00:00New York City mayoral candidate Zoran Mamdani campaigned last week with a
00:04notorious gay-hating Brooklyn imam who is an unindicted co-conspirator in the
00:091993 World Trade Center bombing and who has been linked to other terrorist
00:14activity in the United States, including urging jihad on the Big Apple. And that's
00:19just the tip of the iceberg. Here's everything you need to know. Mamdani was
00:24seen laughing and grinning while standing arm-in-arm with Siraj Wahaj at the
00:29imam's Bedford-Stuyvesant mosque in a photo he posted to X a day after the
00:33first mayoral debate. Mamdani wrote in X, I had the pleasure of meeting with Imam
00:38Siraj Wahaj, one of the nation's foremost Muslim leaders and a pillar of the Bed
00:42Stuy community for nearly half a century. Wahaj, 75, who also heads the Muslim
00:48Alliance in North America, was fingered by prosecutors as an unindicted co-conspirator
00:53in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Six people died in the World Trade Center
00:59bombing in 1993. At the time, Wahaj was an unindicted co-conspirator. So an unindicted
01:06co-conspirator is somebody that prosecutors alleged to have been involved somehow in a
01:16criminal activity, but they either didn't have enough information to indict them at
01:22the time or were going to do it later. In the World Trade Center bombing, just as an
01:27example, there were 300 unindicted co-conspirators. The imam, who was born as
01:33Jeffrey Kearse, has previously denied any connection to terrorism. However, Wahaj served as a character
01:40witness for Omar Abdel Rahman, the terrorist who organized the infamous 1993 World Trade
01:46Center attack. In a sermon in the early 2000s, Wahaj called for an army of 10,000 men to wage
01:53what he insisted was a gun-free jihad on New York City, according to a foreign intelligence
01:58assessment obtained by the Post. Wahaj has also derided the LGBTQ community as, quote,
02:05a disease of this society, the report found. So you could say that Wahaj is a kind of shady guy.
02:13And what's really interesting is that when Mamdani was confronted with this, he actually said,
02:21well, other people campaigned with him. Eric Adams campaigned with Wahaj, Bloomberg, Michael Bloomberg
02:29had met with Wahaj. He, in 2009, he shook his hand. But when he was told who he was, Bloomberg said,
02:46oh, I wish I hadn't, I wish I hadn't done that. Eric Adams claims that he never campaigned with
02:53Wahaj. We called his press person and she said no, that Mamdani was completely mistaken. And Bill
03:02de Blasio was at the Imam's Bedford-Stuyvesant Mosque in 2021. But it's not clear that he ever met
03:09with him. When asked about his relationship with the Imam by a Post reporter, Mamdani smirked without
03:14a word as he climbed into the back of a waiting SUV. Anything to say about Mr. the Imam? He said some nasty
03:22stuff. Does it bug you? Anything. Mamdani has also shown support for other troubling figures.
03:29In 2015, Mamdani took to social media to defend the infamous Al-Qaeda operative Anwar Al-Awaki,
03:37who was a prominent iman at mosques in San Diego and Virginia and interacted with three of the heinous
03:43September 11th, 2001, hijackers, U.S. officials have said. Al-Awaki moved to Yemen in 2004, where he
03:51joined Al-Qaeda and hatched numerous international terrorist plots while preaching jihad and videos
03:57and on CDs. And I just want to say something about Al-Awaki. He was an American. And what was
04:06interesting about him is that he was able to deliver all of these Al-Qaeda messages in English,
04:12which was why he was such an important propagandist for the Al-Qaeda network.
04:17The cleric was considered so dangerous that then-President Barack Obama approved the drone
04:22strike that killed him in 2011, an unprecedented assassination of an American citizen who had not
04:28been charged with a crime. And in Mamdani's uncovered 2017 rap track, Salaam, he praises the heads of the
04:38Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, known as the Holy Land Five.
04:49The five heads of the now defunct Texas-based group that Mamdani expressed his love for were all
04:56convicted in 2008 by a federal jury of funding more than $12 million to the terrorist group Hamas,
05:02as well as the Muslim Brotherhood. I did a lot of work on the Holy Land Foundation and the first
05:09victim of Hamas, a lot of people don't know this, was an American who was studying in Jerusalem in 1996.
05:16David Boehm was gunned down at a bus stop. His parents in Brooklyn were the ones who launched a
05:24lawsuit against the Holy Land Foundation. This was the first legal case. This was the first case
05:31against a group of non-profits in the United States that were funding Hamas.
Comments