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Two retired FBI brokers who investigated the 1993 World Commerce Middle bombing advised Fox Information Digital New York Metropolis mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is “silly” to marketing campaign with an imam linked to the assault’s mastermind.
Mamdani attended prayers Friday at Masjid at-Taqwa on Fulton Road in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, later posting a smiling photograph with Imam Siraj Wahhaj, a Brooklyn cleric who served as a personality witness for the mastermind of the bombing and has been a longtime defender of convicted terrorists, elevating funds for his or her authorized defenses.
“Right now at Masjid At-Taqwa, I had the pleasure of assembly with Imam Siraj Wahhaj, one of many nation’s foremost Muslim leaders and a pillar of the Mattress-Stuy neighborhood,” wrote Mamdani, who was a toddler when terrorists parked a bomb-laden van within the storage beneath the North Tower of the World Commerce Middle.
Zohran Mamdani tweeted Friday about his assembly with Imam Siraj Wahhaj and Yusef Abdus Salaam. (@ZohranKMamdani/X)
Retired FBI agent Frank Pellegrino, who investigated the Feb. 26, 1993 assault, stated seeing the frontrunner to be the town’s subsequent mayor with Wahhaj left him involved.
“Zohran Mamdani’s embrace of Siraj Wahhaj is an instance of Mamdani’s ignorance of historical past. Both he doesn’t know who Wahhaj is or he doesn’t care. Whichever it’s, Mamdani seems to be silly,” Pellegrino stated.
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John Anticev, one other retired FBI agent who was the lead case agent on the 1993 assault, advised Fox Information Digital Mamdani ought to know higher than to court docket an endorsement from somebody like Wahhaj.
“All people who’s in politics ought to pay attention to the folks whose endorsement they’re getting,” Anticev stated. “Imam Siraj Wahhaj has been a cleric who has endorsed a radical agenda.”
Wahhaj, born Jeffrey Kearse, based the Brooklyn mosque in 1981 and has a protracted historical past of controversy. Following the World Commerce Middle assault, prosecutors famous he sponsored appearances by Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the so-called “Blind Sheikh” who was later convicted of masterminding the plot. Wahhaj wasn’t charged with any crimes and has denied involvement within the assault. Wahhaj additionally raised legal-defense funds for El Sayyid Nosair, who assassinated Rabbi Meir Kahane in 1990 and was additionally convicted of seditious conspiracy in reference to the 1993 bombing.
Wahhaj didn’t reply to a request for remark.
In court docket, Wahhaj served as a personality witness for Abdel Rahman, calling him a “revered scholar.” In witness testimony, he additionally admitted elevating authorized protection funds for Nosair, who was initially acquitted within the killing of Kahane, however is now serving a life sentence.
New York Metropolis Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani speaks throughout an interview on “The Story with Martha MacCallum” at Fox Information on Wednesday, Oct. 15, 2025, in New York Metropolis. (Photograph by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)
For Muslims who oppose Wahhaj’s ideological interpretation of political Islam, known as Islamism, Mamdani’s alliance with Wahhaj is a disturbing window into what his mayoral time period might carry, along with his allegiances to teams and leaders with Islamist sympathies and anti-American and anti-semitic views.
Muslim scholar Dalia Ziada, Washington, D.C., coordinator and analysis fellow on the Institute for the Research of World Antisemitism and Coverage, stated Wahhaj represents the identical Islamist ideology that fueled many years of extremism within the Center East.
“I’m significantly involved to see mosques used as political rallying platforms within the free and democratic United States,” she stated. “By embracing Wahhaj, Zohran Mamdani is sidelining average Muslims and normalizing an extremist ideology that when impressed terror on American soil and nonetheless fuels radicalization inside segments of the Muslim neighborhood at this time.”
Soraya Deen, founding father of the Muslim Girls Audio system Motion and a co-founder of the Readability Coalition, a community of Muslims, ex-Muslims and allies difficult Islamist extremism, heard Wahhaj for the primary time 20 years in the past in a chat to Muslim youth in Los Angeles.
“I used to be shocked and bewildered by his name to destroy America, and make Islam nice,” she stated.
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Deen known as the photograph of Mamdani with Wahhaj disturbing, noting, “A theologian spewing hatred for the USA — and Mamdani smiling beside him, calling him ‘one of many nation’s foremost Muslim leaders’ — is harmful for America and harmful for Muslims.”
Within the photograph, there isn’t a girl to be seen, as a result of Wahhaj additionally practices the interpretation of Islam that denies girls entry to the primary corridor of mosques, believing they might sexually tempt the boys praying inside. Deen stated, “Regardless of the gender jihad girls are going through within the Muslim world, Mamdani poses for a photograph op that emboldens the boys suppressing girls’s rights.”
In June, a political motion committee supporting Mamdani, “New Yorkers for Decrease Prices,” accepted $100,000 donations from the “Unity and Justice Fund,” a political motion committee tied to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a bunch designated an unindicted coconspirator within the trial of 5 Holy Land Basis leaders. The 5 leaders had been convicted of funneling about $12.4 million to Hamas and sentenced to many years in jail. Mamdani has included sympathetic lyrics in regards to the “Holyland 5” in a rap. Earlier this yr, Nihad Awad, a co-founder of the Council on American-Islamic Relations and an in depth ally of Wahhaj, stated he was “completely satisfied” in regards to the Oct. 7, 2023, rampage by Hamas terrorists into Israel.
