Zohran Mamdani Cozies Up to Holocaust Denying Queens Sheikh Who Called Jewish Death Toll 'Exaggerated'
Plus, Graham Platner disparaged Army soldiers in deleted Reddit posts: 'Full of fat, lazy trash who would rather not be in uniform'
New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani has developed a close relationship with an influential Muslim sheikh who happens to have a history of Holocaust denial, the Free Beacon’s Jon Levine reports.
Mamdani has met with Sheikh Fadhel Al-Sahlani of the Al-Khoei Islamic Center in Jamaica, Queens, on at least three occasions since January 2025, including most recently in February, when Mamdani smiled while shaking Al-Sahlani’s hand and said it “feels like returning home to be here.” Al-Sahlani, a native of Iraq, has wielded influence from his perch for decades, having met with former British prime minister Tony Blair in October 2001. He’s also argued that the figure of six million Jews killed in the Holocaust is “exaggerated.”
“The numbers which have been mentioned are too much,” Al-Sahlani told the New York Sun in January 2006. “The numbers, the reasons, we have to study more.” Al-Sahlani’s comments came as then-Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was calling the Holocaust a “myth” and planning a conference to “Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust.” Al-Sahlani endorsed the conference, saying there is “nothing wrong with studying more.” He also endorsed Ahmadinejad’s call for Israel to be “wiped off the map.”
“It is a kind of dream,” Al-Sahlani said. “But we have to be realistic.”
The author Walter Ruby followed up with Al-Sahlani months later under the belief that the Sun might have treated him “unfairly.” Al-Sahlani told Ruby that there are “great scholars—specialists in the Holocaust” who “say the number of victims is less than six million.” Asked if one of those scholars was disgraced Nazi apologist David Irving, Al-Sahlani replied, “Yes, I believe that is the person, and probably there are others.”
Ruby said he was saddened that the interview “may further deepen Al-Sahlani’s isolation from the American religious and political mainstream.” Instead, Sahlani’s stature has grown with Mamdani’s election.
Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner called the U.S. Army an “awful” organization and disparaged its soldiers as “fat, lazy trash who would rather not be in uniform,” the Free Beacon’s Alana Goodman reports.
“The Army does things differently, and as a whole, they do things much worse,” Platner posted to Reddit in March 2019 under the username “P-Hustle,” which he deleted prior to launching his Senate campaign. “As an organization it’s awful. Full of fat, lazy trash who would rather not be in uniform.” One month later, in April 2019, Platner wrote that “as a whole,” the Army “is absolute trash,” “absolutely lacking in the warrior ethos,” and “generally attracts a lower standard of person.”
Platner, the de facto Democratic nominee to face Republican senator Susan Collins in November, served in the Marines before reenlisting in the Maryland Army National Guard. He “has struck inconsistent notes about his military service,” Goodman writes. “On the one hand, he has made it a central part of his Senate campaign, touting his status as a ‘Marine and U.S. Army veteran’ who enlisted in the Marines and later served as an Army ‘rifle team leader.’ At the same time, he has said he ‘didn’t do anything good for America’ when he was ‘in uniform’ and attacked prominent U.S. veterans.”
Platner, for example, called U.S. military officers “gay” and disparaged an Army soldier who was wounded by Taliban machine gun fire in Afghanistan and received a Purple Heart. “Dumb motherf—er didn’t deserve to live,” Platner wrote in response to helmet camera footage showing the soldier’s firefight. “At least his stupidity and fat ass wheezing are available for all future infantrymen to witness and hold in contempt. Poor marksmanship on the Taliban’s part is the only reason this mouthbreather made it home.” Platner also wrote of wanting to “beat up” Republican senator and combat veteran Tom Cotton and called Rep. Seth Moulton and former Rep. Peter Meijer, both of whom served in the Iraq war, “asshats.”
Elsewhere:
Federal prosecutors in Florida charged former Cuban president Raúl Castro, the brother of the late Marxist dictator Fidel Castro, with murder and conspiracy to kill U.S. nationals in relation to the Cuban military’s downing of two U.S. civilian airplanes in 1996. It marks “an escalation in the Trump administration’s pressure campaign against the Cuban government,” CBS News reported.
Harvard University faculty members voted to cap the number of As given to undergraduate students in a bid to crack down on grade inflation, adopting a policy that was in place in Princeton until 2014, when the Ivy League school scrapped it “after finding it added a lot of stress to students,” the Washington Post reported. Two-thirds of grades awarded at Harvard were As in the 2024-25 academic year compared with a third in 2012-13.
House Democrats Josh Gottheimer and Jared Moskowitz are pledging to expel Texas Democrat Maureen Galindo, who has called to turn an ICE facility in the state into “a prison for American Zionists” and said Jews “worship Satan,” if she’s elected to represent Texas’s 35th Congressional District, where she advanced to a Democratic primary runoff in March.
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Platner sums up his own appearance rather than Army soldiers. He's a parasite that's kept on life support by his daddy!
This unseasoned Nepo baby is untethered from reality. Does not bode well for the economic survival of NYC. Will Brooklyn Jews move support to Republican party?