The new Trojan horse

Three guests for the special New York episode of the ‘Lignes de Force’ podcast, three women: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, born a Muslim in Somalia, a survivor of female genital mutilation, now an apostate and essayist; Alana Newhouse, founder of Tablet Magazine, for which I have now been working for thirteen years; Olivia Reingold, a journalist at The Free Press, a news website founded in 2021 in response to the media crisis, who covered Mamdani’s entire campaign in New York – and it is precisely this last interview that I would like to focus on,” writes Marc Weitzmann in Il Point. “Who is Zohran Mamdani? Twenty-five years on from 9/11, whilst 4 November will mark the first anniversary of the election of the first Muslim mayor to lead the most Jewish city in the United States, there is no clear answer to this question – perhaps less than ever. His election was an event of global significance. In the United States, it marked the political rise of the Democratic Socialists of America, the revolutionary party to which he belongs and which threatens to take control of the entire Democratic Party following the mid-term elections in November. In Qatar, the editor-in-chief of the state-run daily Al-Sharq, Jaber Al-Harmi, presented it as a defeat for the ‘capital of the Zionist lobby’, whilst Al Jazeera presenter Ayman Azzam shared a post attributing this happy event to the massacres of 7 October: ‘The world is changing; the “Flood” protests are having an impact’. (The ‘Al-Aqsa Flood’ is the name given by Islamists to 7 October).

In France, did Mamdani’s storming of City Hall perhaps mark the advent of a form of decolonialism that would do without ‘white people’? It is, however, surprising to note that it was precisely from that election period, in the autumn of 2025, that the concept of ‘New France’ became the recurring slogan of the leaders of France insoumise (Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s radical left-wing party, ed.). Since then, on social media, Bally Bagayoko (the Mélenchonist mayor of Saint-Denis, ed.) has commented on Mamdani in the same way that he welcomed the victory of Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed in the Michigan Democratic primaries. More recently, on 6 September, Ali al-Qaradaghi, secretary-general of the International Union of Muslim Scholars – an organisation with offices in both Qatar and Turkey and linked to the Muslim Brotherhood – also claimed to see Mamdani’s victory as a ‘blessing’ stemming from the 7 October massacre – a blessing that he suggested was only the beginning: “Without the Al-Aqsa flood, what is happening in Europe and America would not be taking place.” Propaganda, self-delusion, reality, or a bit of everything? Is Mamdani an Islamist, as the American right also states in no uncertain terms? Is he the Trojan horse of a new form of New York anti-Semitism destined to purge New York’s public life of Jews? Certain facts are indisputable: first and foremost, the fact that Mamdani, during his inauguration, took his oath on the Qur’an – one might recall the potential uproar had New York’s former Jewish mayors, Mike Bloomberg or Ed Koch, taken their oath on the Talmud. There is also the ‘purge’ of Jews – if that term is appropriate – from the city’s Judicial Council: whilst almost half of New York’s lawyers are Jewish, not a single member of the Council is, and some of the most competent Jews in the field have been deliberately sidelined by the mayor in favour of figures almost all of whom are close to the ‘anti-Zionist’ far left. Foremost among them is the lawyer Ramzi Kassem, who defended a member of Al-Qaeda in 2018. There are also Mamdani’s own words prior to his term of office and during the election campaign: his refusal to condemn the slogan ‘let’s globalise the Intifada’; his statement that ‘when a New York Police Department boot presses down on the back of our necks, it is laced by Tsahal’, the Israeli army; his visit, in the midst of the election campaign, to the controversial anti-gay imam Siraj Wahhaj of Brooklyn, who was investigated by the authorities following the first attack on the World Trade Centre in 1993; his support for the Senate campaign of his fellow activist Aber Kawas, for whom 11 September is nothing more than ‘a thing a couple of people did’… Finally, there are the facts. According to New York Police Department statistics: in January 2026 – the month Mamdani took office – anti-Semitic hate incidents rose by 182 per cent compared with January 2025, averaging one anti-Semitic incident per day. In the first seven months of his term, around 205 confirmed anti-Semitic incidents were recorded, compared with 189 during the same period in the final year of Eric Adams’s term (after 7 October); this equates to an increase of 8.5 per cent, or one anti-Semitic incident every 25 hours. In July 2026, Jewish people were the targets of 70 per cent of all hate crimes in the city (+53 per cent compared with July 2025). The most serious incident occurred on 24 July, a few days after Mamdani had posted a video accusing Netanyahu of genocide, when a 51-year-old man named Raul Morales stabbed two men, Chok Sung and Moshe Grunhaus, whilst shouting ‘Allahu akbar’, before barricading himself inside his flat on the Upper West Side, not far from where Philip Roth lived. The New York Jewish community’s spending on security for its schools also rose by 98 per cent between 2024 and 2025. Against this backdrop, the behavior of Mamdani’s wife has become a cause for growing concern. To cite just the most striking examples: her ‘like’ on a post claiming that the rapes committed on 7 October were a hoax; her ‘likes’ on anti-Semitic posts by the far-right podcaster Tucker Carlson; her illustrations for a book by her friend, the writer Susan Abulhawa, who, on 29 July, complained on X about the ‘extreme representation of Jews in all branches of government, the media and culture’, before concluding: ‘It won’t end well for anyone’. (Susan Abulhawa is now one of Simon & Schuster’s leading authors; in another world, that publisher would have been the publisher of Philip Roth’s ‘Operation Shylock’.) That is a lot to take in. But is that all there is to it? And, above all, to what extent does this explain – or fail to explain – his success? Olivia Reingold followed Mamdani’s entire campaign. She analysed all his social media posts in minute detail, interviewed dozens of people close to him, and was the first to predict his likely victory at a time when no one else believed it was possible. ‘It was the enthusiasm of his supporters that struck me. At the start of the campaign, I attended one of his rallies in Brooklyn. It was one of those magical days in New York, glorious weather when you can do anything, and the simple realisation that hundreds of young people had chosen to spend their weekend going door-to-door and handing out leaflets for him for free, whilst the other candidates couldn’t find any campaigners, not even if they paid them… It really made me think.”