Twenty-five years ago, America was attacked on its own soil, a first since 1812. A new generation of voters never directly experienced the horrors of that once-in-a-lifetime experience, played out on TV screens like a Hollywood horror movie.
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Lessons have been learned in the years since. But not by all Americans, particularly many New Yorkers.
New York City, which began as a city of survivors, has become a city of apologists. The lessons of 9/11 have been buried under layers of political fashion and academic abstraction.
In their place, a new political order has risen, one that is less interested in defending the West than in condemning it. And organized Radical Islam has learned that it is not necessary to mount a frontal assault on our buildings or hijack our planes.
The most visible expression of this new order is the lightning-fast ascendance of Zohran Mamdani. Mamdani is not merely a mayor; he is an audacious symbol of an ideological movement that has outgrown New York and now threatens to reshape it.
His unprecedentedly expansive view of his role, combined with his globalism, results in issues disconnected from the everyday concerns of New Yorkers, intertwined with unrelated Islamist causes. Take distant Palestine. It was referenced during St. Patrick’s Day celebrations while Mamdani’s wife, invited to address a spiritual retreat in Corsica, framed the Virgin Mary as a “Palestinian woman giving birth under occupation,” a bold religious appropriation of Christian belief.
Mamdani’s commitment to Palestine reached new heights with his call to execute an ICC warrant arresting the democratically elected leader of Israel from the UN opening ceremonies. Trump put an end to this foreign policy incursion by emphatically stating “Benjamin Netanyahu will not be arrested, in any way, shape, or form, while in the United States of America.” Undeterred by jurisdictional realities, Mamdani took to TV and social media to brand Netanyahu a “war criminal,” while excluding real war criminals like Putin or Hafez Assad, demanding America respect international law.
His “Commissioner for International Affairs” scheduled a meeting with Iran’s ambassador to the UN, summarily aborted by the State Department, which had earlier voided a meeting with Colombia’s first socialist president. Given his foreign policy initiatives favoring America’s enemies, House Republicans submitted a request to the Justice Department to investigate Mamdani under the 1799 Logan Act, which bars individuals and local officials from independently making foreign policy.
Moreover, Mamdani has publicly and frequently referenced Islamic religion and culture. His inaugural speech celebrated halal cart vendors; his policy of equal city services for illegals was framed by the example set by the Prophet Mohammed’s hijra; his FIFA map of NYC ethnic enclaves featured Little Palestine; and Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia pro-Hamas organizer currently under a deportation order, was invited to celebrate the iftar at Gracie Mansion.
On the 250th anniversary of the United States, Mamdani delivered his own version of patriotism from behind George Washington’s desk at City Hall. He told newly naturalized citizens that they hold “the power to determine what America means.” But the America he described was not the one founded in 1776. It was an America of “calloused, dirt-streaked hands” exploited by oligarchs, of “masked agents” snatching undocumented neighbors, of a nation that “belongs only to those with the right accent or the right shade of skin.”
This was not a celebration. It was an indictment. His speech called for “righteous dissent,” for protest, for resistance. He framed patriotism as defiance rather than loyalty. He praised the city’s immigrant legacy while rejecting the longstanding vision of America as a nation of law, order, and tradition.
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Clearly, Mamdani avoids the cautious language of governance, instead delivering accusatory sermons. He frames American institutions as instruments of oppression, presenting the post-9/11 era as a period of profound fear and systemic bias for Muslim Americans, recounting the experience of his aunt afraid to wear her hijab in the subway. His rhetoric is not merely radical; it is contemptuous of the very foundations of the society he claims to represent. In his telling, the U.S. is not a flawed democracy to be improved; it is a system of domination to be dismantled. And 9/11 is not a tragedy to be remembered; it is a symbol of American hubris to be mocked. Little wonder that the Republican gubernatorial candidate in 2026 has called on New Yorkers to turn their backs on Mamdani at 9/11 memorial services, while New Yorker Giovanni Galante, whose wife was killed during the attacks, has gathered almost 100,000 signatures on a petition to ban the mayor from the commemorations.
What these activists fail to acknowledge is that it was Islam that once built its own settler-colonial empire that swept across three continents. Its 21st-century counterpart is not Israel but a new Islamist project in the West, driven by organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood, and accelerated by the flight of millions of Muslims from the Middle East into Europe and North America. This weaponized migration, combined with demographic dynamism, has all the hallmarks of a new form of settler colonialism with the imposition of Muslim culture and practice onto host populations much as Mamdani has done in NYC.
If this trajectory continues, the West will not merely be culturally transformed; it will be politically captured, governed by a coalition that defines its legitimacy not by the consent of the governed but by the intensity of its opposition to the very civilization that sheltered it
This is not a political debate. It is a civilizational confrontation.
The irony is unspeakable. The city that was the primary target of Islamist terrorism, whose skyline was shattered by the bodies of Americans falling from the sky, is now becoming the base for a political movement that shares more in common with the ideology of 9/11’s architects than with the values of those who died on that day.
Mamdani’s political vision is not just radical. It is a repudiation of the moral clarity that made 9/11 a defining moment in American history. It is a rejection of the idea that Western civilization is worth defending, or that the United States is anything other than a system of oppression.
Opposition is building and may explode well before his term ends. Staten Island Italians and other European immigrant groups excluded from his ‘ethnic enclaves map’ — along with pro-police factions — have heavily booed him. His administration is facing legal challenges from several groups: bodega owners planning to file a lawsuit, local landlords launching legal pushback against a city-endorsed rent freeze, and NYC homeowners suing over a messy pied-à-terre tax rollout that allegedly violated privacy laws by exposing 900,000 residents’ data and illegally forced primary residents to prove they do not own luxury second homes. Corporations are trimming workers, and almost a thousand local small to mid-size businesses have moved operations to the Sunbelt.
The question is not only whether Mamdani’s performative socialism delivers. The larger issue is whether New York’s experience should prompt a serious national debate about whether immigration, multiculturalism, and political activism can coexist with a shared commitment to constitutional government, public safety, religious pluralism, and the defense of democratic allies.
Will New York City wake up before it becomes, in all but name, the Islamic Republic of NYC?
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