Brad Lander Walked Into a Mosque to Prove His Loyalty. The Imam Prayed for His Slaughter.

The Jewish progressive leading Dan Goldman by 34 points is the textbook case of an old coalition. Socialists trade Jews for power. The mosque sermon was the receipt.

Last week, former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, Democratic candidate for Congress in NY-10, walked into the Al-Khoei Islamic Center in Jamaica, Queens. Al-Khoei is a Shi'ite mosque well outside the Brooklyn-Manhattan district Lander is running to represent. He came anyway. He had something to prove.

Lander, who is Jewish, told the congregation he is "a very proud Jewish New Yorker." He then said that "Israel's genocide in Gaza" is "a desecration, a violation of the understanding that everyone is created in God's image." He called this denunciation "a Jewish requirement." He added that the Israeli "occupation" of Lebanon is "on its way potentially to being a genocide as well." He pledged to vote against any further US military aid to Israel. He told the worshippers that, if elected, he hoped to build the same kind of partnership in Congress with Representatives Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib that he has built with Mayor Zohran Mamdani in New York.

Then he recited, in Arabic, the Quran's Surat al-Ikhlas, Chapter 112. David Frum, who is Jewish, identified the verse in print the next day. It is an Arabic-language denunciation of the Christian doctrine of the divinity of Jesus Christ. "Jewish candidates for office normally show more respect for the majority faith in this country," Frum wrote. Daniel Greenfield at Frontpage noted that Lander could have chosen Surah 109, which contains the line "for you is your religion, and for me is my religion." Lander chose the divine-unity verse instead. It was not a verse about coexistence. It was a verse about submission.

After Lander finished, the imam led the congregation in the Ziarat of Imam Mahdi, recited every Friday by Shia worshippers. The prayer asks the messianic Mahdi to bring "the killing of the infidels with your sword."

That is the transaction. That is the entire piece. A Jewish candidate for Congress walked into a mosque, denounced his own people's state in theological language, recited a verse from a Muslim holy book in Arabic, and the imam responded by praying for the killing of infidels. Lander stood there for it. He came back to the district he is actually running to represent and pretended this was outreach.

It was an audition.

WHO RUNS THE MOSQUE

Al-Khoei's spiritual leader is Sheikh Fadhel Al-Sahlani, a native of Iraq who has held his pulpit in Queens for decades. The Washington Free Beacon's Adam Kredo published a profile of him hours before MEMRI released the Lander clip. The profile was not speculative. It quoted Al-Sahlani's own words.

In January 2006, Al-Sahlani told the New York Sun's Russell Berman that the figure of six million Jews killed in the Holocaust "has been exaggerated." "The numbers which have been mentioned are too much," he said. He allowed that the killing of Jews during the Second World War was "an injustice." He did not specify how much of an injustice.

In April 2006, in a follow-up with Walter Ruby at BeliefNet, the sheikh said there are "great scholars" who dispute the Jewish death toll and who believe the Holocaust was "done by the Zionists." Asked who those scholars were, Al-Sahlani named the British Holocaust denier David Irving, then imprisoned in Austria on charges of Holocaust denial. He confirmed Irving by name.

On November 3, 2023, twenty-seven days after the Hamas massacre at the Nova festival and in southern Israel, Al-Sahlani delivered a sermon from the same pulpit Lander would later stand at. "What we are witnessing is that one movement, Hamas, has made a big difference not only for the Arab Muslim world, but the whole world, the whole world, mashallah." The footage is live on the Imam Al-Khoei Foundation YouTube channel. He praised the slaughter, in the present tense, in English, on camera, in Queens.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani has visited Al-Sahlani at least three times since January 2025. At Ramadan in February 2026, Mamdani told the congregation that "it feels like returning home to be here." Photographs from the event show him shaking the sheikh's hand. Mamdani's press secretary, Sam Raskin, told the Free Beacon that the sheikh's views are "diametrically opposed to the mayor's values." The mayor declined to condemn the sheikh personally.

Brad Lander walked into that institution and announced that the Mamdani-Omar-Tlaib coalition is the future he wants to build.

THE OLD ALLIANCE

The Red-Green alliance is not a new analytical category. It's been documented and exposed by Asra Nomani in her Woke Army. It was named in David Horowitz's 2004 book Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left. It was made intellectually respectable by Paul Berman in Terror and Liberalism and by Nick Cohen in What's Left? It describes a specific coalition: Western leftists who see in radical Islam a fellow traveler against American power, capital, and the Jewish state, and who are willing to subordinate their stated commitments to gay rights, women's rights, and religious pluralism in exchange for street numbers and electoral coalition.

