I am a newly minted American and a Turkish Jew. I watched, in real time, what happens when Thirdworldist Islamists take over a country that was trying — imperfectly, reluctantly — to be a secular democracy. I never thought I would have to watch the same West-hating, Thirdworldist Islamist movements from my birth country infiltrate my chosen home in America. Yet here they are, being welcomed — enthusiastically, uncritically — by people who call themselves progressives.

The man who crystallizes this danger is Zohran Mamdani, the new mayor of New York City.

Mamdani’s political method follows a recognizable pattern: use social justice language to win local elections, build institutional power quietly, then scale to the national level and reshape the country’s culture and institutions from within. This is not speculation. It is the documented strategy of both the Muslim Brotherhood and the Thirdworldist movements that provide it cover — and it has a track record. We have seen it work before. We have seen where it ends. I have seen where it ends.

In 1994, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan became mayor of Istanbul. In 1996, he said: “Democracy is like a tram. You ride it until you arrive at your destination, then you step off.” In 2001, he co-founded the AKP — presented as reformed, moderate Islamism, a reasonable, pragmatic party that secular liberals could support. They did support it. In 2002, it won a national majority. Post-2016, once power was consolidated after a failed coup, the transformation was complete. Turkey — once a model ally of Israel and the United States — became an Islamist mafia state that supplies arms to al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham, protects HTS in Idlib, deploys Syrian mercenaries to support Libya’s Muslim Brotherhood-linked government, and uses religious networks as instruments of foreign policy. The tram arrived. Erdoğan stepped off.

Mamdani is not Erdoğan, and America is not Turkey. But Mamdani is drawing from the same ideological well, running the same deceitful infiltration strategy on American soil, in American institutions. Both men presented themselves as reasonable, compassionate, pro-community. Both use the mechanisms of democracy to pursue goals that are fundamentally opposed to Western Civilization. Erdoğan wrapped his program in economic pragmatism and Muslim identity politics. Mamdani wraps his in anti-racism and postcolonial theory. The packaging differs. The trajectory does not. The danger is not that America becomes a caliphate. The danger — as Hussein Aboubakr Mansour has argued — is that its culture, its institutions, its political language become Thirdworldist slop: the same resentment-soaked, anti-Western grievance culture that hollowed out every society it captured from Istanbul to Cairo to Algiers. Mamdani is not an exception. He is a harbinger. But he is not only a Thirdworldist. He is Thirdworldism with an Islamist engine — the same grievance culture as his progressive allies, but powered by a 1,400-year civilizational project with its own strategy, its own institutions, and its own endgame. Thirdworldism opens the door. Islamism walks through it.

At his February 6th Interfaith Breakfast, Mamdani said: “I consider my own faith, Islam, a religion built upon a narrative of migration.” He invoked the Hijrah — the Prophet Muhammad’s migration from Mecca to Medina — and cited Qur’an 16:41 and the hadith of Islam returning as “strange.” He framed it as a story about welcoming strangers.

It is not. The Hijrah was the founding act of Islamic political power. From Medina, Muhammad built the first Islamic state, then launched the conquests and colonization project that ultimately destroyed the Christian civilizations of Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Turkey, and North Africa. Antioch was one of the five original patriarchs of the early church. Damascus is where Paul was converted. Alexandria was the intellectual center of early Christianity and home to the Coptic Church. These are not ancient abstractions — they are the graves of civilizations that once thrived and were systematically extinguished. Jewish communities that had existed for millennia in those lands are gone. The Yazidis are victims of ongoing genocide. Coptic Christians in Egypt are practically dhimmis and live in fear. This is what the Hijrah inaugurated. It is not an innocent metaphor, and invoking it at an official mayoral breakfast is not an innocent act.

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On February 20th, Mamdani attended Friday prayers at Al-Khoei Islamic Center. The center is tied to the Alavi Foundation — an Iranian front organization whose assets were seized by the U.S. government for sanctions violations and money laundering. Its leaders have been convicted of obstruction and investigated for weapons deals. The center’s network links to Hezbollah financiers who funneled cash through counterfeit goods and shell rentals. Mamdani could have chosen any mosque in New York City. He chose the one connected to the Iranian regime — a regime that is, at this moment, executing its own citizens in one of the worst campaigns of state terror in half a century. This is the regime whose network runs the mosque Mamdani chose. It is not a quiet nod. It is a declaration.

