[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]
There have been over 1,600 rapes, 2,000 sexual assaults with penetration and over 4,300 sex crimes as part of a staggering wave of assaults so far this year in New York City.
Total rapes were up 42% in just the past week, and as an exclusive FPM+ report titled ‘New Rape City’ revealed, are up as high as 300% in some parts of the city. And it’s getting worse.
In the middle of this shocking wave of sexual assaults, Zohran Mamdani, the socialist candidate currently ahead in the mayoral election, has offered proposals tailor-made to sex offenders.
Critics had already warned that Mamdani’s pro-crime proposals, including having social workers rather than cops respond to domestic violence calls, will enable further violence against women.
Mamdani’s proposal to free half of the criminals being held at Riker’s Island that called for exempting from prison those sex predators charged with sexual misconduct, forcible touching, as well as sexual abuse in the second and third degrees, and early release for sex abusers.
Additional details in the Mamdani endorsed proposals sought to release larger numbers of violent felons including rapists to pour fuel on the city’s already critical sexual assault crisis.
Why does Zohran Mamdani want to enable rapists, predators and domestic abusers?
Even in politics, Zohran Mamdani has a history of relationships with sex predators including those who prey on minors. In 2021, Mamdani hailed Matthew Thomas, a Democratic Socialists of America member who served as his Communications Director, who six years earlier had been charged for “sexual solicitation of a child” alongside a deputy to Joe Biden’s son.
Mamdani tweeted that Thomas “was a big part of why we won.”
And long before he ran for public office, Mamdani told a revealing story about the protests against the Muslim Brotherhood terror regime in Egypt. “Many women at the protest, and at protests in the days ahead,” he wrote in his college paper “had to contend with the very real threat of sexual harassment and assault, especially at night” but while he considered volunteering, he decided that “the last thing Egyptians needed was a well-meaning foreigner’s assistance.” The sexual assaults were often more like gang rapes and one of the victims was Lara Logan, then a mainstream media correspondent, but Mamdani didn’t want to get involved.
While Mamdani decided he didn’t want to ‘interfere’ to protect anti-Brotherhood protesters, he described increasingly being identified by others with the Muslim Brotherhood ruling movement. The same movement that created Hamas, played a major role in Al Qaeda and dominates Islamist movements, including the ones enabling his candidacy, in the United States.It’s the same movement on whose behalf he rallied protesters after the Oct 7 attacks. Mamdani refuses to condemn Hamas, including its sexual assaults, and won’t even call on it to disarm.
Egypt has a sexual harassment rate in the high 90s and high rates of violence against women. Mamdani seems all too comfortable with enabling the growth of a similar culture here even while phrasing the transformation in the familiar terms of social justice discourse.
When Zohran Mamdani didn’t want to interfere with Muslim gang rapes in Egypt or domestic violence in New York City (a behavior that Islam mandates) and wants to free sex offenders from custody, it’s always phrased as if the perpetrators, Egyptian rapists, Muslim wife-beaters or illegal alien sex predators, are the victims of an unfair system. But what’s really unfair is that women, girls and other victims can’t count on law enforcement to protect them.
And that’s because pro-crime radicals like Mamdani always side with the perpetrators.
“A key reason we have to make the bus free is that it reduces assaults on bus drivers,” Zohran Mamdani recently suggested. How would Mamdani like to reduce assaults on women?
Mamdani has failed to address New York City’s rising sexual assault crisis, but if he did, it would be invariably in the language of ‘restorative justice’ which always asks us to understand the point of view of the criminal, not the victim, whether it’s a bus driver or a rape victim.
An article in the same publication from which Mamdani garnered his proposal to free half the criminals in New York City’s most notorious prison proposed documenting the “complex relationships between crime victims and the individuals who caused them harm” and seeking “wherever possible, support reparative work such as restitution or mediation” between the victim and her attacker.
When Zohran Mamdani first ran for office, he championed “ restorative justice approaches” like these in which attackers, instead of going to prison, go to a chat session with a therapist and perhaps the victim.
At a pro-Hamas rally, Zohran Mamdani quoted Mariame Kaba. As he does so often. Kaba is known as the “godmother of police defunding” who wrote a New York Times op-ed headlined, “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police” and proposed getting rid of prisons entirely.
As New York City suffers under a wave of sexual assaults, the personal experience of applying restorative justice to rape by the activist whom Mamdani cites almost more than any other is instructive as to what the women and girls of the city could expect under his idea of justice.
When a community organzier in a BLM-style group assaulted a sexual assault educator after telling her that “sexual violence prevention was something he was really passionate about”, Mariame Kaba was brought in to lead a “restorative process” to show how it would work.
And predictably the rapist went on raping.
“In the coming months and years after our process ended, other people came forward to share their own stories of sexual harm involving Malcolm,” Kaba admitted.
“After a year and a half long accountability process, Malcolm made the choice to continue raping Black women,” his victim complained. “The process had many goals, but the main hope was that at the very least Malcolm wouldn’t rape anyone else.”
But that’s how ‘restorative justice’ works. Or doesn’t. Depending on your point of view.
New York City, already suffering under a wave of sexual assaults due to pro-crime legislation which frees sex offenders to continue offending, would see the situation worsen a good deal.
And while women and girls are the leading targets, they would not be the only ones.
Mohammed Azeem called a man on a Manhattan subway train “cute” before sexually assaulting him. The obese Muslim predator taunted police and reporters as he was taken away. He had been previously charged with another form of sexual misconduct on public transportation.
Mohammed is currently being held at Riker’s Island on charges of rape and sexual abuse, but if Mamdani has his way, he may soon be free.
