Radical Groups Tied to Mamdani Associates Pulled in Millions of Taxpayer Dollars

The race for New York City mayor featured super-charged rhetoric and accusations about Zohran Mamdani’s connections to radical antisemites and terrorism sympathizers. Nevertheless, Mamdani, a self-described socialist who has spoken of “seizing the means of production,” prevailed and will lead the city.

Open the Books dove into the organizations associated with Mamdani to see whether public funds have flowed to them. We found receipts totaling more than $33 million.

Background

In mid-October, the Democratic Socialist Mamdani campaigned with Siraj Wahhaj, an Islamic imam who has been linked to terrorist activity and said gay people deserve death.

Mamdani posed grinning from ear-to-ear in a photo, which he shared to the social media platform X, with Wahhaj and Councilman Yusef Salaam, a member of the exonerated Central Park Five, the New York Post first reported.

“Today at Masjid At-Taqwa, I had the pleasure of meeting with Imam Siraj Wahhaj, one of the nation’s foremost Muslim leaders and a pillar of the Bed-Stuy community for nearly half a century,” Mamdani wrote on X. “A beautiful Jummah,” referencing Islam’s Friday prayers.

Wahhaj is the decades-long imam at Masjid At-Taqwa, a mosque in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. He testified for the defense at the trial of Omar Abdel Rahman, a man known as the “Blind Sheikh,” who masterminded then 1993 World Trade Center bombing that killed six people.

Wahhaj denied any connection to terrorism, instead calling the FBI and CIA the “real terrorists.”

Several people connected to the bombing either attended Wahhaj’s mosque or visited around the time of the attack, the New York Times reported. Wahhaj was named among several dozen potential conspirators but was not charged in the case.

The imam testified in support of attack mastermind Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman — the infamous “blind sheikh” and spiritual leader of Egypt’s then-largest Islamic extremist fundamentalist group, Jamaa Islamiyya — calling him a “respected scholar.”

Wahhaj later gave a sermon in the early 2000s that called for an army of 10,000 men to wage gun-free jihad on New York City, The Post reported, citing a foreign intelligence assessment. More of his comments can be found at Middle East Forum’s Islamist Watch.

He also called the LGBTQ community “a disease of this society,” the intelligence report found. “And you know, brothers and sisters, you know what the punishment is, if a man is found with another man? The Prophet Mohammad said the one who does it and the one to whom it is done to, kill them both.”

The imam then reversed, The Post reported, and discouraged his followers from open violence, suggesting instead they “invite them to Islam and make them feel uncomfortable.”

Wahhaj founded the Muslim Alliance in North America in 2004, and he is also the former vice-president of the Islamic Society of North America.

The Institute for National Security Studies authored a 2023 report on the “first Islamist organizations in the U.S. that promoted ideological antisemitism” including the Islamic Society of North America.

A Circle of Extremists

“The evidence demonstrates that Mamdani’s political trajectory has not only been supported by activist movements but also reinforced by endorsements and alliances noted in figures with a documented history of extremist views and activities, posing a direct national security threat to New York City and the U.S.,” according to the intelligence report.

Well-known New York City antisemitic activist Linda Sarsour is a mentor to Mamdani. She is described as being a close friend of Mamdani’s for nearly a decade and “helped guide his far-left hatred of Israel,” according to a foreign intelligence report and critics.

“Zohran Mamdani’s candidacy is linked closely within a network of Islamist figures and organizations with extremist associations,” according to the intelligence report.

Sara Forman, executive director of the pro-Israel New York Solidarity Network, described Sarsour as “an absolutist, committed to the destruction of the State of Israel with every fiber of her being. Zohran Mamdani’s brand of socialism is intertwined with, and indistinguishable from, Linda’s and certainly a reflection of her decades of work to delegitimize Israel.”

Longtime Democratic consultant Hank Sheinkopf told The Post this means Sarsour will remain a close advisor to Mamdani.

“Anyone who thinks [Sarsour] won’t have access to City Hall” if Mamdani becomes mayor, including “access to anything having to do with city policy toward Jewish-Americans, is out of their minds.”

