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| Fifth Column | ||
| Asra Nomani: How Socialist Muslims pulled off a 20-year takeover of the Democratic Party | ||
| 2025-06-30 | ||
Many people are wondering how Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old socialist Muslim who wants to defund the police, globalize the intifada, and destroy capitalism, has emerged as the Democratic Party's nominee for New York City mayor, with leaders like former President Bill Clinton fawning over him. To understand Mamdani’s political ascent, you have to trace the red-green-blue spider’s web that brought him here. This isn’t a complete map — I've written a book, "Woke Army: The Red-Green Alliance That Is Undermining America’s Freedom," to document that story — but it is a snapshot of key turning points over two decades of strategy, narrative manipulation, and activist training. A critical moment traces back to a Friday night in 2008, according to investigative reporting I’ve done at the Pearl Project, a nonprofit journalism initiative. It reveals how socialists (red) and Muslims (green) seized the Democratic Party (blue) over a long 20-year campaign. At 9:28 p.m. on Dec. 12, 2008, former ACLU civil rights lawyer Ann Beeson sent an email to former Clinton administration senior advisor John Podesta. Beeson was executive director of U.S. Programs at George Soros’ Open Society Foundation, where she said she oversaw $150 million in annual grants to "promote human rights, social justice and accountability nationwide." In her email, publicly discussed here for the first time, Beeson wrote, "I’m writing to follow up on one topic we discussed — what the incoming Administration could do to address domestic national security policies and practices that unfairly target Muslim, South Asian, and Arab communities in America." She attached a memo from Farhana Khera, then executive director of Muslim Advocates, a group based in San Francisco, and Aziz Huq, then the director of the "liberty and national security project" at the William J. Brennan Center for Justice, both Open Society "grantees." As a former Wall Street Journal reporter who has investigated the convergence of radical leftist politics and Muslim political activism for decades, I have followed a paper trail of tax returns, grant lists and confidential memos, and this email represented the culmination of a decades-long ideological drive that began with Muslim international students arriving in the U.S. in the 1960s, not just to study, as my father did at Rutgers University, but to lay the institutional groundwork for political Islam, or Islamism, in the United States. By the 1980s, they had established a strategic base at 500 Grove Street in Herndon, Va., later investigated by the FBI for alleged ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, both groups seeking to destroy Israel and America and build a global caliphate. The transformation accelerated after December 2005, when Muslim governments convened at an "Extraordinary Islamic Summit" of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. There, they launched a campaign to weaponize the term "Islamophobia" to silence critics of extremist Islam. American Muslim leaders seized the moment to re-engineer the national security narrative, using American philanthropic networks, like the House of Soros, as a Trojan horse to racialize Islam, frame Muslims as the "oppressed" and embed illiberal ideologies within America’s liberal institutions, including the Democratic Party. By January 2008, with Soros pumping money into Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, his philanthropy staff launched a "National Security and Human Rights Campaign" with D.C.-based Atlantic Philanthropies, committing at least $20 million to "dismantle" Bush-era counterterrorism policies. One grantee, the Proteus Fund, based in Waltham, Mass., ballooned in revenue from $9.5 million in 2008 to $73 million in 2023. Soros dollars flowed to groups including Muslim Advocates, the Brennan Center, the ACLU and many others who set their sights on targets, including the New York Police Department. Today, Mamdani says he wants to "defund the police." A Pearl Project analysis of 38 documents detailing the operations and funding of the National Security and Human Rights Campaign revealed the coordinated efforts of progressive and Islamist activists to reframe post-9/11 narratives. The aim: clear the path for red-green candidates like Mamdani. Muslim Advocates grew nearly 10-fold, from $76,331.03 in annual revenues in 2005 to $992,892 in 2023. The Brennan Center’s revenue exploded from $6.6 million to $57.9 million during the same period. Soros soon funded a new "Security and Rights Collaborative" at Proteus Fund to "restore civil liberties and human rights lost in the name of the ‘war on terror.’" Headquartered in a one‑story building off Research Drive in Amherst, Mass., the new "collaborative" was run by Shireen Zaman, a Muslim activist previously at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, a Washington, D.C., group tied to the Muslim Brotherhood. Their focus: America’s "Muslim, Arab and South Asian community," called "MASA." Zaman now works at the Ford Foundation. Their strategy went beyond policy to narrative warfare. Starting in late 2008, Soros pumped some $20 