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Two retired FBI agents who investigated the 1993 World Trade Center bombing told Fox News Digital New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is “foolish” to campaign with an imam linked to the attack’s mastermind.
Mamdani attended prayers Friday at Masjid at-Taqwa on Fulton Street in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, later posting a smiling photo with Imam Siraj Wahhaj, a Brooklyn cleric who served as a character witness for the mastermind of the bombing and has been a longtime defender of convicted terrorists, raising funds for their legal defenses.
“Today at Masjid At-Taqwa, I had the pleasure of meeting with Imam Siraj Wahhaj, one of the nation’s foremost Muslim leaders and a pillar of the Bed-Stuy community,” wrote Mamdani, who was a toddler when terrorists parked a bomb-laden van in the garage beneath the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
Retired FBI agent Frank Pellegrino, who investigated the Feb. 26, 1993 attack, said seeing the frontrunner to be the city’s next mayor with Wahhaj left him disgusted.
“Zohran Mamdani’s embrace of Siraj Wahhaj is an example of Mamdani’s ignorance of history. Either he doesn’t know who Wahhaj is or he doesn’t care. Whichever it is, Mamdani looks foolish,” Pellegrino said.
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John Anticev, another retired FBI agent who was the lead case agent on the 1993 attack, told Fox News Digital Mamdani should know better than to court an endorsement from someone like Wahhaj.
“Everybody who is in politics should be aware of the people whose endorsement they’re getting,” Anticev said. “Imam Siraj Wahhaj has been a cleric who has endorsed a radical agenda.”
Wahhaj, born Jeffrey Kearse, founded the Brooklyn mosque in 1991 and has a long history of controversy. Following the World Trade Center attack, prosecutors noted 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 in the attack. Wahhaj also raised legal-defense funds for El Sayyid Nosair, who assassinated Rabbi Meir Kahane in 1990 and was also convicted of seditious conspiracy in connection with the 1993 bombing.
Wahhaj didn’t respond to a request for comment.
In court, Wahhaj served as a character witness for Abdel Rahman, calling him a “respected scholar.” In witness testimony, he also admitted raising legal defense funds for Nosair, who was initially acquitted in the killing of Kahane, but is now serving a life sentence.
For Muslims who oppose Wahhaj’s ideological interpretation of political Islam, called Islamism, Mamdani’s alliance with Wahhaj is a disturbing window into what his mayoral term could bring, with his allegiances to groups and leaders with Islamist sympathies and anti-American and anti-semitic views.
Muslim scholar Dalia Ziada, Washington, D.C., coordinator and research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy, said Wahhaj represents the same Islamist ideology that fueled decades of extremism in the Middle East.
“I am particularly concerned to see mosques used as political rallying platforms in the free and democratic United States,” she said. “By embracing Wahhaj, Zohran Mamdani is sidelining moderate Muslims and normalizing an extremist ideology that once inspired terror on American soil and still fuels radicalization within segments of the Muslim community today.”
Soraya Deen, founder of the Muslim Women Speakers Movement and a co-founder of the Clarity Coalition, a network of Muslims, ex-Muslims and allies challenging Islamist extremism, heard Wahhaj for the first time 20 years ago in a talk to Muslim youth in Los Angeles.
“I was stunned and bewildered by his call to destroy America and make Islam great,” she said.
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Deen called the photo of Mamdani with Wahhaj disturbing, noting, “A theologian spewing hatred for the United States — and Mamdani smiling beside him, calling him ‘one of the nation’s foremost Muslim leaders’ — is dangerous for America and dangerous for Muslims.”
In the photo, there isn’t a woman to be seen, because Wahhaj also practices the interpretation of Islam that denies women access to the main hall of mosques, believing they would sexually tempt the men praying inside. Deen said, “Despite the gender jihad women are facing in the Muslim world, Mamdani poses for a photo op that emboldens the men suppressing women’s rights.”
In June, a political action committee supporting Mamdani, “New Yorkers for Lower Costs,” accepted $100,000 donations from the “Unity and Justice Fund,” a political action committee tied to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a group designated an unindicted coconspirator in the trial of five Holy Land Foundation leaders. The five leaders were convicted of funneling about $12.4 million to Hamas and sentenced to decades in prison. Mamdani has included sympathetic lyrics about the “Holyland Five” in a rap. Earlier this year, Nihad Awad, a co-founder of the Council on American-Islamic Relations and a close ally of Wahhaj, said he was “happy” about the Oct. 7, 2023, rampage by Hamas terrorists into Israel.
