’s vision of an Islamic takeover. And the connection between Mamdani and Wahhaj goes deeper than one event.
Before Mamdani carpetbagged his way to Queens to displace a local councilwoman in a district being settled by fellow Pakistani and Bangladeshi ‘Indian’ Muslims, he got his start in politics as a board member of the Muslim Democratic Club of New York (MDCNY). MDCNY had been co-founded by Linda Sarsour, who recently bragged, “I would be honored to die a martyr”, and who had described Wahhaj as her “a mentor” and “my favorite person in the room.”
When Mamdani became a board member at MDCNY, he joined a board that included not only Sarsour, but her close friend, Faiza Ali, the former ‘Community Affairs Director’ for CAIR, which recently came out in defense of Wahhaj, and which has endorsed the Hamas attacks of Oct 7, Debbie Almontaser, whose “Intifada NYC” ended her previous effort to create a Muslim public school and Aliya Latif, whose brother Imam Khalid Latif had hailed Wahhaj as his hero.
Imam Khalid Latif and Sarsour recently fronted an MDCNY event at the ‘Middle Church’ on championing Mamdani’s campaign. But Imam Latif’s biggest moment in the spotlight came after the Islamic terrorist attack at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando when it turned out that the killer had joined a trip led by Latif to Mecca after which the future shooter was flagged by the FBI.
Key MDCNY figures had backed the lawsuits against the NYPD that had dismantled its ability to monitor Islamic terror mosques like Al-Taqwa and paved the way for future terrorist attacks.
But, as Sirraj Wahhaj had preached, “I will never ever tell people, ‘don’t be violent, that is not the Islamic way.’ The violence has to be selected.” The selected violence over the years had included members of the Al-Taqwa mosque’s security team styling themselves “Jihad warriors” and “Jihad assassins”. One of those participants, Farooque Ahmed, was sentenced to 23 years in prison for plotting an attack on a rail station in Arlington, Virginia, when he scouted the area and then handed over his findings to what he believed was an Al-Qaeda terrorist, advising him to plant the bombs during the commute to maximize casualties.
More recently, Wahhaj’s son and family members were busted running a terrorist training camp for kids in New Mexico. The targets were to be “military, law enforcement, and financial institutions.” But violence has always surrounded Wahhaj without ever denting his influence.
Two years before the World Trade Center bombing, Rep. Nick Rahall made Imam Wahhaj the first Muslim to recite a prayer in Congress. Wahhaj had invited the Blind Sheikh, at the center of the terror plots in the city to speak at his mosque and defended him in court.
Then, two years after 9/11, the Brooklyn borough president created Imam Sirraj Wahhaj Day.
Mamdani’s deliberate normalization of Wahhaj was part of an ongoing project by the Islamist groups like MDCNY and CAIR to not just normalize the man, but what he really stands for.
“If only Muslims were clever politically, they could take over the United States and replace its constitutional government with a caliphate,” Wahhaj had advised and Mamdani is clever.
“I pray one day, Inshallah, Allah will bless us to raise an army and I’m serious about this. We were very close, recently. We had made intention to raise an army of 10,000 men in NY City. Muslim men to go fight…And the day is going to come, when that happens,” he preached.
That day is now here.
