What Would the "Falling Man" Think of Mandami's "Aunt"?

Unlike Zohran's "aunt" or Obama's "grandfather," this poor soul was real.

“I want to use this moment to speak to the Muslims in New York City,” said a tearful Zohran Mandami on Friday. “I want to speak to the memory of my aunt who stopped taking the subway after September 11 because she did not feel safe in her hijab.”

The “Falling Man” did not feel safe either. Rather than burn alive, this humble worker, name and ethnicity still unknown, jumped from the Windows on the World Restaurant to a sure death more than 100 stories below. AP photographer Richard Drew faced instant backlash for taking the photo, but in the years since people have come to see what Elton John has described as “the most beautiful image of something so tragic.”

The Falling Man was one of 2,753 people killed in New York City by Muslim terrorists on September 11, 2001, among them 343 firemen and 60 police officers. And Zohran literally weeps about imagined dirty looks for an imaginary aunt? Even before the “aunt”hoax exploded—and more about that in a minute—Mandami’s comments should have cost him the vote of every New Yorker who remembers the events of September 11, 2011.

Leftists would rather not talk about the Falling Man. Mandami’s “aunt” is more their style. By 2001, they had already taken on the procrustean task of shoehorning Islam into the Rainbow Coalition. True, even the biggest slacker in Logic 101 could have sensed a dust-up coming when people who celebrate gays and people who savage them tried to hammer out a multicultural Ten Commandments, but leftists and Islamists managed to find common ground in, of course, their shared victimization.

Ironically, the word first “Islamophobia” appeared in the New York Times on September 9, 2001. Later, at a forum on Capitol Hill, moderate Muslim Abdur-Rahman Muhammad blew the whistle on the word’s origins. He told of attending a meeting some years prior in Northern Virginia. Envious of the success homosexuals enjoyed with “homophobia,” Muslim activists improvised their own one-click slander with “Islamophobia.” According to Muhammad, they planned to use the word “to beat up their critics.”

By the time Obama declared his candidacy in 2007, “Islamophobia” had found its rightful place in the Left’s defamatory arsenal. In August 2010, as president, Obama used the occasion of a White House dinner celebrating Ramadan to beat up critics for opposing a proposed mosque near Ground Zero in lower Manhattan. “This is America, and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable,” said Obama. By 2016, he was routinely generating headlines such as this one from NBC News, “President Obama Asks All Americans to Fight Islamophobia During First Mosque Visit.”

By 2025, Marxists like Mamdani had perfected the Islamophobia scam. He had likely been telling the “aunt on the subway” story for years, but when he told the story publicly, citizen journalists quickly picked it apart. As it turns out, his only aunt, Masuma Mamdani, does not wear a hijab. In 2001, as she does now, Aunt Masuma lived a long subway ride from Manhattan in Tanzania.

Aunt Masuma, not an obvious target.

With the truth closing in, Mandami pulled “an Obama.” In the way of background, on the stump in 2002, the crafty Obama offset his opposition to war in Iraq by asserting his patriotic credentials. “My grandfather signed up for a war the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed, fought in Patton’s army,” said Obama. “He saw the dead and dying across the fields of Europe; he heard the stories of fellow troops who first entered Auschwitz and Treblinka.”

By Memorial Day 2008, under pressure, Obama was now claiming that it was his “uncle” who was in Patton’s army. This uncle did not just “hear stories” about Auschwitz. He was now actually “part of the first American troops to go into Auschwitz.” When reminded that his mother was an only child and his father a Kenyan, Obama designated his “great uncle” as the liberator of Auschwitz. This proved problematic as well because Auschwitz, as critics gleefully pointed out, was actually liberated by the Soviets.

In similar spirt, Mamdani switched out his “aunt” for his father’s cousin, “Zehra fuhi,” "who conveniently “passed away a few years ago.” The word “fuhi” allegedly means paternaI aunt in Urdu. What it really means is that no will be able to find a photo of the elusive Ms. Zehra. This should not surprise. In their pursuit of the larger truth—pravda—Marxists have historically scorned any petty factual truth—istina—that stood in their way. The system had a name—”lying for the truth.” Get used to it.

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