By Melanie Phillips
The victory of New York state assemblyman Zohran Mamdani in the New York City mayoral election was long heralded by the opinion polls. Yet its effect upon America threatens to be nothing less than seismic.
It’s not just that Mamdani may wreck the city through the expected multiple failures of his infantile magic money-tree wish list. It’s not just that his antisemitism and hatred of Israel make him a potential threat to the city’s Jewish community.
More importantly, what’s happened is a major strategic victory for the Islamic world in its war against the West. Muslim activists are ecstatic that Mamdani has conquered New York—the city with the largest number of Jews outside Israel—for Islam.
They’re linking this directly to the onslaught that they’ve mounted against the Jewish world for the past two years by weaponizing Israel’s war of self-defense against Hamas in Gaza. Qatari journalists, reports MEMRI, have exulted that Mamdani’s victory was the outcome of the terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Jaber Al-Harmi, the editor of the Qatari state daily Al-Sharq, wrote that New York was “the capital of the Zionist lobby” as the largest stronghold of the Jewish community in the United States. “Two years ago,” he wrote, “no one could have imagined such a major shift against the Zionist narrative. The steadfastness and resistance of our people in Gaza have turned the tables on the Zionists and exposed their colonialist settlement project to the entire world.”
Mamdani’s victory has put rocket fuel behind the already delirious feeling among Muslim radicals that they are now on the cusp of conquering the West for Islam.
This euphoria was triggered by the fact that on Oct. 7, the Hamas-led forces had been able to do what had previously been thought impossible—breach Israel’s apparently impregnable fortress.
The ensuing demonstrations on the streets and campuses of Western cities—with intimidation and violence towards Jews, chants for their murder, and calls to destroy Israel and America, producing next to no pushback by the police or other authorities—weren’t just protests against Israel or demands to “Free Palestine.” They were demonstrations of raw Islamic power over the bamboozled and supine West.
That campaign was organized by a global alliance between Islamists and the hard left. A similar alliance has brought Mamdani to power.
Palestinian American activist Linda Sarsour has said that a fund controlled by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) was Mamdani’s largest institutional donor. CAIR, which was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in a 2007 terrorist-funding case that linked it to Hamas, is a Muslim Brotherhood outfit.
The Muslim Brotherhood’s agenda is to conquer the West for Islam. Its strategy includes infiltrating democratic institutions in order to subvert them. And now, its biggest prize by far is to have captured the mayoralty of New York, America’s commercial and cultural heart.
Mamdani achieved this by concealing what he is. A Shia Muslim who is reportedly driven by hatred of Jews and an obsession with “Palestine,” he works for the destruction of Israel and has refused to condemn chants of “globalize the intifada,” the call for the murder of Jews around the world.
In his victory speech, his mask slipped. He did not project himself as a unifier of the city he now leads. He did not display the smiley charm and charisma that had wowed so many New Yorkers. Instead, he made an angry, divisive speech.
He declared that New York was now “a city where more than a million Muslims know that they belong … in the halls of power.” And he also threatened that any criticism of the Islamic world, which he termed Islamophobia, would now not be allowed.
At a post-election rally in Times Square, where hundreds of Muslims prostrated themselves in prayer to the chants of Allahu akhbar! (“God is great!”), he declared that New York was “a city of immigrants, powered by immigrants, and as of tonight, led by an immigrant.” Of the city’s white-skinned, native residents, he made no mention.
The city’s Muslims responded to his triumph by jubilantly stating, “Now this is our time,” calling for Sharia law to start and hailing an “Islamic caliphate of New York.”
The prospect of Mamdani now controlling the city’s police and what children are to be taught in school chills the blood.
But New York is by no means the only place in America where Islamization is making important inroads. The Palestinian Arab-American influencer Abdul Eyad celebrated Mamdani’s victory by telling Israelis in New York to pack their bags and get out. He said that they should go to Poland or Cyprus, but not to “Palestine,” where they would be humiliated and removed.
This charming individual appeared to be speaking from Plano, Texas. This city hosts the East Plano Islamic Center (EPIC), a restricted Islamic community governed by Sharia law that has existed for nearly 12 years and comprises a mega-mosque, homes restricted to Muslim purchasers, Islamic schools, an Islamic medical clinic and Islamic businesses.
The community’s resident scholar, Yasir Qadh, has declared democracy incompatible with Islam, refused to condemn terrorist groups like Hamas, and preached that Islamic law—not Western governance—should dictate every aspect of life. Now he is leading a coordinated effort to Islamize Texas, using EPIC as the nucleus of a growing network of Islamic enclaves designed to operate outside the framework of U.S. law.
According to the RAIR Foundation, which campaigns against Islamization in America, plans are in the works to expand EPIC to create EPIC City, a 402-acre residential and commercial enclave that will include more than 1,000 homes and community provisions structured to function within an Islamic legal and social framework.
At a public inquiry into this development last April, Lt (Rtd) Douglas Deaton, an expert in SWAT tactics and urban threat analysis, gave evidence based on his experience with the Plano police department.
One of the first houses in EPIC, he said, had been positioned with a clear view of some of the police department’s most sensitive tactical assets. “That house has all the hallmarks of a fortress and a command post,” he said. “The rear of the house looks a lot like an observation post and a shooting platform.”
The original owner of that house, says RAIR, is listed in public records as Junaid Din, a prominent fundraiser for EPIC and a co-founder of the Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research based in the city of Irving, Texas, which promotes the integration of Sharia law into Western societies. Its founder and chairman, Omar Suleiman, described Zionists in 2014 as “the enemies of God, His messengers, sincere followers of all religions and humanity as a whole.”
The EPIC development is part of a calculated, long-term political strategy to carve out a separate, parallel society where Islamic law—not American values—dictates daily life. The jaw-dropping thing is that this is happening not in Dearborn, Mich., a long-standing Somali Islamic stronghold (which is troubling enough), but in the state of Texas, the standard-bearer of robust American Christianity.
That, of course, is precisely the point. The choice of Texas in which to develop this openly defiant, parallel Islamic society is not random. It’s strategic.
Islamic jihadis draw their strength from the symbolism of their conquests, which inspires their own forces and demoralizes their victims. The Twin Towers, Texas, now New York— the Islamists are steadily destroying these icons to conquer America.
When nearly 3,000 New Yorkers were murdered on Sept. 11, 2001, the city came together against the threat of jihadi Islam. Now, in November 2025, Islam has captured New York through a civilizational jihad few Americans acknowledge or understand.
Americans have naively believed that Islamization is confined to Britain and Europe. They’ve failed to see how it is advancing in America as well.
Shockingly, some 30% of New York Jews voted for Mamdani. They need to rip off their liberal blinders and wake up. The Trump administration must wake up, too. This is about more than one upstart revolutionary. America is the frog in the Islamist pot that’s being slowly boiled alive. JNS
{Matzav.com}
