Is Mamdani’s Momentum a Demographic Phenomenon?

Does Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani’s rise in the polls reflect New York City’s surging Muslim population? The question transcends the mayoral race, says Ira Stoll in “The Editors” substack, citing “evidence that America’s largest city matches the global trend of Islam gaining ground owing in part to birth rates and migration.” The Times calls Mr. Mamdani’s candidacy “a watershed moment for Muslim New Yorkers,” noting that 1 million Muslims live here.If that number is correct — Mr. Stoll reports that there is some reason to be skeptical — it means that the number of Muslim New Yorkers could now exceed the city’s Jewish population. That amounts to a demographic shift, and a largely under-reported one, with significant implications for the future of the city. The nation, too, considering New York’s importance in national industries like finance, publishing, broadcasting, and the press.Mr. Stoll points to an estimate by a Muslim group, Emgage, claiming that the city has “around one million Muslims.” In February, Mayor Eric Adams’s office reported that “one in nine New Yorkers” is Muslim, suggesting 942,000 Muslims are resident here. That figure is on the rise. Yet while 2 million Jews lived here in the 1950s, a Jewish charity, the UJA-Federation of New York, estimated there were but 960,000 Jews here in 2023, Mr. Stoll reports. Mr. Mamdani’s ascent, in Mr. Stoll’s telling, amounts to “a demographic race with political implications.” The Times says “more than 350,000 Muslim New Yorkers are registered to vote,” citing the Council of American-Islamic Relations, though “only about 12 percent cast ballots in the last mayoral election, in 2021.” Yet with just more than a million New Yorkers casting ballots in the Democratic primary, the Muslim vote could well have been critical.Mr. Stoll declines to make “value judgments,” he writes, “about whether this demographic change is good or bad.” That’s a sentiment these columns endorse. After all, the right of free religious exercise is part of America’s constitutional bedrock, enshrined in the First Amendment. That’s no reason, though, to shy away from a clear-eyed appraisal of the political and cultural impact of a growing Muslim population at New York.If a larger Muslim populace “contributes to the election of a mayor who is a socialist and who backs a boycott of Israel, that is certainly a cause for concern,” Mr. Stoll contends. While most Muslims are peaceful and law-abiding, the impending anniversary of the 9/11 attacks is a reminder that militant sects within Islam have been, and are, associated with fomenting terrorism. That tendency within Islam has bedeviled politics and culture across the West.Feature, say, the murder in 2015 at Paris of the staff of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and other attacks across the country by Muslim extremists. These incidents raise fears that France, where Muslims now comprise 25 percent of the population younger than 25, as our Michel Gurfinkiel reports, could face a national identity crisis. Europe’s troubles could reflect, in part, the lack there of an assimilative creed like America’s “melting pot” ideal, though. Too often on the left, discussion of the perils of Muslim extremism is stifled on grounds of “Islamophobia.” Yet the topic could prove unavoidable. In “a city that was once the largest Jewish population center in the world,” Mr. Stoll sounds a caution over the waning number of Jewish residents and the Muslim rise. It points, he says, to a further risk of a Mamdani mayoralty that “rather than merely marking a demographic transition it could accelerate it.”

Is Mamdani’s Momentum a Demographic Phenomenon?

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