Similarly, Wahhaj has preached a philosophy of exploiting America’s democracy to further a conquest for Islam. In 1991, according to a videotape of the event, Wahhaj told a gathering of Muslims: “I just want to say this. Brothers and sisters, in my opinion what the Muslims do in America will have a profound effect on Muslims everywhere on this earth. As long as you remember that if you get involved with politics, you have to be very careful that your leader is for Allah. You don’t get in politics because it’s the American thing to do. You get involved in politics because politics can be a weapon to use in the cause of Islam.”
In 2011, Wahhaj urged Muslims to donate to the legal defense of Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani neuroscientist dubbed “Lady Al Qaeda” for attempting to kill U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
“I think that she is innocent,” he told a Worcester, Massachusetts, fundraiser. “There’s reasonable doubt, and by law, if there’s reasonable doubt, you have to acquit.”
Siddiqui, who served as a courier to Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, the mastermind of the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center, is serving an 86-year sentence at a Texas federal prison for attempted murder and multiple other felonies.
In a 1992 talk, Wahhaj declared that if American Muslims united, “you wouldn’t have to vote for Bush or Clinton … we’d elect our own emir and give allegiance to him.”
Three years later, he shared his views on the U.S., saying, “You know what this country is? It’s a garbage can. Filthy. Filthy and sick.”
Former U.S. Navy Lt. Dr. Zuhdi Jasser witnessed a keynote address by Wahhaj in 1995 at the Islamic Society of North America conference, where the imam held up a Qur’an and declared his wish to replace the U.S. Constitution with Islamic law.
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“There’s nothing more clarifying on the Islamist extremism and dangers of Zohran Mamdani than his friendship with known anti-American jihadi Imam Siraj Wahhaj,” said Jasser, now president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy. “Mamdani’s fealty to one of America’s most radicalizing clerics tells you everything you need to 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 groups linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, including the alphabet soup of organizations that experts consider legacy groups 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 told the Wall Street Journal that a society ruled by strict Islamic law, where adulterers are stoned and thieves’ hands are cut off, “would be superior to American democracy.”
In talks, Wahhaj denounced the U.S. government as “controlled by Shaitan,” the Arabic word for the devil, urged Muslims not to befriend “non-believers,” condemned homosexuality as “a disease of this society,” and supported Islamic laws that punish sex outside of marriage with 100 lashes and stoning. He denounced Muslims befriending non-Muslims, saying, “Woe to the Muslims who pick kafirs,” or non-Muslims, “for friends.”
Wahhaj even instructed Muslims to bar their children from making friends outside the faith.
“Don’t you know our children are surrounded by kafirs?” he said. “I’m telling you, making the hearts of our children corrupt, dirty, foul. It’s clear, the principles are clear. Birds of a feather, they say, flock together. And so, when our Muslims hang out with the non-Muslim, you become just like them. You talk just like them. You do what they do, you dress the way they dress, you act the way they act, you want to be just like them, because their hearts are corrupt, and now they’re corrupting your heart.”
His personal life has also been shadowed by scandal. In 2018, three of Wahhaj’s children were arrested after authorities discovered 11 malnourished children living in a New Mexico compound where one of his grandchildren had died during an attempted exorcism.
The embrace of such a figure has ignited debate over Mamdani’s judgment and the Democratic Party’s tolerance for radical associations. Wahhaj remains a revered figure among some Islamist activists, including Linda Sarsour, who in 2017 called him “a mentor” and “my favorite person in the room.” Sarsour left the Women’s March, which she co-founded, amid accusations of antisemitism. She has led many of the anti-Israel marches since the Oct. 7 attack, leading chants of claiming Israel “from the river to the sea.”
For reform-minded Muslims, however, the image of a rising American politician celebrating Wahhaj carries grim symbolism.
“It sends the wrong message to moderate Muslims who are working hard to separate faith from extremism,” said Ziada. “And it tells the broader American public that those aspiring to lead this country have forgotten what extremist ideology once did to New York’s skyline.”
Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to Imam Siraj Wahhaj as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.
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