New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has now appointed three cofounders of the Muslim Democratic Club of New York to senior positions in his administration. The organization posted statements on X just two days after Hamas's Oct. 7, 2023, massacre, blaming Israel for the slaughter of 1,200 civilians and the kidnapping of 451 hostages.
The latest appointment came on Tuesday, when Mamdani named Faiza Ali as Commissioner of the Mayor's Office of Immigrant Affairs. She joins fellow MDCNY cofounder Aliya Latif, who was tapped earlier this month as Executive Director of the Mayor's Office of Faith-Based Partnerships, and Ali Najmi, who now leads the Mayor's Advisory Committee on the Judiciary, a body that plays an influential role in the selection of local judges.
Three cofounders. Three powerful perches. One organization that looked at the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust and pointed the finger at the victims.
According to The Washington Free Beacon, the MDCNY was founded in 2012 by Ali, Latif, Najmi, and Linda Sarsour. Two days after Hamas terrorists carried out their attack, the group posted a statement on X that opened with a nod to pain and fear before pivoting to justification:
Especially as the Israeli apartheid regime have forced millions of Palestinians in Gaza to live under occupation for decades and an open air prison since 2007.
The statement continued, condemning elected officials who offered support for Israel while accusing the country of openly declaring "its intent to engage in mass violence and genocide against Palestinians." The group declared that "75 years of Israeli occupation and oppression" had "led us to this moment."
Read that framing carefully. Twelve hundred people were dead. Hundreds were dragged into tunnels. And this organization's public response was to build an argument that Israel brought it on itself.
That is who now holds three senior appointments in America's largest city.
Ali worked for the New York branch of CAIR between 2007 and 2011. CAIR was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in a federal case against a Hamas front group and has been designated a foreign terrorist organization in both Texas and Florida.
During the "Ground Zero Mosque" controversy in 2010, Ali represented CAIR at a press conference promoting the project and dismissed opponents. She said the backlash "reveal[ed] a new wave of anti-Muslim sentiment." She also publicly defended Zahra Billoo, the head of a San Francisco Bay Area CAIR chapter who refused to denounce "jihad" or "sharia." Ali described criticism of Billoo as "attempts to silence WOC & Muslim women" and called her "a fierce Muslim American civil rights leader."
Billoo, for her part, once posted that "blaming Hamas for firing rockets at [Apartheid] Israel is like blaming a woman for punching her rapist." That is the voice Ali chose to champion.
She now runs the city's Office of Immigrant Affairs.
Latif, now overseeing the Mayor's Office of Faith-Based Partnerships, used her X account to repost accusations that Israel committed a "genocide." She also reposted support for Marcellus Williams, who was found guilty of stabbing a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter 43 times and was executed in September 2024.
At a recent interfaith breakfast where Mamdani announced her appointment, Latif urged city clergy to resist immigration enforcement. She has described Linda Sarsour as her "right hand," "sister," and "seeker-mother" on X.
Najmi, an election attorney who ran unsuccessfully for New York City Council in 2015, now holds a role that influences local judicial appointments. He has praised Sarsour on numerous occasions and defended her against what he called "slander and falsities."
The fourth MDCNY cofounder, Linda Sarsour, did not receive a formal job in the Mamdani administration. She doesn't need one.
Sarsour bragged at CAIR events during the 2025 mayoral race that she convinced CAIR's political arm and a CAIR-endorsed super PAC to back Mamdani's campaign. She has compared Zionism to white supremacy, supported Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, and supported convicted individual Rasmea Odeh. She helped foster what has been described as a culture of antisemitism within the Women's March organization.
After Mamdani won, Sarsour did not play coy about what it meant. She declared that anti-Israel extremism "actually sends you to City Hall." At a September CAIR event, she spelled out the mechanics:
The story is not just that it's random that Zohran ascended to this place. It's Muslim money.
She then vowed to hold Mamdani "accountable," saying she would not let him "do whatever the hell he wants when he gets to City Hall."
So the person who organized the money and the political infrastructure now has three allies embedded in senior government roles. And the one person explicitly tasked with fighting antisemitism in City Hall? Gone.
Mamdani replaced the executive director of the Mayor's Office to Combat Antisemitism. Rabbi Moshe Davis, the former executive director, did not leave quietly. He said he believed the mayor dismissed him because he is a "proud Jew" who supports Israel.
His replacement has been described as a left-wing activist who has bashed Israel, though the individual has not been publicly named.
Consider the sequence:
This is not a series of coincidences. It is a staffing philosophy.
Mamdani championed a bill during his time as a state legislator, tagged with the hashtag #NotOnOurDime, that would have prohibited nonprofits in New York from working with Israel. He took that posture into the mayor's office and has now surrounded himself with people who share it, or something more extreme.
Every one of these appointments sends a signal. To Jewish New Yorkers who watched Oct. 7 in horror and then watched this organization blame the country where their families live, the signal is unmistakable. To activists like Sarsour, who boasted about the political machinery that put Mamdani in office, the signal is a receipt.
There is a difference between diversity in government hiring and ideological capture. When an administration's senior ranks are populated by people drawn from a single organization with a single, well-documented posture toward Israel, toward CAIR, and toward the language of "apartheid" and "genocide," the word for that is not inclusion.
It is a consolidation.
New York City has eight million residents, the largest Jewish population of any city outside Israel, and a mayor who just handed the keys to people who think Oct. 7 was a long time coming.
