Is New York City's mayor connected to the Iranian regime?
Zohran Mamdani's mosque ties, political alliances, and public actions raise serious questions.
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This is a guest essay by Yusuf Roso, a Turkish Jew who moved to the United States.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
Born and raised in Turkey, I watched, in real time, what happens when Thirdworldist Islamists take over a country that was trying — imperfectly, reluctantly — to be a secular democracy.
Having recently moved to the United States, I never thought I would have to watch the same West-hating, Thirdworldist Islamist movements from my birth country infiltrate my chosen home in America. Yet here they are, being welcomed enthusiastically and uncritically by people who call themselves progressives.
The man who crystallizes this danger is Zohran Mamdani, the new mayor of New York City.
Mamdani’s political method follows a recognizable pattern: Use social justice language to win local elections, build institutional power quietly, then scale to the national level and reshape the country’s culture and institutions from within. This is not speculation; it is the documented strategy of both the Muslim Brotherhood and the Thirdworldist movements that provide it cover — and it has a track record.
We have seen it work before. We have seen where it ends. I have seen where it ends.
In 1994, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan became mayor of Istanbul. In 1996, he said: “Democracy is like a tram. You ride it until you arrive at your destination, then you step off.”
In 2001, he co-founded the Justice and Development Party — presented as reformed, moderate Islamism, a reasonable, pragmatic party that secular liberals could support. They did support it. In 2002, it won a national majority.
Post-2016, once power was consolidated after a failed coup, the transformation was complete. Turkey, formerly a model ally of Israel and the United States, became an Islamist mafia state that supplies arms to al-Nusra (a Sunni Islamist organization that fought against Bashar al-Assad’s regime forces in the Syrian Civil War) and Ahrar al-Sham (a major Syrian Salafist rebel group founded to fight Assad’s regime as well), protects Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (a dominant Syrian jihadist militant group), deploys Syrian mercenaries to support Libya’s Muslim Brotherhood-linked government, and uses religious networks as instruments of foreign policy.
The tram arrived. Erdoğan stepped off.
Mamdani is not Erdoğan, and America is not Turkey. But Mamdani is drawing from the same ideological well, running the same deceitful infiltration strategy on American soil, in American institutions. Both men presented themselves as reasonable, compassionate, pro-community. Both use the mechanisms of democracy to pursue goals that are fundamentally opposed to Western civilization.
Erdoğan wrapped his program in economic pragmatism and Muslim identity politics. Mamdani wraps his in anti-racism and postcolonial theory. The packaging differs, but the trajectory does not. The danger is not that America becomes a caliphate; the danger is that its culture, its institutions, its political language become Thirdworldist slop: the same resentment-soaked, anti-Western grievance culture that hollowed out every society it captured from Istanbul to Cairo to Algiers.
Mamdani is not an exception; he is a harbinger. And he is not only a Thirdworldist. He is Thirdworldism with an Islamist engine — the same grievance culture as his progressive allies, but powered by a 1,400-year civilizational project with its own strategy, its own institutions, and its own endgame. Thirdworldism opens the door. Islamism walks through it.
At his February 6th Interfaith Breakfast, Mamdani said: “I consider my own faith, Islam, a religion built upon a narrative of migration.” He invoked the Hijrah — the Prophet Muhammad’s migration from Mecca to Medina — and cited Qur’an 16:41 and the hadith of Islam returning as “strange.” He framed it as a story about welcoming strangers.
It is not. The Hijrah was the founding act of Islamic political power. From Medina, Muhammad built the first Islamic state, then launched the conquests and colonization project that ultimately destroyed the Christian civilizations of Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Turkey, and North Africa. Antioch was one of the five original patriarchs of the early church. Damascus is where Paul was converted. Alexandria was the intellectual center of early Christianity and home to the Coptic Church.
These are not ancient abstractions; they are the graves of civilizations that once thrived and were systematically extinguished.
Jewish communities that had existed for millennia in those lands are gone. The Yazidis are victims of ongoing genocide. Coptic Christians in Egypt are practically dhimmis and live in fear. This is what the Hijrah inaugurated. It is not an innocent metaphor, and invoking it at an official mayoral breakfast is not an innocent act.
On February 20th, Mamdani attended Friday prayers at Al-Khoei Islamic Center. The center is tied to the Alavi Foundation, an Iranian front organization whose assets were seized by the U.S. government for sanctions violations and money laundering. Its leaders have been convicted of obstruction and investigated for weapons deals. The center’s network links to Hezbollah financiers who funneled cash through counterfeit goods and shell rentals.
Mamdani could have chosen any mosque in New York City. He chose the one connected to the Iranian regime — a regime that, just weeks earlier, was executing its own citizens in one of the worst campaigns of state terror in half a century. This is the regime whose network runs the mosque Mamdani chose. That is not a quiet nod; it is a declaration.
