A City Council policy event turns out to be a reunion for the mayor's inner circle, a Hamas-adjacent network, and a Chinese Communist Party funding operation

The invitation landed in City Council inboxes like hundreds of others do every week: We are hosting a policy briefing on Islamophobia tomorrow.

Six featured speakers. A sponsored event from Council Members Hanif and Krishnan. Policy experts, it said, but these experts are gaslighting and Muslim supremacy AgitProp.

Read the names on that speaker list, though, and what looks like a routine advocacy briefing looks considerably less routine. It is, if you know how to read it, a snapshot of the network that has spent a decade working its way from the protest line to City Hall, a network with documented ties to Hamas, a Chinese Communist Party-linked funding operation, and the administration that just moved into Gracie Mansion.

The invitation called it "an incredible discussion." On that narrow point, it was not wrong.

The Speakers

Mahmoud Khalil needs no introduction, nor do his 19 lawyers. Though the invitation frames him like a policy wonk who just happens to have opinions. He is the Columbia radical activist who led the 2024 encampment that produced sustained harassment of Jewish students. He spent 104 days in federal immigration detention on Hamas-related grounds before a judge released him on bail last June. He attended Mayor Mamdani's inauguration on January 1. Two weeks ago, Mamdani hosted him for iftar at Gracie Mansion. His deportation case remains active, appeals are ongoing, and the administration still wants him out of the country.

He is not a policy expert. He is the mayor's personal guest and the most famous pro-Hamas activist in New York City. But sure, policy briefing.

Badar Khan Suri is a Georgetown postdoctoral fellow arrested by DHS in March 2025 and held for months on allegations that he spread Hamas propaganda and maintained "close connections to a known or suspected terrorist, who is a senior adviser to Hamas." His father-in-law is Ahmed Yousef, longtime senior political advisor to Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh. A federal judge ordered him released; immigration proceedings continue. He has not been charged with a crime. He has also not been cleared.

Baher Azmy

is the legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights. He is also Mahmoud Khalil's personal attorney. The man who represented one speaker in his federal detention fight is appearing on the panel alongside that same speaker. This is not a coincidence. It is a coalition, and it would prefer you call it a briefing.

Rana Abdelhamid is a Democratic Socialists of America member running for the Assembly seat Mamdani vacated when he became mayor. She is a candidate in a live primary campaign. Calling her a "policy expert" here is like calling someone at a campaign rally a random citizen with opinions.

Asad Dandia is the most locally embedded of the six and requires the most careful accounting.

Dandia and the Surveillance That Turned Out to Be Right

Dandia is a Brooklyn community organizer, CAIR-NY alumnus, and close Mamdani ally. The press profile is familiar: founded a Muslim food charity, got infiltrated by an NYPD informant, sued the city with ACLU backing, won landmark reforms.

What that profile leaves out would fill a different kind of article.

The Raza v. City of New York lawsuit Dandia filed in 2013 named several co-plaintiffs, including Masjid At-Taqwa, the Brooklyn mosque led by Imam Siraj Wahhaj. The NYPD justified its surveillance of the mosque in court: the security team had been trained to disarm law enforcement, martial arts classes had been attended by convicted terrorists, the assistant imam raised money for terrorist groups. Wahhaj himself was named a possible unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and testified on behalf of the convicted perpetrators.

The lawsuit argued this was unjustified bigotry. Then, in March 2024, a federal judge sentenced Siraj Ibn Wahhaj, the imam's son, to life in prison without the possibility of parole. His two sisters and a brother-in-law received the same sentence. The charges: conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists, providing material support to terrorists, and conspiracy to murder federal agents. They had abducted a three-year-old child, built a fortified compound in New Mexico, and trained for armed attacks on FBI, CIA, and military personnel. When the child died in their custody, they waited for him to resurrect and launch a holy war. He did not.

Co-plaintiff in the lawsuit that dismantled NYPD surveillance of this network: Asad Dandia.

There is more. The same NYPD court filings stated Dandia regularly attended sermons by Mohammed Elshinawy, another Raza plaintiff, who preached to at least four people subsequently convicted on terrorism charges and organized a paintball event he explicitly called jihad training. The NYPD also alleged Dandia attempted to travel to Pakistan in 2011 with his close friend Justin Kaliebe. In February 2013, Kaliebe pled guilty in federal court to attempting to provide material support to Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Thirteen years in prison. His co-conspirator got twenty-five.

Dandia was never charged. He denies the NYPD's characterizations. These facts can all be true simultaneously. What cannot be squared with honest journalism is presenting him at a City Council policy briefing as a "community leader" without mentioning that his civil rights landmark dismantled surveillance of a network that subsequently produced federal life sentences, and that his closest associate in the period under scrutiny went to prison for trying to join Al-Qaeda.

