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Palestinian-American activist Linda Sarsour issued a thinly veiled warning Saturday night to New York City mayoral front-runner Zohran Mamdani, saying she will “hold Zohran accountable” to fulfill campaign promises, including dismantling an NYPD unit that polices terrorism threats, protests and riots.
In a livestream on Instagram, obtained by Fox News Digital, Sarsour told her followers that electing Mamdani doesn’t mean that the network that supports him will “let him do whatever the hell he wants when he gets to City Hall.”
Mamdani’s mentor Linda Sarsour said during an Instagram livestream she “will hold him accountable”. (Reuters)
“I just want you all to know I’m not going to work for the Zohran administration,” Sarsour said. “I’m not going to work in City Hall, because, guess what? There gotta be people like me willing to stay outside.”
“Our friends on the inside need people on the outside to hold them accountable. To say, ‘We see you. We’re paying attention.’”
Neither Sarsour nor MPower Action, the political nonprofit she co-founded, responded to a request for comment.
A member of the Democratic Socialists of America along with Mamdani, Sarsour has been like a political mentor to Mamdani. In 2017, they canvassed together for a city council candidate, Khader El-Yateem, endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America, in a race he lost. Not long after, Mamdani joined the board of the Muslim Democratic Club of New York, which Sarsour co-founded. She endorsed Mamdani’s winning race for the New York General Assembly and was an early supporter when he announced his race for the mayor’s job.
MPower Action is one of 110 groups in a wide coalition of Democratic Party affiliates working with labor unions and Muslim and South Asian groups to elect New York City’s first Muslim mayor.
Activist Linda Sarsour, shown here protesting near Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) New York Field Office, has been described as a mentor to Mamdani. (Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images)
In the livestream, Sarsour said she and her coalition will be vocal should Mamdani fail to meet expectations.
“When he does something when he’s in City Hall and he’s wrong, I’m going to tell him he’s wrong,” she said.
“Voting for Zohran is not, ‘We’re going to vote for Zohran and just let him do whatever the hell he wants when he gets to City Hall.’ Our job as a movement is we have to hold whoever goes to City Hall accountable,” Sarsour said.
Despite Mamdani regularly invoking his religious roots through the campaign, Sarsour rejected claims that Mamdani’s campaign is centered on religion.
“Our candidate is out there and just happens to be a Muslim,” she said.
She noted that he refrained from expressing his pro-Palestine activism.
“None of the campaign was ever like ‘Free Palestine’ or the Muslims are going to get extra rights. It just happens to be something that’s part of who Zohran is. But that’s actually not been his campaign.”
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The Mamdani campaign did not immediately return a request for comment.
On the campaign trail, Mamdani said he would keep Jessica Tisch as police commissioner and said later in a podcast that he would expect her to follow his directives, including disbanding the NYPD’s elite Strategic Response Group, which polices terrorism threats, protests and riots.
“I think everyone will follow my lead. I’ll be the mayor,” Mamdani said in the podcast.
Established in 2015, the NYPD has deployed the Strategic Response Group to anti-Israel demonstrations since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas invasion of Israel, when protests erupted across New York City, many led by the same groups now backing Mamdani’s campaign. Sarsour and Mamdani have participated in those protests. In November 2024, New York Mayor Eric Adams appointed longtime police veteran Tisch to be the city’s police commissioner.
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Sarsour said, “I wasn’t really happy about the news that he was going to keep Tisch on for the NYPD.”
She struck the same chord as Mamdani, saying, “What’s most important is that in New York City, the police commissioner works for the mayor. They are not a separate elected official. So that means if Zohran says to Tisch, ‘You gotta do A-B-C,’ Tisch gotta do what the mayor says.”
“Now, if she doesn’t do that and goes against the mayor, then that’s when we’re going to have to go to Zohran and be like, ‘You definitely made the wrong decision here,” Sarsour continued. “What are you going to do to hold your police commissioner accountable to the plan?’”
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Sarsour tacitly acknowledged the messaging success of Mamdani’s seemingly contradictory alliance of the Democratic Socialists of America with controversial clerics, like Siraj Wahhaj, who served as a character witness for one of the architects of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing that killed six people.
“You can’t be a Marxist and a jihadist and an Islamist and a fundamental Muslim, or whatever they call him, all at the same time,” Sarsour said. “You gotta pick a side. Either we’re theocrats or we’re leftists. Like these things don’t go together.”
Sarsour told her followers Mamdani will owe her and his other supporters if he wins.
“When Zohran gets inaugurated in January, and as we move forward with this mayor, we have to be the people outside,” she said. “Zohran is going to have to tell his own critics that are on the other side to basically say, ‘Look out that window, those people outside, these constituents, these activists, these organizers that are outside, I’m accountable to them, because they’re the ones that helped me get there.’”
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Sarsour also expressed support for two other Muslim candidates: Minneapolis mayoral candidate Amar Fateh, and Jersey City mayor Mussa Ali, who is endorsed by Emgage Action and CAIR Action, two 501(c)(4) Muslim political nonprofits also endorsing Mamdani.
Invoking the Arabic phrase for “God willing,” she added, “Inshallah, you know, we start a new type of politics, right?”
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