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Zohran Mamdani visited Brooklyn mosque whose cleric called for ‘annihilation of Israel’
In a photo posted by Zohran Mamdani on social media, he can be seen beside cleric Sheikh Muhammad Al-Barr at the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge.
New York City mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani, on his campaign trail, had visited a Brooklyn mosque whose cleric had last year called for the “annihilation of Israel".
In a photo posted by Zohran Mamdani on social media, he can be seen standing beside cleric Sheikh Muhammad Al-Barr at the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge.
“It was a privilege to join Jummah prayers at the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge today,” Mamdani captioned the January 17 post.
The post was made five months after Al-Barr's sermon at the Brooklyn mosque, wherein he appealed to God to “liberate Palestine from the occupiers and the plunderers”.
“Oh Allah, annihilate those who occupied their lands, and those who betrayed and deserted them, and those who spilled their blood,” Al-Barr said in Arabic, according to New York Post.
Mamdani courts fresh political controversy on college admission
A fresh political controversy erupted with Mamdani at its centre, after a New York Times report on his college application to Columbia University in 2009.
The report stated that in his application, Mamdani had claimed both Asian as well as Black or African-American status.
Following this, the Democratic nominee's rivals slammed him for claiming African-American status in order to further his chances of admission to the university, at a time when the institution had race-sensitive affirmative action policies in place.
Incumbent New York City mayor Eric Adams said the identity was a “history, struggle and lived experience”, adding that it was not “a checkbox of convenience”.
Mamdani was born in Uganda to filmmaker Mira Nair and Indian-Ugandan academic Mahmood Mamdani. He says that he identifies as an “American born in Africa”.
However, Mamdani said he had checked multiple boxes on the college application form “to capture the fullness of my background”, while saying that there was no box for Indian-Ugandans.
