Linda SarSour will ensure Mamdani follows her directions if elected

In the grand bazaar of American identity politics, where the stalls overflow with grievances and the currency is unyielding entitlement, few figures peddle their wares with quite the fervor of the execrable Linda Sarsour. 

This Palestinian-American activist, ever the vigilant sentinel of the progressive faith, has taken to the digital airwaves to issue a stern admonition to her protégé, Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic Socialists of America's anointed contender for New York City's mayoral throne. Should he triumph on Election Day, she promises, there will be no complacency in the ranks of his supporters. No, they shall not "let him do whatever the hell he wants when he gets to City Hall." 

Instead, Sarsour and her anti-Semitic cronies will loiter perpetually on the steps of that venerable edifice, transformed into a sort of ideological praetorian guard, ensuring their jihadi toes the line on promises as radical as they are risible.

Picture this: a Saturday night Instagram livestream, captured by Fox News Digital, where sourpuss Sarsour addresses her flock with the solemnity of a commissar briefing the apparatchiks. "I just want you all to know I'm not going to work for the Zohran administration," she claims, as if preempting some imagined descent into bureaucratic sinecure. "I'm not going to work in City Hall, because, guess what? There gotta be people like me willing to stay outside." 

Ah, the romance of the outsider; the eternal revolutionary who thrives on the periphery, forever threatening the storming of the Winter Palace, even as their chosen one occupies it. "Our friends on the inside need people on the outside to hold them accountable. To say, 'We see you. We're paying attention.'"

This is a thinly veiled warning, laced with the unmistakable stench of leverage. Mamdani, after all, owes much to Sarsour's mentorship. A fellow traveler in the Democratic Socialists of America, [a group of socialists who are not so quietly infiltrating the Democratic Party while hating them] he first crossed paths with her in 2017, pounding the pavement alongside her for the doomed candidacy of Khader El-Yateem, another jihadi DSA darling. 

Soon after, Mamdani ascended to the board of the Muslim Democratic Club of New York, co-founded by comrade Sarsour herself. She was there at the cradle of his Assembly victory and the launch of his mayoral bid, a spectral godmother whispering incantations of solidarity. Now, as MPower Action, the political nonprofit she co-chairs, marshals a coalition of 110 groups, from labor unions to Muslim and South Asian outfits, all bent on crowning the city's first Muslim mayor, the bill has come due.

Sarsour's ire, it transpires, fixates on one overt particular pledge: the evisceration of the NYPD's Strategic Response Group, that elite unit forged in 2015 to confront terrorism, riots, and the more boisterous strains of protest. Insofar as the, you know, Jews are concerned, I guess we'll see how many will need to flee the city to save their skin.

Mamdani has pledged the NYPD's disbandment, even as he murmurs sweet nothings [i.e., taqiyya] about retaining Jessica Tisch as police commissioner, a choice that drew Sarsour's pursed-lip disapproval. "I wasn't really happy about the news that he was going to keep Tisch on for the NYPD," she confesses in the stream. Yet she tempers her discontent with a reminder of the pecking order: "What's most important is that in New York City, the police commissioner works for the mayor. They are not a separate elected official. So that means if Zohran says to Tisch, 'You gotta do A-B-C,' Tisch gotta do what the mayor says." Should Tisch demur, the mob outside will duly descend: "Now, if she doesn't do that and goes against the mayor, then that's when we're going to have to go to Zohran and be like, 'You definitely made the wrong decision here. What are you going to do to hold your police commissioner accountable to the plan?'"

Hitler salute? 

One cannot help but marvel at the choreography here, the way Mamdani's campaign pirouettes between invocations of his Muslim heritage and a studied avoidance of anything so gauche as overt sectarianism. Sarsour, ever the apologist, dismisses any suggestion that faith is the fulcrum: "Our candidate is out there and just happens to be a Muslim," she insists. His pro-Palestine fervor? Conspicuously holstered. "None of the campaign was ever like ‘Free Palestine’ or the Muslims are going to get extra rights. It just happens to be something that's part of who Zohran is. But that's actually not been his campaign." 

How convenient, this selective amnesia, especially when one recalls the protests that have convulsed New York since Hamas's barbaric incursion on October 7, 2023, demonstrations policed by the very unit Mamdani and Sarsour now seek to consign to history's dustbin. Both have marched in those ranks, their chants echoing off the canyons of Manhattan.

And yet, for all the talk of accountability, Sarsour's rhetoric occasionally cracks open to reveal the fissures in this improbable alliance. Mamdani's coalition, after all, marries the DSA's Marxist zeal to the firebrand sermons of figures like Siraj Wahhaj, the cleric who once vouched for the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. 

"You can't be a Marxist and a jihadist and an Islamist and a fundamental Muslim, or whatever they call him, all at the same time," Sarsour concedes with a wry shake of the head. "You gotta pick a side. Either we're theocrats or we're leftists. Like these things don't go together." A rare moment of candor in a movement that prides itself on such contradictions, tacitly nodding to the messaging triumph of blending red banners with green crescents.

Come inauguration day in January, "Inshallah," as Sarsour invokes with pious flourish, dreaming of a "new type of politics," the mayor-elect will find his view from City Hall obstructed not by pigeons, but by the expectant faces of his benefactors. "When Zohran gets inaugurated in January, and as we move forward with this mayor, we have to be the people outside," she urges.

"Zohran is going to have to tell his own critics that are on the other side to basically say, ‘Look out that window, those people outside, these constituents, these activists, these organizers that are outside, I'm accountable to them, because they're the ones that helped me get there.’" And should he falter? "When he does something when he's in City Hall and he's wrong, I'm going to tell him he's wrong." After all, as she reminds her audience, "Voting for Zohran is not, 'We're going to vote for Zohran and just let him do whatever the hell he wants when he gets to City Hall.' Our job as a movement is we have to hold whoever goes to City Hall accountable."

In this tableau, one glimpses the inexorable logic of the activist state: power is not an end, but a means to perpetual agitation. Mamdani may wear the mayoral chain, but the true governors will be those rattling the gates below, their demands as unyielding as the Brooklyn Bridge. Whether New Yorkers, wearied by riots and radicalism, will indulge this shadow governance remains the gamble of the hour. But if history is any guide, the house always wins, at least until the next election, or the next conflagration.

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