Mamdani Has a Terrific Idea for How the U.S. Should Handle the Immigration Issue

In denouncing ICE and Trump’s deportation of criminal migrants, and announcing new measures to obstruct the enforcement of immigration law, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani wasn’t strictly negative. Like the canny Marxist operative that he is, Mamdani attempted to portray his neo-Confederate stance as the position that all the world’s most celebrated sages, prophets, and holy men dictate. Including, of course, a certain seventh-century Arab warlord of which Mamdani is quite fond. 

Hizzoner started out, however, by magnanimously invoking the wisdom of a different religion, in an apparent effort to throw his critics off the scent and dispel growing suspicions that he is a far more hardline Muslim than he ever gave any hint of being during his campaign. 

Risking the ire of his supremacist coreligionists who believe that all the teachings of other religions are worthless manifestations of jahiliyya, the pre-Islamic period of ignorance, he said: “I think of the freedom from suffering that Buddhism teaches us, is only possible, if we remove the three poisons of desire, hatred, and ignorance from our daily lives. We need not accept suffering as unchangeable. We need not treat hatred as the natural state. We have the power to set ourselves free.” Get it? Buddhism teaches that Orange Man Bad, because, you see, enforcing immigration law is “hate.” 

And not just Buddhism. The Boy Mayor continued: “And I consider my own faith: Islam. A religion built upon a narrative of migration. The story of the hijra reminds us that prophet Muhammad, sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam [peace be upon him], was a stranger, too, who fled Mecca and was welcomed in Medina. Sura Nahl 16:42 tells us: “As for those who emigrated in the cause of Allah after being persecuted, we will surely bless them with a good home in this world. Or, as the prophet Muhammad sallallahu 'alayhi wa sallam said, ‘Islam began as something strange, and will go back to being strange. So glad tidings to the strangers.’” 

After some hesitation, that line got some dutiful, albeit puzzled, applause, after which Mamdani drove his point home: “If faith offers us the moral compass to stand alongside the stranger, government can provide the resources. Let us create a new expectation of city hall, where power is wielded to love, to embrace, and to protect. We will stand with the stranger today.”

This is all swell, but it couldn’t be more misleading. According to Islamic tradition, Muhammad didn’t show up in Medina as a needy refugee. He was invited there to become, for the first time, a political and military leader as well as a preacher of religious ideas. Once there, he exiled two of the Jewish tribes of Medina, massacred the third, and then later went to the oasis where the exiled tribes had established a new community and massacred them as well. Mamdani didn’t say anything about that, but as an observant Muslim, he undoubtedly knows it, and his choice of this as the example of Muhammad for New York City to follow carried ominous overtones for the Jews of the city.

Related: In Virginia, You Must Love Islam — Or Else

Mamdani also didn’t mention what it means in Islamic theology to “emigrate for the sake of Allah.” It means to move to a new land in order to Islamize that land, and impose Sharia upon it. To recommend that as a model for immigration to the U.S. is tantamount to recommending the conquest and Islamization of the U.S. As a knowledgeable Muslim, Mamdani without any doubt knows this, but is counting upon the ignorance of his audience to give his words a benign patina.

The same can be said of the Islamic tradition that depicts Muhammad on his deathbed saying: “I will expel the Jews and Christians from the Arabian Peninsula and will not leave any but Muslim.” (Sahih Muslim 1767a). Jews and Christians had lived in Arabia for centuries before the advent of Islam, but Mamdani’s “stranger” drove them from their homes and forbade anyone but Muslims to enter. The government of Saudi Arabia still enforces these words of Muhammad by prohibiting all non-Muslim religious practice and banning non-Muslims from entering Mecca at all. 

So if one applies Mamdani’s analogy rigorously, the Jews and Christians (and cosmopolitan atheists) of New York City should welcome in large numbers of Muslim migrants, who will one day displace and expel them. That’s Comrade Mayor’s vision of what it means “to love, to embrace, and to protect.”