When the twin towers burned like torches until they sank into the belly of Manhattan, no one imagined that a Muslim could ever become mayor of the city that suffered that exterminating attack. But 24 years after the day ultra-Islamism killed thousands of Americans, New Yorkers voted en masse for a Mohammedan as mayor.
A year before the Muslim Sadiq Khan became mayor of London, in Paris Michel Houellebecq published “Submission”, the novel in which a party called the Muslim Brotherhood wins the election in France and begins its march towards the Islamization of that cradle of European secularism.
Nine years later, the Muslim Humza Yousaf was at the head of the Scottish government. Khan and Yousaf made reality what Houellebecq proposed as dystopian fiction. The nightmare that kept Oriana Fallaci awake at night. However, the rulers in real life did not do what President Mohammed Ben Abbes did in the pages of Submission: turn France into an Islamic theocracy.
Apparently, Islamist fundamentalism does not exist in Zohran Mamdani’s head. New York’s new mayor is a secular Muslim. And Donald Trump will target his smear campaign there, because calling him a “communist” did not help him prevent his triumph in The Big Apple.
In Mamdani’s speech there is a demodé democratic socialism. That radicalism channeled the majority desire to resist the plutocratic capitalism promoted by Trump, generating obscene levels of inequality between the middle classes and a tiny elite of mega-millionaires.
That immunized Mamdani from the label of communist that Trump applied to him, saying that New Yorkers would flee en masse to Miami as Cubans have done since 1960. The new mayor is not a communist. The problem, in any case, is that its social democratic recipe is outdated and has demagogic edges.
In the United States, a progressivism is necessary that confronts the advance of the plutocrats, but with more current and less ideological recipes.
Mamdani won the mayoralty of New York because it represented the loudest slap in the orange cheeks of the person who will promote him on a national scale if he carries out his threat to block the funds that correspond to that city.
From now on, evangelical conservatism will begin to describe Zohran Mamdani as an ultra-Islamist. By the way, being Muslim does not mean being ultra-Islamist, and professing Islam, which is a deeply conservative religion, rather brings one closer to the evangelical fundamentalism that supports Trump.
Mamdani is his absolute opposite because he is an immigrant and defines himself as a socialist. Trump has launched the largest hunt for immigrants in the history of the country and it was an immigrant who defeated him in none other than the city where he was born and began to amass his fortune.
He will never be forgiven and the campaign to destroy him would include showing himself as a “crusader” saving Christians in Africa. The first sign of what he was worried about was denouncing a “genocide” of Nigerian Christians. The jihadism of Boko Haram and a faction of the Islamic State commits massacres of Christians, but also massacres Muslim villages where, as in the other countries of the Sahel, a moderate and secularized Islam is professed.
It sounds strange that Trump would receive former Al Qaeda member Ahmed al Sharaa in the White House and lift sanctions on Syria, and react in this way with Nigeria. It is also strange for a president who is silent in the face of the massacres of Christians in Sudan, who suddenly talks about “entering with all the artillery” in Nigeria to attack jihadism and the secular government that fails to control these criminal militias.
Furthermore, it is not only totalitarian ultra-Islamism that massacres secular Christians and Muslims. There are also peasant bands of the Fulani ethnic group, which is a minority and gains land through violent banditry.
The main Nigerian ethnicities, Hausa (Muslims), Igbo (Christians) and Yoruba (Muslims and Christians), are victims of Fulani jihadism and banditry. Christians are not safe. But based on reports from evangelical organizations such as Open Doors, which claim that there are more Christian victims and that the Nigerian government allows it, Trump is trying to act like a medieval crusader who goes to holy war to protect worshipers attacked by Muslims. And that will be part of the propaganda against Mamdani, the “Saladin” who conquered the city that Al Qaeda had attacked.
Mamdani was not the only slap Trump received at the polls. The governorships of New Jersey and Virginia were won by Democratic candidates. The opposition also won the mayoralties of Cincinnati (where Vice President Vance’s brother was defeated), Detroit, Atlanta and Pittsburgh. But the president’s great defeat occurred in California, where a referendum pitted him against his biggest challenger until now: Governor Gavin Newsom.
However, New York is the epicenter of the rebellion. There, since the Republican candidate did not move the ammeter, Trump had to support Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat who committed two moral frauds: first, the sexual assault that made him resign before completing his second term as governor. Second, run as an independent after losing the primary to Zohran Mamdani.
Common sense indicates that whoever loses a party’s primaries is left out of the electoral process. And Cuomo failed to comply with that political ethic.
But to prevent the victory of a leftist immigrant, the immigrant-hunting president supported the son of a progressive hero: former governor Mario Cuomo.
Playing dirty against whoever he chose as an “enemy” in The Big Apple, he warned New Yorkers that if Mamdani won, the city would be left without the funds it should receive from the federal State. A threat that is credible in his mouth because, during Covid, when Cuomo was governor, Trump withheld funding from anti-pandemic programs.
Exhibiting that dark side, he failed to prevent Zohran Mamdani from winning. For this reason, from now on, he will be the target of a campaign that, if it fails to deport him as an “illegal” immigrant, will defame him as an ultra-Islamist and revive the memory of the twin towers sinking into the belly of Manhattan.
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