Equally, Wahhaj has preached a philosophy of exploiting America’s democracy to additional a conquest for Islam. In 1991, in line with a videotape of the occasion, Wahhaj advised a gathering of Muslims: “I simply wish to say this. Brothers and sisters, in my view what the Muslims do in America may have a profound impact on Muslims all over the place on this earth. So long as you do not forget that if you happen to get entangled with politics, it’s important to be very cautious that your chief is for Allah. You do not get in politics as a result of it is the American factor to do. You get entangled in politics as a result of politics is usually a weapon to make use of in the reason for Islam.”
Frank Pellegrino, retired FBI agent, who investigated the 1993 World Commerce Middle assaults. (Frank Pellegrino)
In 2011, Wahhaj urged Muslims to donate to the authorized protection of Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani neuroscientist dubbed “Girl Al Qaeda” for trying to kill U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
“I feel that she is harmless,” he advised a Worcester, Massachusetts, fundraiser. “There’s cheap doubt, and by regulation, if there’s cheap doubt, it’s important to acquit.”
Siddiqui, who served as a courier to Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, the mastermind of the 2001 assault on the World Commerce Middle, is serving an 86-year sentence at a Texas federal jail for tried homicide and a number of different felonies.
In a 1992 discuss, Wahhaj declared that if American Muslims united, “you wouldn’t should vote for Bush or Clinton… we’d elect our personal emir and provides allegiance to him.”
Three years later, he shared his views on the U.S., saying, “You understand what this nation is? It’s a rubbish can. Filthy. Filthy and sick.”
Former U.S. Navy Lt. Dr. Zuhdi Jasser witnessed a keynote handle by Wahhaj in 1995 on the Islamic Society of North America convention, the place the imam held up a Qur’an and declared his want to substitute the U.S. Structure with Islamic regulation.
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“There’s nothing extra clarifying on the Islamist extremism and risks of Zohran Mamdani than his friendship with identified anti-American jihadi Imam Siraj Wahhaj,” stated Jasser, now president of the American Islamic Discussion board for Democracy. “Mamdani’s fealty to one in every of America’s most radicalizing clerics tells you the whole lot you should know.”
A convert, Wahhaj, 75, rose to prominence as a bridge between immigrant Muslim leaders and America’s Black Muslim converts. He has headlined fundraisers for teams linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, together with the alphabet soup of organizations that specialists think about legacy teams for the Muslim Brotherhood: the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), and the Muslim American Society (MAS).
In 2003, he advised the Wall Road Journal {that a} society dominated by strict Islamic regulation, the place adulterers are stoned and thieves’ palms are lower off, “can be superior to American democracy.”
In talks, Wahhaj denounced the U.S. authorities as “managed by Shaitan,” the Arabic phrase for the satan, urged Muslims to not befriend “non-believers,” condemned homosexuality as “a illness of this society,” and supported Islamic legal guidelines that punish intercourse outdoors of marriage with 100 lashes and stoning. He denounced Muslims befriending non-Muslims, saying, “Woe to the Muslims who choose kafirs,” or non-Muslims, “for pals.”
New York Metropolis Democratic mayoral nominee, Zohran Mamdani, spoke to supporters at a canvass launch occasion in Prospect Park on Sunday, Aug. 17, 2025. (Deirdre Heavey/Fox Information Digital)
Wahhaj even instructed Muslims to bar their youngsters from making pals outdoors the religion.
“Don’t our youngsters are surrounded by kafirs?” he stated. “I’m telling you, making the hearts of our youngsters corrupt, soiled, foul. It’s clear, the ideas are clear. Birds of a feather, they are saying, flock collectively. And so, when our Muslims hang around with the non-Muslim, you turn out to be similar to them. You discuss similar to them. You do what they do, you costume the way in which they costume, you act the way in which they act, you wish to be similar to them, as a result of their hearts are corrupt, and now they’re corrupting your coronary heart.”
His private life has additionally been shadowed by scandal. In 2018, three of Wahhaj’s youngsters had been arrested after authorities found 11 malnourished youngsters residing in a New Mexico compound the place one in every of his grandchildren had died throughout an tried exorcism.
The embrace of such a determine has ignited debate over Mamdani’s judgment and the Democratic Social gathering’s tolerance for radical associations. Wahhaj stays a revered determine amongst some Islamist activists, together with Linda Sarsour, who in 2017 known as him “a mentor” and “my favourite particular person within the room.” Sarsour left the Girls’s March, which she co-founded, amid accusations of antisemitism. She has led most of the anti-Israel marches for the reason that Oct. 7 assault, main chants of claiming Israel “from the river to the ocean.”
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For reform-minded Muslims, nonetheless, the picture of a rising American politician celebrating Wahhaj carries grim symbolism.
“It sends the improper message to average Muslims who’re working exhausting to separate religion from extremism,” stated Ziada. “And it tells the broader American public that these aspiring to guide this nation have forgotten what extremist ideology as soon as did to New York’s skyline.”
Editor’s Observe: An earlier model of this text incorrectly referred to Imam Siraj Wahhaj as an unindicted co-conspirator within the 1993 bombing of the World Commerce Middle.