While speaking at the Islamic Society of North America in 2018 — where Wahhaj was vice president — Sarsour told her fellow Muslims they shouldn’t humanize Israelis because they’re the enemy.

Unsurprisingly, she has spoken highly of Wahhaj, including at a 2017 Islamic Society of North America convention, saying, “My favorite person in this room, because that’s mutual, is Imam Siraj Wahhaj, who has been a mentor and motivator and encourager of mine.”

Sarsour is a longtime advocate, like Mamdani, of the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement.

She was executive director of the Arab American Association of New York from 2005 to 2017, later founding Islamic charity MPower Change, a Muslim online organizing platform. Following the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown, she co-founded Muslims for Ferguson.

Sarsour’s critics called on New York City, among other governments, to deny funding to AAANY while Sarsour was director after she made comments that America was built on “genocide & slavery” and equating the practices to Judeo-Christian values.

Following a public fight with a New York City Council member on Twitter in 2015, Sarsour claimed the “Zionist trolls are out to play,” prompting further calls for the city to end its support of AAANY, the New York Post reported.

She was one of several people to run the 2017 Women’s March, then begin organizing the 2019 Women’s March. But she refused to condemn antisemitic Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, so the march’s founder, Teresa Shook, called for her and other organizers to step down, accusing them of having “allowed anti-Semitism, anti-LGBTQIA sentiment and hateful, racist rhetoric to become a part of the platform by their refusal to separate themselves from groups that espouse these racist, hateful beliefs.”

AAANY also lists Islamic Relief USA , which has faced allegations of anti-Semitism and alignment with the Muslim Brotherhood, as its partner. The Middle East Forum reports that all around the world Islamic Relief branches are led by Islamists with close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist causes.

AAANY also supports BDS and has been criticized for distorting facts about pro-Israel figures, including Martin Luther King, Jr., to suit its left-wing policy proposals, InfluenceWatch reported.

Also in Mamdani’s inner circle, as reported by The New York Times, is Faiza Ali, who worked with Mamdani as leaders of the Muslim Democratic Club of New York and who The Times described as a member of the brain trust.

She is now the first deputy chief of staff to the speaker of the City Council, and previously was at the Council on American-Islamic Relations, CAIR.

In a video posted on X, Sarsour says The Unity and Justice Fund PAC, which is a CAIR-funded super PAC, was the largest Mamdani institutional donor in New York.

As the Anti-Defamation League describes CAIR, “Founded in 1994, the organization ostensibly focuses on responding to the proliferation of anti-Muslim incidents and sentiment nationwide, but key CAIR leaders often traffic in openly antisemitic and anti-Zionist rhetoric. Some of CAIR’s leaders, such as Nihad Awad, CAIR’s executive director, were previously involved in a now-defunct organization that openly supported Hamas and, according to the U.S. government, functioned as its ‘propaganda apparatus.’”

Following Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, Awad claimed Israel didn’t have a right to defend itself and that he had been “happy” on October 7 “to see people breaking the siege,” ADL reported.

Zahra Billoo, CAIR San Francisco Bay Area Executive Director, declared that “Zionists” are “your enemies,” and said of the October 7 attack, the world was “witnessing decolonization.”

The New York City-based ADL called on mayor-elect Mamdani to “truly be a mayor for all and represent every Jewish New Yorker,” and the organization set up a dedicated tip line to report antisemitic incidents.

The day after Mamdani’s election, swastikas were found graffitied on a Brooklyn yeshiva and cemetery.

Following the Money

Both Wahhaj’s and Sarsour’s organizations have received taxpayer money.

Sarsour’s Arab American Association of New York received over $4.1 million from New York City and New York State between 2017 and 2024, according to vendor checkbook records provided to Open the Books by the city and state. She ran the organization until 2017 and left to pursue the national stage.

It’s unclear why the payments, ranging from $20,000 to over $1,000,000, were given. The city gave $3.3 million, although only $60,000 is identified as coming from the Department of Small Business Services; the remainder has no city agency attached to it. The state makes up the remaining $854,000, with $20,000 attributed to the Office of NYS Children and Family Services and the rest from the New York Department of State.

