Mayor Zohran Mamdani has never treated CAIR as a problem, and New York taxpayers are still paying the groups tied to it. He took political help from CAIR-linked PACs, hired from the same network, and City Hall now acts like the paper trail is a smear instead of a record.
Texas and Florida designated CAIR a terrorist organization. The UAE did it years earlier.
CAIR spent years selling itself as a civil-rights shop. Prosecutors listed it as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation case, the largest Hamas-financing trial in American history. A CAIR board member later drew a 65-year sentence in that same world of cases.
None of that stopped CAIR-tied money from becoming one of the biggest institutional boosts behind Mamdani’s rise. Linda Sarsour said it out loud at a CAIR conference: the Unity and Justice Fund, the CAIR-backed super PAC, was the largest institutional donor to the pro-Mamdani PAC.
Campaign records showed two gifts from the Unity and Justice Fund into New Yorkers for Lower Costs: $25,000 on May 30, 2025, which is on the FEC report, and $75,000 on June 16, which Politico confirmed when it reviewed the filings. Added together that is the $100,000 figure. The later running total on Transparency USA is $120,000.
CAIR’s 501(c)(3) can deny writing a campaign check. That is technically true. The PAC Linda Sarsour called “the CAIR super PAC” on a CAIR stage still wrote those checks, and CAIR Action’s own director was its treasurer (Jerusalem Post).
After the election, CAIR and CAIR-NY treated the win as theirs. They called it a “historic turning point” and a rebuke of “anti-Palestinian politics.” They stood with Mamdani when hewent after Netanyahu and framed pushback as bigotry. Then he staffed City Hall from the same network. Three cofounders of a group that blamed Israel for October 7 landed administration jobs. One of them had already done a tour at CAIR-NY.
The city money never stopped. The Muslim American Society’s Brooklyn shop took more than $265,000 in Council discretionary funds. Then it hosted a fundraiser where vendors sold trinkets for Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine — all U.S.-designated terrorist organizations. After the story broke, the Council still sent another $85,000. Leadership promised better vendor screening. The checks cleared. MAS people sat on Mamdani’s transition team.
Sarsour’s old shop, the Arab American Association of New York, had already pulled more than $4 million from city and state coffers. Watchdogs mapped tens of millions more flowing to groups tied to Mamdani allies. New York’s matching-funds program made it worse. Small donations from staff at outfits like ICNA got multiplied with public cash. Taxpayers were not just watching the network. They were helping pay for the campaign that put its preferred mayor over a $100 billion budget.
This is not a one-off association. Years earlier, Mamdani recorded a track that sent “love to the Holy Land Five” and told listeners to look them up, the men convicted in the Hamas-financing case that also named CAIR. He has not spent his mayoralty drawing a line under any of it. The answer from his corner is the same every time: call the questions Islamophobia and change the subject.
That dodge only works if you ignore the Holy Land record, the state designations, the vendor tables hawking Hamas and Hezbollah paraphernalia in Brooklyn, and the Council votes that followed.
This week made it harder to miss. Days before the 25th anniversary of September 11, Mamdani signed remembrance orders and then handed the ceremonial pen to an aide who once represented an al-Qaeda defendant. Allied groups still collect city money after selling terror souvenirs in Brooklyn. City Hall made the hire and signed the grants. The rest is commentary.
New Yorkers are allowed to ask why their taxes keep following that money trail. The receipts are already in the Council ledgers and the FEC filings. City Hall can keep calling it a smear. The documents do not.
