New York: New York City's mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has been caught up in controversies one after another over his old social media posts and his visit to a Brooklyn mosque during the Mayoral campaign trail. His old social media posts include showing the middle finger to a statue of Christopher Columbus in Astoria and a series of tweets in which he appears to be defending US cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who was linked to the terrorist group al-Qaida. He had also visited a Brooklyn mosque whose cleric had last year called for the “annihilation of Israel" and praised Hamas. While Mamdani continues to be the target of Republicans, including United States President Donald Trump, the new controversy around his social media activities has brought a wave of reactions against him.
In a tweet from June 2020 that resurfaced on X after Mamdani's victory, he was seen showing a middle finger to Christopher Columbus in Astoria and had written, "Take it down", calling for the removal of the statue. He was running for the state office at that time. A report on the Times of India quoted Angelo Vivolo, the president of Columbus Heritage Coalition, saying that he will never support Mamdani. "We will defend Columbus Day and Columbus statues," he said. As per the report, left-wing politicians tend to target Columbus statues and Columbus Day because of how the explorer treated Native Americans when he sailed to North America.
In yet another post from 2015 that has resurfaced now, Mamdani shared an article about the FBI’s surveillance of Anwar al-Awlaki, a US-born cleric later linked to the terror group al-Qaida and wrote on X (then Twitter), “Why no proper interrogation of what it means for the FBI to have conducted an extensive survey into Awlaki's private life?” In another post, he said, “How could Awlaki have ever trusted the FBI to not release surveillance, especially if he continued to critique the state? Why no further discussion of how Awlaki's knowledge of surveillance eventually led him to al-Qaeda? Or what does that say about the efficacy of surveillance?”
Amid controversy over his old social media posts, his recent visit to the Brooklyn mosque has also raised questions. In a video from inside the mosque, Mamdani can be seen standing beside cleric Sheikh Muhammad Al-Barr at the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge.
“It was a privilege to join Jummah prayers at the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge today,” Mamdani captioned a post on January 17 this year. The post went viral as it was made five months after Al-Barr in a sermon at the same mosque, was heard appealing God to “liberate Palestine from the occupiers and the plunderers” and “annihilate” the occupiers.