This is not coincidence. It is method. The Muslim Brotherhood’s 1982 document, “The Project,” lays out a 100-year strategy for global Islamic consolidation through patient infiltration of democratic institutions. The 1991 Explanatory Memorandum, discovered by the FBI, is even more explicit: it calls for “eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within,” forming tactical coalitions with progressive movements, and using civil institutions — NGOs, academic networks, media — as instruments of what it calls “civilizational jihad.”

Framed through the lens of civilizational jihad, Mamdani’s rhetoric, policies and appointments take a whole new meaning. Notice how Mamdani talks about America. The vocabulary is: racism, settler colonialism, imperialism. These words appear consistently and with intent. What is absent is any acknowledgment of what America actually is — the country that defeated Nazism, fought Soviet communism, built the world’s longest-running constitutional republic, and lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty by giving the world modern capitalism. This is not critique. This is contempt and Thirdworldist West-hatred I grew up with, dressed in the language of justice. To add insult to injury, Mamdani appointed Ramzi Kassem, who defended al-Qaeda operative Ahmed al-Darbi, as his Chief Counsel. The lawyer that defended the terrorists of the organization that murdered 2,977 Americans on September 11 is now the chief counsel of New York’s mayor.

None of this would be possible without the Thirdworldist left, which has made itself the willing vehicle for Islamist entry into American institutions. This is not naivety. It is ideological possession. Within hours of October 7th — before Israel had fired a single shot in response — student groups at America’s most prestigious universities held Israel “entirely responsible” for the massacre of its own citizens. Faculty signed open letters contextualizing the mass murder, rape, torture and kidnapping of civilians including women and children as “resistance.” Campus encampments spread across the country. Now consider: the Iranian regime is at this moment executing its own people for demanding basic freedoms — thousands murdered, dissidents tortured, women killed for removing the hijab. The same universities that erupted over Gaza have said nothing. The same faculty who signed letters have signed nothing. The same students who built encampments have built nothing. This is not a gap in attention. It is a diagnosis. The operating system of the American elite is not human rights. It is Thirdworldism. Within that framework, the Islamic Republic — as an anti-Western force — is on the protected side of the ledger. Its victims do not register. That framework now operates not only in universities but in newsrooms, law firms, human rights organizations, and the highest levels of government. It is not a cultural transformation. It is an ideological possession — and the possessed do not know they are possessed. Into this vacuum walks a movement with a 1,400-year-old answer to every question the West has stopped asking. The alliance is tactical on one side only.

The ideologically possessed do not see this. Iran’s revolutionaries did not see it in 1979. Khomeini allied with Marxist groups to overthrow the Shah. Once power was secured, he arrested, tortured, and executed his former allies. The useful idiots were used, and then they were eliminated. The Thirdworldist left believes it is using Islamism to advance its goals. It is being used. It has always been used.

So, when a dhimmi refusenik like me — who witnessed the Thirdworldist & Islamist takeover of his home country — hears all this: the Hijrah invoked at an official breakfast, Friday prayers at an Islamic Republic connected mosque, defenders of mass murderers appointed to City Hall — I hear two things, and both are alarming. The first is the theatrical staging of victimhood by a man of extraordinary privilege — a son of a Columbia professor and a celebrated filmmaker, educated at Bowdoin, embedded in every elite network in New York — performing the part of the oppressed outsider, extracting moral authority from an audience too credulous or too intimidated to notice the gap between the performer and the role. The second is what runs beneath the performance: a 1,400-year-old conquest narrative laundered through the vocabulary of diversity and inclusion. The Thirdworldist performance is how he moves through American institutions. The Islamist project is where he is taking them. I have seen where both lead. Today, secular democratic Turkey is no more. The Jewish and Christian communities that once defined the Middle East — the birthplace of Judaism and Christianity, the cradle of Western civilization itself — are gone. Destroyed, expelled, or reduced to dhimmitude. The one exception is Israel — the only successful resistance to this 1,400-year project — and it is precisely what Mamdani and his movement hate most.

