Zohran Mamdani wouldn’t mock his own faith

Zohran Mamdani is defensive about his faith and has maintained that his culture is “not a costume.” Why then, New Yorkers might wonder, does he not extend this courtesy to others?

In December, he shared an Indian dance video about Hanukkah by comedy group the Geeta Brothers who performed behind a menorah, spinning dreidels, while singing Hey Hanukkah. The Punjabi track features lyrics: tera dreidel bara ghummay (your dreidel spins a lot), taazi roti kosher howay (let’s have fresh kosher bread), with a repeated chorus of mombatiyan, which means candles.

Mamdani also wished his followers a merry Christmas using a video for the Geeta Brothers’ Jingle Bells track where the group woos a woman. The parody group said they had never celebrated Christmas and thought presenting Christmas carols and songs in Punjabi style was “really, really funny.”

It is hard to imagine Mamdani commemorating Islamic festivals in similar fashion. Given that Christians celebrate Christmas as the birth of Jesus Christ, would he, for instance, use bhangra parodies to celebrate the birthday of Islam’s Prophet Mohammed this September?

It is almost poetic that his Hanukkah tweet has surfaced around Ashura, a day of significance in Mamdani’s Shia sect of Islam. Followers commemorate the Battle of Karbala, and the killing of Hussain, the grandson of the Prophet Mohammed, paying tribute to his resistance against injustice and oppression. Hanukkah too is a commemoration of the fight against oppression and the rededication of the Second Temple in Jerusalem. Mamdani wouldn’t need to be told that any parody on Hussain or Mohammed would make it impossible for him to return to public life, let alone run to become the mayor of the largest city in America.

In many ways, these double standards are a reflection of the global left’s identity politics playbook, where Muslims – including those as privileged as Mamdani – are given a free pass to castigate and mock other communities without any self-reflection. On the flipside, holding Muslims and Islam to the same standard as others can be deemed “Islamophobic” by the left, with even Muslim public figures shielded from much of the scrutiny that is sweepingly shelved under “Islamophobia.”

The demise of the global left is attributed to the “rise of the Christian far-right” and not to the fact that the left has for far too long accommodated the Islamist right-wing while showcasing it as an epitome of multicultural pluralism. That Mamdani did not even have to pause to reconsider his parody posts on Jewish and Christian religions during his campaign, while accusing Andrew Cuomo of “blatant Islamophobia” for making his beard darker in an unused ad, illustrates the bar for Muslims representatives of the socialist Democratic left.

It is worth reiterating that Mamdani’s tweets were posted after he had announced that he would be running for mayor, and aren’t obscure social media posts from years gone by. Back then one could find Mamdani conjuring apologia for jihadists like al-Qaeda’s Anwar al-Awlaki. The more one explores the more one finds that the Democratic mayoral nominee has been merely echoing the left’s tropes, whether it’s finding reasons to blame the Judaeo-Christian world for jihadists, or critiquing Hindu nationalism in India – Muslim victimhood remains the common denominator.

It wouldn’t be surprising at all to see the uproar over Mamdani’s tweets on Jewish and Christian festivals too being shunned as “Islamophobic,” including by the man aspiring to have chief executive powers over, among others, Jews and Christians of New York City.

Mamdani brilliantly leveraged identity politics to win the Muslim and South Asian votes in the Democratic primary. But a lesson that the left continues to fail to learn is that identity politics is the most two-way of streets. Many European countries and Republican voting American states have resoundingly shunned the idea of forced collective guilt to accommodate victimhood tropes. And if Muslim leftists continue to flaunt Islamist narratives and prioritize their religious identities, the Christian, Jewish and Hindu liberals might no longer have any qualms to do the same – including in New York City.