The Arab American Association of New York’s programs include adult education and women’s empowerment, immigration legal services, mental health and domestic violence support services, social services and case management, career readiness and economic development

Its offering of advocacy and civic engagement work includes working “in solidarity with coalitions in New York and beyond to end hate violence, fight for community-based alternatives to policing, expand immigrant rights, expand voter engagement in immigrant and POC communities, and more.”

Its youth program “encourages young people to explore identity, history, politics, culture, climate justice, and more through civic engagement, interactive workshops, community projects, art activism, and more.

The Arab American Association of New York also received a $177,000 Small Business Administration loan under the Paycheck Protection Program during the Covid-19 pandemic.

It’s unclear whether their loans were forgiven, but at least 92% of all PPP loans across the country were.

Wahhaj’s mosque received less than $10,000 from SBA for a PPP loan during the pandemic.

The Islamic Society of North America, where he was vice president, received a combined $332,000 in federal grants and forgivable loans during the pandemic.

The organization also received at least $14,000 from several school districts, according to vendor checkbook records provided to Open the Books.

It’s unclear what the series of small payments is for. They range from $795 from Wake County Public School System in North Carolina to $5,115 from Skokie School District 68 in Illinois. The organization holds an annual convention, conferences, education forums and more.

Mamdani’s inner circle also includes people whose organizations have received city and state money.

Jagpreet Singh, which the Times described as a Mamdani “organizer,” is the political director of a group called DRUM Beats, which works with the South Asian and Indo-Caribbean communities, and previously worked with Mamdani at Chhaya Community Development Corporation, which helps address the housing and economic needs of low-income South Asian and Indo-Caribbean New Yorkers. They say they are a Department of Housing and Urban Development-certified counseling agency providing pre-purchase and post-purchase counseling services.

It received a collective $2.2 million frmm NYC since 2020, including $187,000 from NYC Department of Small Business Services, according to vendor checkbook records provided to Open the Books. It’s unclear which city agencies funded the remaining $2 million.

Chhaya also provides immigration services and works on “economic justice” where it “advocates for a more equitable and inclusive economic environment where individuals, families, and small businesses can thrive.”

The organization also got $3.6 million in federal funds since 2019, most of which is from two HUD grants awarded in 2023 and 2024 for an economic development initiatives totaling $3 million.

About $300,000 from HUD was for housing counseling services awarded between 2019 and 2024. It was awarded to National Coalition For Asian Pacific American Community Development, which subawarded to Chhaya.

Another $100,000 was awarded by HUD to NYC Mayors Office of Criminal Justice in 2019, which subwarded to Chhaya for “local economic development initiatives.”

A $150,000 congressional earmark in 2023 is for an unspecified community project.

Murad Awawdeh, president and chief executive of the New York Immigration Coalition, “serves as a regular late-night sounding board for Mr. Mamdani,” The Times described. “He helped shape the campaign’s policy platform and build its novel coalition of young voters, South Asians and other immigrant groups.”

New York Immigration Coalition received $23.4 million from NYC and NYS since 2017, according to records obtained by Open the Books.

$16.5 million came from the state (State Department, Office of Children and Family Services, Division of Criminal Justice Services, Department of Labor, Office of Mental Health, Legal Services) while $5.8 million came from unspecified city agencies.

The group got $392,000 in federal funding since 2017 from AmeriCorps, $27,500 of which was from a grant for “anti-discrimination education for adults learning English” from DOJ to NYC Human Right Commission and passed onto the coalition as a subcontractor.

Afua Atta-Mensah, Mamdani’s political director, helped him expand his support among Black New Yorkers, according to The Times. She came from the progressive advocacy group Community Change, whose goal is “to build the power and capacity of low-income people, especially low-income people of color, to change the policies and institutions that impact their lives.”

That organization received almost $125,000 from NYC since 2018, according to records obtained by Open the Books.

While it’s up to New Yorkers to assess Mamdani’s radical connections, every taxpayer should be asking why organizations led by the likes of Wahhaj and Sarsour are pulling in public funds, and whether those in Mamdani’s inner circle receiving city funds pass the smell test.

Photo Citation: Bingjiefu He, Zohran Mamdani at the Resist Fascism Rally in Bryant Park on Oct 27th 2024, Wikicommons