The Muslim Brotherhood’s 1982 document, “The Project,” lays out a 100-year strategy for global Islamic consolidation through patient infiltration of democratic institutions. The 1991 Explanatory Memorandum, discovered by the FBI, is even more explicit: It calls for “eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within,” forming tactical coalitions with progressive movements, and using civil institutions — NGOs, academic networks, media — as instruments of what it calls “civilizational jihad.”
Framed through the lens of civilizational jihad, Mamdani’s rhetoric, policies and appointments take a whole new meaning. Notice how Mamdani talks about America. The vocabulary is: racism, settler colonialism, imperialism. These words appear consistently and with intent. What is absent is any acknowledgment of what America actually is — the country that defeated Nazism, fought Soviet communism, built the world’s longest-running constitutional republic, and lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty by giving the world modern capitalism.
This is not critique; it is contempt and Thirdworldist West-hatred I grew up with, dressed in the language of justice. To add insult to injury, Mamdani appointed Ramzi Kassem, who defended al-Qaeda operative Ahmed al-Darbi, as his Chief Counsel. The lawyer that defended the terrorists of the organization that murdered 2,977 Americans on September 11th in New York City is now chief counsel of the city’s mayor.
None of this would be possible without the Thirdworldist Left, which has made itself the willing vehicle for Islamist entry into American institutions. Within hours of October 7th — before Israel had fired a single shot in response — student groups at America’s most prestigious universities held Israel “entirely responsible” for the massacre of its own citizens. Faculty signed open letters contextualizing the mass murder, rape, torture, and kidnapping of civilians (including women and children) as “resistance.” Campus encampments spread across the country.
The operating system of the American elite is not human rights; it is Thirdworldism. Within that framework, the Islamic Republic — as an anti-Western force — is on the protected side of the ledger. Its victims do not register. That framework now operates not just in universities, but also in newsrooms, law firms, human rights organizations, and the highest levels of government — and the possessed do not know they are possessed. Into this vacuum walks a movement with a 1,400-year-old answer to every question the West has stopped asking. The alliance is tactical on one side only.
The ideologically possessed do not see this. Iran’s revolutionaries did not see it in 1979. Ruhollah Khomeini allied with Marxist groups to overthrow the Shah. Once power was secured, he arrested, tortured, and executed his former allies. The useful idiots were used, and then they were eliminated. The Thirdworldist Left believes it is using Islamism to advance its goals. It is being used. It has always been used.
So, when a dhimmi refusenik like me — who witnessed the Thirdworldist and Islamist takeover of his home country — hears all this: The Hijrah invoked at an official breakfast, Friday prayers at an Islamic Republic connected mosque, defenders of mass murderers appointed to City Hall — I hear two things, and both are alarming.
The first is the theatrical staging of victimhood by a man of extraordinary privilege — a son of a Columbia University professor and a celebrated filmmaker, educated at Bowdoin College in Maine, embedded in every elite network in New York — performing the part of the oppressed outsider, extracting moral authority from an audience too credulous or too intimidated to notice the gap between the performer and the role.
The second is what runs beneath the performance: a 1,400-year-old conquest narrative laundered through the vocabulary of diversity and inclusion. The Thirdworldist performance is how he moves through American institutions. The Islamist project is where he is taking them. I have seen where both lead.
Today, secular democratic Turkey is no more. The Jewish and Christian communities that once defined the Middle East — the birthplace of Judaism and Christianity, the cradle of Western civilization itself — are gone. Destroyed, expelled, or reduced to dhimmitude. The one exception is Israel, the only successful resistance to this 1,400-year project, and it is precisely what Mamdani and his movement hate most.
These are not abstract prescriptions for me. I did not come to America to watch this happen again. I escaped it. I am a newly minted American and I love this country with a specificity that only someone who has seen the alternative can fully feel. Most Westerners have not seen what I have seen, and I do not believe most of them understand the gravity of what is unfolding. The threat is real, it is patient, and it does not stop on its own.
What Westerners must understand is that what they inherited is not an Englightenment-era experiment. It is the product of a 3,000-year fight, from Jerusalem to Athens to Philadelphia, over a single question: Can human beings govern themselves without a master?
Nearly every civilization in history answered no. The West is the one that fought its way to yes. That answer is an anomaly. It has always been an anomaly. Every generation that inherited it had to defend it against new tyrants speaking new languages of domination.
The men and women who built and defended this civilization, from the ancient world through the beaches of Normandy to the skies of Tehran, did not leave it to us so we could hand it over in exchange for the comfort of not being called a bigot, or for the cheap absolution of a guilt we were taught to feel for belonging to the only civilization that ever questioned its own sins. Their sacrifices bought us the chance to fight this battle with words, with votes, with truth — rather than with blood. That chance is not permanent.
If we waste it, the next generation will not have it.
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An excellent and expository post. Your analysis is correct in that it's unfolding as I write this. Indeed it's been unfolding for decades but is now supercharged. The West is weak and divided. The left has grown exponentially in the West and has taken over the country I was born in and live. I fear that Islam will prevail in the West - that's the plan as written and with time and money will eventually prevail.
Excellent encapsulation. Thank you. How to wake up the younger people/the useful idiots!?