In the latest incident of Zohran Mamdani’s history coming back to haunt him, the Islamist Socialist candidate had in the past suggested that law enforcement was responsible for Anwar Al-Awlaki, the head of Al Qaeda in Yemen, becoming a Jihadist.

The context for Mamdani’s tweets is a New York Times article which describes the (useless) FBI surveilance of Al-Awlaki due to his ties to the 9/11 hijackers even as the Bush administration and the media brought him out as a representative of “moderate Islam”. The premise of the Times was that the reason Al-Awlaki left America and formally joined Al Qaeda was that he knew the FBI had monitored his visits to prostitutes.

For anyone who knows Islam (and the NYT doesn’t and instead assumed that being a religious ‘conservative’, Al-Awlaki was very worried about his congregation finding out), none of this was a big deal. Islam licenses concubines and does not expect men to remain monogomous. That’s a Jewish and Christian idea. Not long afterward, ISIS would make headlines by officially bringing back sex slavery.

The 9/11 hijackers patronized a strip club and Saudi and other Gulf elites routinely employ escorts.

The New York Times was trying to distract from the reality, that Al-Awlaki had always been a Jihadist who had pretended to be a moderate, with a new narrative, that he fled to join Al Qaeda, not because the Brotherhood network in America was being raided, but because he feared his sex life being outed.

(How fleeing to Yemen and becoming an Al Qaeda leader was supposed to stop his visits to hookers coming out is unclear and the Times doesn’t try to explain its conspiracy theory.)

Now Zohran Mamdani eagerly picked up this thread on Twitter and argued that there needed to be “proper interrogation” of the FBI’s “extensive surv. into Awlaki’s private life” and urged “discussion of how Awlaki’s knowledge of surv. eventually led him to alqaeda”.

Mamdani tried to blame America for Al-Awlaki’s Jihad. Anything to distract from Islam.