New York City’s likely next mayor, Zohran Mamdani, has not infrequently blamed not only patriots, but also his fellow leftists for “racist” and “Islamophobic” attacks against him. As evidence of how he was a victim of attacks on his race and religion, his campaign, according to Gothamist, “pointed to a recent political flyer proposed by a pro-Cuomo super PAC that darkened and lengthened Mamdani’s beard.”
Those who didn’t see the original picture and the way it was rendered on the Cuomo flyer might have gotten the impression that Cuomo’s people had made Mamdani look like Osama bin Laden. In reality, the photo on the flyer was standard stuff for campaign material of this kind: Mamdani was cast in harsh light and shadow, making him look vaguely menacing despite the benign half-smile on his face. Innumerable other candidates had gotten the same treatment on their opponents’ flyers and not immediately charged “racism” and “Islamophobia.”
Mamdani posted the original photo of himself with the version from the Cuomo flyer on X, with the comment: “Andrew Cuomo is afraid he’ll lose, so his donors want you to fear me. His SuperPAC just sent out a mailer that artificially lengthened and darkened my beard. This is blatant Islamophobia—the kind of racism that explains why MAGA billionaires support his campaign.”
The Cuomo flyer clearly enraged Mamdani, for he later added another statement: “This wasn’t an accident. Thickening and darkening my beard — playing into racist tropes — was meant to make me look threatening, because Andrew Cuomo and the donors propping up his flailing campaign are scared.”
The idea that New Yorkers, of all people, would be susceptible to “racist tropes” and less likely to vote for someone who had a longer and darker beard than Mamdani actually had was straight out of the most paranoid far-left perspective on America, and Cuomo spokesman Rich Azzopardi was not impressed. “He’s called the governor every dirty name in the book,” Azzopardi said of Mamdani, “and we’ve never complained about it. To conflate that with the actual threat of political violence that we’ve [experienced] across the country is craven and disingenuous.”
Indeed. But this was Zohran Mamdani, and he appeared determined to cast his opponents as offended far more by his race and religion than by his Marxist policies that would be catastrophic for New York City.
“It’s the notion of othering that is at the core of all of this language, these threats,” Mamdani claimed. “They are bound together by a notion that these are outsiders and they do not deserve to be here and definitely do not belong here.” And the idea of leveling this charge was to cause left-leaning New Yorkers to decide to vote to Mamdani in order to register their conviction that racism and xenophobia were evil and that yes, he certainly did belong here.
Mamdani also claimed that he was getting threats: “I woke up yesterday to a message that said, ‘The only good Muslim is a dead Muslim.’ This is what I see and read quite regularly.” His campaign says he received a phone message in which the caller said: “Hey Zohran, you should go back to f**king Uganda, before I shoot you in the head and your whole family too. You piece of s**t Muslims don’t belong here.”
When President Donald Trump called Mamdani a “Communist lunatic,” Mamdani implied that Trump’s real motive was racism and xenophobia: “I have already had to start to get used to the fact that the president will talk about how I look, how I sound, where I’m from, who I am, ultimately, because he wants to distract from what I’m fighting for.” Yet Trump hadn’t said a word about how he looked or sounded. Mamdani, a canny campaigner, simply knew that such charges would play well with his leftist base. If the truth contradicted what he claimed, so much the worse for the truth.
Mamdani has also claimed that the controversy over his refusal to condemn the call to kill Jews worldwide, “Globalize the Intifada,” was really all about people being suspicious of him because he was a Muslim: “And as a Muslim man who grew up post-9/11, I’m all too familiar in the way in which Arabic words can be twisted, can be distorted, can be used to justify any kind of meaning.” He has complained that part of the “very sad burden of what it means to be the first Muslim candidate to run for mayor, is to deal with dehumanizing language.”
Why, the poor baby! He is such a stellar victim, we must elect him mayor immediately!