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So what is to be done?

First, the West must remember what it is. The West’s core achievement is not technological or economic. It is moral. It is the idea that the individual human being is sacred and sovereign. That no king, no priest, no collective can override the conscience of a single person. Judaism posited that every human being is created in the image of God and therefore sacred beyond the reach of any earthly power. The law was given not to the king but to the people, and even the king was bound by it. No human authority was absolute. The orienting command of the whole enterprise was not to submit — which is what the word Islam means — it was to wrestle with God and choose life. Christianity universalized these ideas, placing love — not power, not law, not submission — at the center of the moral universe, and extending the dignity of the individual soul beyond tribe and nation to all of humanity. The Enlightenment secularized it — natural rights, constitutional government, the rule of law. The Judeo-Christian Tradition and the Enlightenment are the bedrock of Western civilization. A 3,000-year argument that the individual is not a tool of the state, not a cell in the body of the ummah, not raw material for someone else’s utopia. He is an end in himself.

Mamdani has told us, in his own words, what he intends to do with this inheritance. “We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” Every word is doing work. Frigidity — the rights of the individual recast as cold, sterile, something to be overcome. Rugged individualism — the founding ethos of the American republic reduced to a pathology. Warmth — the seduction, the promise that surrender will feel like belonging. Collectivism — the one word that connects every catastrophe of the 20th century. Every tyrant in history promised warmth. The collective always feels warm — until you try to leave it. This is not a policy proposal. It is a declaration of philosophical war against the foundation of Western civilization. Spoken plainly. In public. By the mayor of America’s largest city. Whether Mamdani is a conscious actor in this strategy or merely its most useful instrument is a distinction without a difference. The trajectory is the same: the Thirdworldist capture of American institutions packaged as the repentance of the West, driven by an Islamist engine.

To fight this trajectory and reverse it, the second order of business is to name the enemy precisely. Thirdworldists and Islamists. Both state their goals openly and repeatedly: the destruction of Western civilization. The correct response is to believe them. And then understand what drives them.

The underlying impulse is not a political program. It is something older and darker. It is Ressentiment. Not ordinary resentment — the passing emotion of someone wronged — but resentment elevated into a total explanation of existence. A moral framework. An identity. Nietzsche identified it with surgical precision. Dostoyevsky dramatized it in his Underground Man — a figure oppressed by no one, living in moderate comfort, yet unable to stop raging. He is offered friendship and refuses it. Offered love and destroys it. Because accepting either would mean relinquishing the grievance that gives his life its only structure. He needs the wound. The man of Ressentiment does not say “I am good.” He says “You are evil.” His identity is entirely reactive. The oppressor is not incidental to the worldview. He is structurally necessary. Remove him and the entire moral identity collapses.

This is the engine beneath every mask. Communism was its most powerful 20th-century vehicle — until it delivered 100 million dead. The Gulag. The Cultural Revolution. The Killing Fields. But Ressentiment does not die when its vehicle breaks down. It migrates. And it migrates most effectively when it attaches itself to a legitimate cause. Colonialism was real and brutal, and it needed to end. The anticolonial cause was just — peoples had a right to self-governance. But Thirdworldism took the moral authority of anticolonialism and pathologized it into a permanent indictment of the West — and only the West. The British Empire is a crime. The Arab conquests are not. European colonialism demands eternal penance. Turkish, Mughal, and Chinese imperialism require no reflection. The West was no longer wrong because of what it did. It was wrong because of what it is. Once the West is defined not as a civilization with sins but as a civilization that is sin, any force that opposes it becomes righteous by definition. This is where Islamism enters. It completes the circuit from the theological direction. The individual conscience is subordinated entirely to divine law. Any society built on individual freedom is an offense against God. The progressive-Islamist alliance works because both share a common enemy — the sovereign individual — even though their visions are mutually annihilating. This is not a coalition. It is a temporary convergence of Ressentiments. It will end the way such convergences always end. Americans who do not understand this architecture cannot fight it. Americans who do not teach their children to recognize it will watch them join it.

