As Gotham’s Democratic mayoral candidate maintained a victimhood closing pitch over Islamism, he faulted propaganda over extremism concerns while making light about a food regulation.
(Video Credit: The Daily Show)
If polling proves accurate, New York City is one week away from electing New York State Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, a proud socialist and perceived Islamunist (Islamist communist), as only the fifth person to serve as mayor since September 11, 2001.
Little more than 24 years after the terror attack that took the lives of 2,977 people and counting, the lawmaker who only days earlier had embraced Siraj Wahhaj, radical imam and unindicted co-conspirator of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, acted as though public concern was about an alleged plan to mandate halal food.
“I don’t begrudge New Yorkers who are skeptical because they’ve also lived through tens of millions of dollars of commercials telling them to fear me,” Mamdani told host Jon Stewart on Monday’s installment of “The Daily Show.”
Without explaining what image he was talking about, the candidate running against disgraced former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) and Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa (R) went on, “You know, they have lived through waking up every morning and seeing a photo of me and just feeling, ‘Oh my God,’ because the language that’s written around me is as if I am a threat to the city that they love. And so when I meet with them, just the mere fact that I don’t strangle them within 30 seconds is often a surprise, and then I think it’s an opportunity where, you know, I both can tell them the things that I will do and the things that I won’t do, right?”
“I will freeze the rent, I won’t defund the police. I will make buses fast and free, I won’t decriminalize misdemeanors. I will deliver universal childcare, I won’t require everyone to eat halal food,” claimed Mamdani who’d long campaigned on ensuring more halal vendors were given licenses to operate in the city and previously posted “#DefundTheNYPD” amid allegations that the police force is “racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety.”
We don’t need an investigation to know that the NYPD is racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety.
What we need is to #DefundTheNYPD.
But your deal with @NYCMayor uses budget tricks to keep as many cops as possible on the beat.
NO to fake cuts – defund the police. https://t.co/2RCXU8heg2
— Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@ZohranKMamdani) June 29, 2020
“You just made news,” snarked Stewart as the guest continued, “This is literally in a push poll to New Yorkers saying that I’m going to make halal mandatory, and it’s like, if you do want to eat halal, like go to 34th Avenue and Steinway, go to Mahmouds. But I’m not gonna force you to go there.”
Further making light, the host went on, “You wouldn’t force them, but you would describe it in such delicious terms that people would have a hard time resisting that,” before the candidate added of the Queens establishment, “If they wanted chicken and rice, there would only be one place.”
The interview came in the wake of Mamdani deflecting from the reality that the story he’d told about an aunt who’d been afraid to ride the subway after 9/11 for fear of being targeted over wearing a hijab had been fabricated. As many pointed out that the politician’s only known aunt neither wore a hijab nor was in the United States to ride the subway, he suggested he’d actually been talking about a cousin of his father and linked detraction to the purported Islamophobia he’d been addressing with the tale.
Native of Brooklyn, NY, Kevin Haggerty is a graduate of Hunter College where he studied Cultural Anthropology and Geography. An avid reader and truth seeker, he currently resides in Texas with his wife and their dog and, when he isn't researching current events and their impacts, you'll find him spending time with friends and family or working on his next novel.
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