The Red half supplies institutional cover, money, and progressive legitimacy. The Green half supplies foot soldiers, theological intensity, and a willingness to escalate. The trade is straightforward. Socialists get to claim a global anti-imperial movement. Islamists get to claim the moral high ground inside Western democracies. The losers are everyone the coalition has to throw overboard: Jews, gays, dissident Muslims, Iranian women, anyone who has noticed the contradictions.

Lander is the canonical Red-Green Jewish broker. He gives the coalition what it cannot otherwise buy: a Jewish face for the campaign against the Jewish state. He gives Mamdani a halachic permission slip. He gives Omar and Tlaib a co-religionist of the people they want to disempower. The 57 to 23 Emerson number is not an accident. The Democratic primary electorate in NY-10 wants this coalition. They want Goldman, the Jewish incumbent, removed. They want the Jewish progressive who will go to Queens and recite the Quran in their name.

This is a feature.

WHAT JEWS HAVE SEEN BEFORE

In the 1920s the Yevsektsiya, the Jewish section of the Soviet Communist Party, took the lead in suppressing Hebrew, Zionism, and traditional Jewish religious life across Soviet territory. The Yevsektsiya was made up of Jews. They were the cadre Stalin used to liquidate Jewish institutions because the optics required Jewish enforcers. They were dissolved in 1929. The leadership was purged in the late 1930s. The pattern closed with the Doctors' Plot in 1953.

In 1979 the Iranian Tudeh Party, the country's Marxist-Leninist apparatus, made common cause with Ayatollah Khomeini against the Shah. The Tudeh provided organizational muscle and ideological respectability. The clerics took power. Within four years the Tudeh leadership was imprisoned, tortured into televised confessions, and executed. Khomeini did not need them after the throne fell.

There is a structural reason for this. Coalitions assembled across an unbridgeable theological gap survive only as long as the more militant partner needs the more secular one. Once power consolidates, the brokers are unnecessary. The Yevsektsiya stopped being useful when the Jewish religious infrastructure was already destroyed. The Tudeh stopped being useful when the Shah was already gone. The Jewish progressive who delivered his community to the Mamdani machine stops being useful the morning after the primary.

The Al-Khoei imam said it out loud. He stood at the same pulpit Lander had just stood at and prayed for the killing of infidels by the Mahdi's sword. Lander was the infidel in the room. So was every other non-Muslim who had walked in that day. The prayer did not make an exception for the Jewish New Yorker who had just recited Surat al-Ikhlas.

He came looking for partners. They prayed for his slaughter. He smiled and went home to Brooklyn.

THE CONSTITUENCY

The Emerson College / PIX11 poll fielded May 16-17 has Lander at 57 percent, Goldman at 23, undecided at 20. Voters under 40 break for Lander 73 to 15. The Kalshi and Polymarket prediction markets put Lander's win probability at 94 and 88 percent. The Democratic primary is June 23, 2026. The Goldman campaign disputed the numbers and pointed to an internal poll showing a closer race. The Free Beacon's Adam Kredo characterized the underlying trend correctly: the Mamdani electorate is the Lander electorate, and it is the youngest, most progressive, most Brooklyn-based slice of Democratic primary voters.

This is the coalition. It is not hiding. It elected Mamdani in November 2025 on the explicit pledge to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu if he set foot in the city. It revoked the IHRA definition of antisemitism on day one. It installed Phylisa Wisdom, of the anti-Zionist New York Jewish Agenda, at the Office of Antisemitism. It is now running Lander to clear the Jewish Democrat out of NY-10 and replace him with the Jewish progressive who will vote with Omar and Tlaib.

The Red-Green coalition is not a theoretical category at this point. It is a functioning operation with a primary calendar, a polling lead, and a candidate willing to recite a sectarian Arabic supplication at a Holocaust-denier's mosque to seal the deal.

Some Jews refuse to learn from history. Brad Lander is not refusing to learn. He has learned. He has read the room. He has identified which coalition will deliver him a House seat, and he has decided that the seat is worth the pulpit, the imam, the partnership, and the prayer.

The June 23 primary will tell us how many Democrats agree.