Other than that, stellar lineup.

CAIR: Still on the Unindicted Co-Conspirator List

Dandia's career ran through CAIR-NY. A word on CAIR, since it keeps appearing in respectable contexts without its footnotes.

CAIR was founded in 1994 by Nihad Awad and Omar Ahmad, both members of the Palestine Committee, the Muslim Brotherhood's Hamas-support network in the United States. Both attended the 1993 Philadelphia meeting of Hamas supporters inside America. Internal FBI documents obtained during the Holy Land Foundation prosecution, the largest terrorism financing case in U.S. history, place CAIR among the Palestine Committee's organizational branches from the start. The trial produced a formal finding: CAIR was named an unindicted co-conspirator. The FBI formally severed contact in 2008 and has not restored it. In December 2023, the Biden administration cut off contact after CAIR's executive director said he was "happy to see" October 7.

The federal government has not designated CAIR a terrorist organization. It has treated it as one in every way that does not require issuing a press release.

The Money: $278 Million and a Family Tree

The Muslim Community Network did not invent this speaker list out of thin air. It emerged from an ecosystem. To understand the ecosystem, you need to understand what Asra Nomani has been publishing this week in a five-part Fox News Digital investigation: the House of Singham.

The Shanghai Network: How $278 Million Built a Pro-CCP Influence Machine Inside America

Digital investigation traces the rise of the Singham network to a weekend in Jamaica: like the opening scene of “The Godfather,” where families consolidate power, the wedding of Neville Roy Singham + Jodie Evans built the House of Singham.

The Unredacted | Truth Without PermissionGene Goodwin

Neville Roy Singham is a 71-year-old former tech mogul who sold his company for $785 million in 2017 and moved to Shanghai. According to Nomani's reporting, backed by financial filings and congressional testimony, Singham funneled $278 million through a network of nonprofits advancing Chinese Communist Party narratives while systematically destabilizing American institutions. The Justice, State, and Treasury departments are reportedly investigating. Goldman Sachs terminated his account in 2024. In footage Nomani obtained, Singham stands at attention as "The Internationale" plays, colleagues punching the air around him. Understated, he is not.

The New York City node of this network runs through JFREJ, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice. Specifically through JFREJ's political director, Alicia Singham Goodwin. She is Neville Roy Singham's niece. Her mother is Singham's sister and chairs a department at the state-controlled East China Normal University in Shanghai.

The Group Advising Mamdani on Jewish Safety Is Run by a CCP-Linked Operative’s Niece

New York’s Jewish Safety Plan Was Written by People Who Don’t Think Israel Has the Right to Exist

The Unredacted | Truth Without PermissionGene Goodwin

Goodwin ran "Jews for Zohran," the operation that delivered Jewish organizational credibility to Mamdani's mayoral campaign. She was arrested at an anti-Israel protest one week after October 7. At a JFREJ vigil shortly after, she accused Israel of "75 years of occupation, displacement, death and state violence." She is now the political director of an organization the Mamdani administration has identified as a partner on Jewish safety policy.

Rana Abdelhamid, Thursday's Assembly candidate speaker, received the formal endorsement of The Jewish Vote, JFREJ's electoral arm, in her 2022 congressional campaign. The chain goes: Singham money, Singham family, JFREJ political operations, Mamdani election, Mamdani administration, this briefing.

It is not a conspiracy theory. It is an org chart.

What the Briefing Actually Is

The word "Islamophobia" is carrying a lot of freight in that invitation. It is a term designed to preemptively classify scrutiny of the above as bigotry. When you note that one of the featured speakers is the personal guest of the mayor currently fighting federal deportation proceedings on Hamas-connection grounds, you are not raising a public safety concern. You are being Islamophobic.

Efficient framing. Credit where it is due.

The policy ask underneath the framing is this: the City Council should further constrain the police department that was successfully litigated into abandoning surveillance of the precise networks that subsequently produced federal terrorism convictions, and should further integrate those same networks into city government.

Council Members Hanif and Krishnan sponsored this event. They deserve a simple, public question: did they know who was on this speaker list when they signed their names to it?

The record of the people assembled for this "incredible discussion" is, in fact, extraordinary. Just not in the way the invitation suggested..

The Unredacted is an independent investigative publication covering NYC politics, national security, and institutional networks. Source material: Fox News Digital (Asra Q. Nomani, five-part series on the House of Singham, March 2026); DOJ press releases (United States v. Kaliebe, EDNY 2013; United States v. Wahhaj et al., D.N.M. 2024); GWU Program on Extremism, "The Hamas Networks in America" (2023); InfluenceWatch; public court records.