A graceless woman in Gracie Mansion.
I have a special affection for Gracie Mansion, the large handsome federal-style house, built in 1799 alongside the East River on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, that since 1942 has served as the official residence of the mayor of New York City. When I was born, my parents lived right down the block from it, in a building on East 89th Street called Gracie Gardens. When I was still a baby we relocated to Queens, and over thirty years later, after many more moves, I found myself living again at Gracie Gardens, where I got a remarkable deal on a first-floor co-op.
It was wonderful. East 89th Street between East End and York Avenue was, in my view, not only the most pleasant block in the whole city but also the safest. The mayor, after all, lived right down the street. At that time the mayor was the great Rudolph Giuliani, and even though 9/11 hadn’t yet happened, making him “America’s Mayor,” he was already a hero to me, having transformed New York, to exaggerate only slightly, from hell to heaven. It was remarkable that I could step outside at three in the morning, walk half a block, pass Gracie Mansion, and stroll along the waterside without a hint of fear. In those moments, New York was, thanks to Mr. Giuliani, sheer bliss, everything that a civilized city could be.
I left Gracie Gardens, and the U.S., 28 years ago. But I’ve continued to follow New York politics. Not long after Giuliani saved the city, I was stunned to see the voters put in office – for two terms, mind you – the execrable, corrupt Bill de Blasio, whose policies were precisely the sort that had led New York into disaster. But nothing could have prepared me for the election, twenty-four years after 9/11, of a man who professed to be both a socialist and a devout Muslim. To me, it was a testament to several things: just how quickly memories – and outrage – can fade; just how quickly a generation goes by, swelling the electorate with young people who lack historical memory; just how effectively the legacy media, even now, can brainwash voters; and just how ignorant Americans still are, by and large, about Islam. When Mamdani took his oath of office as mayor, he took it on the same book whose commandments the 9/11 terrorists had been obeying when they steered their airliners into the Twin Towers.
It didn’t take long for the neighborhood around Gracie Mansion to turn from a serene, out-of-the-way little corner of Manhattan into a war zone. The occasion was a protest against Islam on March 7. But it wasn’t the critics of Islam who committed violence. No, they were peaceful. The violence was the work of Muslim counter-demonstrators, who actually hurled bombs at police, including at least one item that the police described as “a potentially deadly IED.” Only two of the Muslims, Emir Balat and Ibrahim Kayumi (who had said they wished to kill more people than the 2013 Boston Marathon bombers), were arrested. And here’s the kicker: when Mamdani publicly spoke about the fracas the next day, he said, first, that “hate has no place in New York City” – which, given his point of view, was presumably a comment on the anti-Islam protesters – and then, second, made a pro forma denunciation of violence, while dancing neatly around the fact that the purveyors of violence were his brothers in faith.
The headlines about the Gracie Mansion melee had barely died down when a new set of Mamdani stories hit the news. On March 10, Jon Levine of the Washington Free Beacon reported that two nights earlier, the mayor had welcomed Mahmoud Khalil, a Syria-born Algerian national, along with his wife and son, as dinner guests at Gracie Mansion. In the wake of the Hamas invasion of Israel, Khalil, head of the Columbia University Apartheid Divests movement, which calls for “death to America,” had led protests in support of Hamas at Columbia University and taken part in the occupation of the Barnard library. In March of last year, after families of Hamas victims sued Khalil and his cronies on charges of working in cahoots with Hamas, the Trump administration confiscated his visa and green card, took him into custody, and sought to deport him, an effort stymied two months later by a federal judge who ordered Khalil released. Next stop: a convivial dinner with the Mamdanis at Gracie Mansion. --->READ MORE HERE
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| Getty Images |
NYC First Lady Rama Duwaji showed support for far-left orgs applauding Hamas rampage
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani spent the mayoral campaign distancing himself from the most radical anti-Israel elements of his leftist movement, but an examination of his wife’s social media activity reveals she liked multiple Instagram posts cheering on Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, assault.
The posts liked by Rama Duwaji, a Syrian-American artist, unambiguously celebrated the terrorist attack, which saw nearly 1,200 Israelis and foreign workers killed, thousands wounded, 251 civilians and military personnel kidnapped and numerous episodes of sexual assault.
The first post, shared on the day of Hamas’ onslaught, came from The Slow Factory, which bills itself as “a school, knowledge partner and climate innovation organization” that “center[s] the voices and ideas of the Global Majority (Black, Indigenous, and other people of color) to share their knowledge outside the boundaries of institutions & oppressive systems.”
The Instagram post shows stills from participants’ livestreamed footage of the attack: first of a bulldozer that terrorists used to breach the barrier separating Israel from Gaza, the second of attackers riding on a captured IDF vehicle. Printed on the former are the words “Breaking the walls of apartheid and military occupation,” and on the latter “Resisting apartheid since 1948,” and on both the slogan “Systemic change for collective liberation.”
The extensive caption on the post laments that “if and when the occupation forces retaliate against this resistance” Gazans will be “punished for wanting freedom from apartheid.”
Duwaji, who met Mamdani on a dating app in 2021 and married him in early 2025, liked this post and others using a personal account in her own name, on which she has posted her often-political illustrations and with which the mayor has interacted in the past. She has used it also to directly criticize Israeli policy.
The unapologetic tone of the Slow Factory Post contrasts radically with the mayor’s debate-stage messaging on the attack, which characterized Hamas’ actions as “war crimes,” even as he continually lambasted the Israeli military response.
Duwaji did not respond to multiple requests for comment, and the mayor’s office would not answer questions regarding his feelings about her online activity, or whether they had discussed the Oct. 7 attacks at the time. Rather, his team repeated his standard line on the bloody terrorist rampage. --->READ MORE HERE
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