From my Facebook page. The anti Mamdani Muslim.

 Testimony to how influential your parents are in determining your whole mindset, including how you think about your society and your country. In this fascinating interview with Reihan Salam, a New Yorker of South Asian Muslim origins, like Mamdani, the contrast could not be more stark. One cannot underestimate the importance of the family in shaping one's whole life. People like Salam are on the side of hope against the side of fear and despair.

 And notice the influence of the Manhattan Institute.

 Here is a particularly interesting slice from toward the end.…

"That appears to be what drew the mayor’s parents, cosmopolitan and prosperous people, to the U.S. Mr. Mamdani was “raised as a very devoted son, steeped in these kinds of Marxist, Third Worldist ideas,” Mr. Salam says. “He’s said that he came to socialism in America through his commitment to the Palestinian cause.”

 This dovetails with Mr. Mamdani’s politicized professions of faith, which he sees “through the lens of discrimination, victimhood, and imperialism,” Mr. Salam says. “Islam is a kind of banner of oppression for him.” That disturbs Mr. Salam, the nominal Muslim.

“I assimilated into a Jewish-inflected America,” he says. “Many of my teachers and mentors were people whose ancestors had come to the country during the great wave of Jewish migration.” These were people who believed “in a pluralistic, meritocratic, overwhelmingly positive” vision of America. “These were people who fled pogroms. There was no going back.”

 He says he is “obsessed” with the Tenement Museum on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, which shows visitors what it was like to be an impoverished Jewish immigrant in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. “You were in the rag trade, but then your child or grandchild moved up and created this civic and philanthropic energy that came from that feeling of America as a refuge. That is really powerful.”

The Jewish American story “made everything in my life possible,” Mr. Salam says. “When I think about the people who just had this incredible openness to talent, I see their mammoth contribution to making America true to itself.” The “explosion of antisemitism” after Oct. 7, 2023, and “the so-called anti-Zionist and anti-Israel energy” that is so visible in Mr. Mamdani’s New York, is “driven by this incredible envy and resentment and hatred of a community that has enriched American life.”

 “I see this,” Mr. Salam says, “as a profound threat to my city. I see this as a profound threat to my America.” "

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Click below to read the whole interview.

 wsj.com

Reihan Salam: What’s the Opposite of Mamdani?