million into a "fieldwide communications hub" to arm Muslim groups and leftist media allies with messaging tools. The recipient: ReThink Media, a nonprofit in Berkeley, Calif., co-founded by "progressive" political operatives Peter Ferenbach and Lynn Fahselt, then a consultant to Democratic donors, including Open Society, Proteus Fund, Ploughshares Fund, Carnegie Corporation, Piper Fund, Atlantic Philanthropies, and others "progressive" donors that have since pumped money into ReThink Media. ReThink Media became the loudspeaker for the red and the green. Last year, Proteus Fund paid ReThink Media $643,000 as a "communications consultant." Soros also backed Media Matters, run by ex-conservative-turned-Democrat David Brock, to shape media narratives about Muslims attacked by Republicans. Over the years, ReThink Media has hired and trained alumni of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, including staffers Zainab Chaudary and Corey Saylor, to promote an "echo chamber" for liberal groups. One narrative: Muslims were under attack in the West, and the Democratic Party would defend Muslims. This storyline took hold in the post-Obama political landscape. In late 2010, Open Society staffers in Beeson’s U.S. Programs division distributed an internal memo, "Extreme Polarization and Breakdown in Civic Discourse," announcing they were giving Podesta’s Center for American Progress $200,000 for a new "Examining Anti-Muslim Bigotry Project" that would "document structures underlying the Islamophobia movement." The memo detailed plans to do "opposition research" on groups like the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Middle East Forum, which track Islamic extremism. The project description noted that "progressives were caught off guard" earlier that year when New York City residents opposed the building of a "Ground Zero mosque" near the site of the former World Trade Center. "Progressives" were in "urgent need of high-quality opposition research so that they can switch from playing defense to develop a proactive strategic plan to counter anti-Muslim xenophobia and to promote tolerance," protecting "progressive counter-terrorism policies," they wrote.
Who are those 5%? They aren’t New Yorkers because polls showed us Mamdani performing poorly with anyone over 50, with African-American, Latino and working class white voters. What’s left? White hipsters and Muslim immigrants. Related: Asra Nomani 04/20/2025 Another round of anti-Trump protests hits US cities, reasons all over the map Asra Nomani 04/01/2025 Elon Musk asked, ‘Who is funding and organizing all these [Tesla Takedown] paid protests?’ Asra Nomani 03/13/2025 Mahmoud Khalil: Palestinian Graduate Arrested In US Worked For UK 'Flagship Soft Power Policy', judge rules to keep him longer in LA detention, a dozen arrested in unruly protest crowd outside courtroom | ||
| Posted by:Skidmark |
| #7 There is no such thing as "Islamophobia." Whoever uses the term is an enemy of Western Civilization because he equates the normal operation of the free marketplace of ideas with a pathological process. Actually existing, contemporary political Islam as expressed by the OIC's political consensus is a totalitarian, murderously intolerant polticial ideology. </rant> |
| Posted by: Elmerert Hupens2660 2025-06-30 18:35 |
| #6 I understand that Adams himself is fairly liberal but at least he's not stark, raving mad. Hizzoner ran as a sensible, cop’s cop Democrat —he was a New York City police captain before he went into politics, as I recall — all the benefits of electing a Republican without electing an icky Republican. Once sworn in he pivoted hard to BLM and defunding the poh-leece, then pivoted back when real life showed they were terrible ideas. Now he is once again running as a Republican in all but name, this time as an Independent, but he’s in the difficult position of having been rejected by the Democratic Party and needing President Trump’s support just to function in the job now as he fights both city and state Democrats to get what NYC needs. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2025-06-30 14:13 |
| #5 Democratophobia. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2025-06-30 13:02 |
| #4 Islamophobia should not be a derogatory term. There are good reasons for a lot of phobias. Take claustrophobia. It's quite healthy if you don't want to get stuck in a narrow, underground tunnel. Herpetaphobia? Many snakes are venomous and their bites can kill you. I don't think I need to go any further about it. |
| Posted by: Abu Uluque 2025-06-30 12:59 |
| #3 Flooding Purple, Blue and Red States with millions of third worlders no doubt helped. "Open Democracy" is the key word Open Society Socialists use for their flavor of socialism. What do we mean by the S-word? The yearning to do better than capitalism. |
| Posted by: mossomo 2025-06-30 12:50 |
| #2 In the Dem's defense, they were pretty much already there. |
| Posted by: ed in texas 2025-06-30 12:31 |
| #1 Pardon me for not knowing this earlier but I recently learned that Eric Adams will be on the November ballot running as an independent. I understand that Adams himself is fairly liberal but at least he's not stark, raving mad. What the Eric Adams Party Switch-Up Means for the Mayor’s Race |
| Posted by: Abu Uluque 2025-06-30 12:30 |