And this is the third order of business: reclaiming the institutions that transmit civilization or building new ones. This is exactly what is now being taught — in American schools and universities — as education. The grievance framework is not a supplement to the Western canon. It is a replacement for it. Children who should be learning that their civilization fought for 3,000 years to establish the dignity of the individual are instead being taught that their civilization is an unbroken record of oppression. They are being given Ressentiment as a birthright. The most urgent prescription is therefore the most fundamental: teach the young what the West actually is, what it cost to build, who its historical enemies are and why it is worth defending. A civilization that does not transmit its own story to its children has already agreed to die.

Fourth, say it plainly and in public: Western civilization is better. Not perfect — better. Not because it is more powerful or more prosperous — those are consequences, not foundations. The West is better because it is the only civilizational tradition that arrived at the principle that the individual conscience is sovereign and that power must justify itself to the person rather than the person to power. This is not the old colonial argument that the strong have the right to rule the weak. It is the opposite. The West is the only civilization whose defining principle prohibits that very claim. Every other civilizational tradition, including the ones now attacking the West, organizes itself around the opposite principle — that the person only exists to serve something larger, whether that is God, the state, the ummah, or the collective. The evidence is the lines in front of American consulates in every country on earth, including the ones whose governments denounce America most loudly. People vote with their feet. They are not fleeing toward collectivism. Political leaders who believe this must say it. The silence of the West on its own behalf is not humility. It is surrender.

Fifth, investigate and expose every politician, NGO, and academic institution with documented ties to the Thirdworldist-Islamist network. The research exists. ISGAP has traced the funding from Qatar, Hamas, and al-Qaeda into American universities, civil society, and political infrastructure. Vote out every complicit politician. This material should be public and acted upon.

Sixth, do not surrender to the accusation of Islamophobia. It is a tactical weapon, not an argument. The correct response — as Amir Pars has argued — is to turn the gaze back to the Islamists: Why is the energy spent denouncing the West never spent demanding that Muslim societies reform their own illiberal, oppressive, and barbaric practices? What exactly brings Islamist activists to the West if the West is so irredeemably evil? Why do 55 Muslim-majority countries fail on nearly every measure of human welfare — and why does the colonialism response collapse when applied to Turkey, which colonized others and was never colonized itself? Why are Singapore, Hong Kong, and South Korea — all formerly colonized — thriving? The question is not whether external factors played a role. It is whether they are sufficient as an explanation. They manifestly are not.

Seventh, stop accepting the enemy’s universalized moralistic slop as neutral — words like “international law,” “human rights,” “justice,” and “colonialism” that sound universal but are aimed in one direction only. When Mamdani invokes “international law,” he is not appealing to a shared moral standard. The regimes that champion international law most loudly — Iran, China, Russia — violate it most flagrantly. When “human rights” is invoked to condemn the West but never to condemn honor killings, the mass murder of Iranians, the persecution of apostates, or the execution of gay people in Islamic theocracies, it is not a principle. It is a weapon. Do not argue within a vocabulary that was designed to convict you. Name it for what it is and force the conversation back to substance.

These are not abstract prescriptions for me. I did not come to America to watch this happen again. I escaped it. I am a newly minted American and I love this country with a specificity that only someone who has seen the alternative can fully feel. Most Americans have not seen what I have seen, and I do not believe most of them understand the gravity of what is unfolding. The threat is real, it is patient, and it does not stop on its own.

What Americans must understand is that what they inherited is not a 250-year-old experiment. It is the product of a 3,000-year fight — from Jerusalem to Athens to Philadelphia — over a single question: can human beings govern themselves without a master? Nearly every civilization in history answered no. The West is the one that fought its way to yes. That answer is an anomaly. It has always been an anomaly. Every generation that inherited it had to defend it against new tyrants speaking new languages of domination. The men and women who built and defended this civilization — from the ancient world through the beaches of Normandy to the skies of Tehran — did not leave it to us so we could hand it over in exchange for the comfort of not being called a bigot, or for the cheap absolution of a guilt we were taught to feel for belonging to the only civilization that ever questioned its own sins. Their sacrifices bought us the chance to fight this battle with words, with votes, with truth — instead of with blood. That chance is not permanent. If we waste it, the next generation will not have it.

America is worth it. I owe this country everything it gave me — a life I could never have built in Turkey. We must fight for it as if our lives depend on it — because they do.

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