What’s Our problem with the DSA?

Twenty-five years ago, on September 11, 2001, Islamist terrorists attacked the United States, murdering nearly 3,000 people.

They didn’t attack us because we had failed to understand their grievances. They attacked us because they embraced an extremist political ideology that rejects democracy, equality, religious pluralism, and the fundamental dignity of human life.

That ideology is Islamism - a movement that seeks to impose religious supremacy through government, coercion, and, in its most radical forms, terrorism.

The threat did not end with the destruction of al-Qaeda’s camps or the death of Osama bin Laden. Islamist ideology continued to inspire attacks - in Boston, San Bernardino, Fort Hood, Orlando, and on New Year’s Day 2025 in New Orleans, where an attacker who pledged allegiance to ISIS drove a truck into a crowd on Bourbon Street and murdered 14 people. On October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists invaded Israel, massacred families, raped women, burned homes, and kidnapped civilians, including Americans. Hamas and al-Qaeda are not the same organization, but both belong to the same universe of radical Islam that glorifies death.

What does any of this have to do with the Democratic Socialists of America? The DSA is not an Islamist organization. But it helps make Islamist extremism sound acceptable. When terrorists murder civilians, the DSA downplays the religious extremism and Jew-hatred behind the violence. It calls that violence “resistance,” or “liberation,” and normalizes the idea that killing civilians can be justified if the killers claim to be fighting oppression. Then the DSA spreads that message into college campuses, campaigns, and City Hall.

On October 8, 2023, the day after Hamas murdered roughly 1,200 people, the NYC-DSA told its followers to come to Times Square in solidarity with the Palestinian people and their right to resist. It didn’t organize the rally, but it advertised it, and later deleted the post and apologized for the timing and the tone - but not the position.

Two days after the October 7 massacre, the DSA’s national organization posted a statement to its website. It called the attack “not unprovoked.” The DSA then promoted the campaign of Zohran Mamdani.

In August 2024, after Israel killed Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran and Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr in Beirut, the DSA’s International Committee published a statement mourning and honoring them as martyrs, and pledged unwavering solidarity with their movements. The DSA deleted the statement days later; martyr is not a word socialists normally use. It is the word terrorist organizations use to glorify their fighters.

On September 19, 2024, the DSA published an article, “Why Palestinians Engage in Armed Struggle,” in which the authors called violence a necessary component of national liberation.

On August 10, 2025, in a Chicago convention hall, DSA delegates voted and adopted Resolution 22, “For a Fighting Anti-Zionist DSA.” The resolution affirmed the Palestinian Thawabit, a 1977 doctrine whose central tenet is escalating armed resistance by any means necessary. The resolution also made support for BDS a condition of membership and endorsement, and made the sentence “Israel has a right to defend itself” an expellable offense. This resolution applies to every candidate who has accepted a DSA endorsement.

For years before the Treasury Department designated Samidoun a sham charity operating as an international fundraiser for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) - long designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the U.S. government - DSA chapters and working groups co-endorsed Samidoun campaigns, including a week of action to free the PFLP’s general secretary.

And then there is Zohran Mamdani.

On October 17, 2025, two days after telling a national television audience that he didn’t have opinions about the future of Hamas - a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization -  Mamdani campaigned at a mosque in Bedford-Stuyvesant. He posted a photograph with Imam Siraj Wahhaj, whom he called “one of the nation’s foremost Muslim leaders and a pillar of the Bed-Stuy community for nearly half a century.”

In 1995, Wahhaj testified as a character witness for Omar Abdel-Rahman, the cleric convicted of directing a plot to bomb the World Trade Center and destroy the Lincoln Tunnel, the Holland Tunnel, the George Washington Bridge - and even the United Nations. The government never called him as a witness. He volunteered, even though he was also on the government’s list of possible co-conspirators.

Thirty years later, Zohran Mamdani called him a pillar of the community.

Family members of those murdered on September 11 have signed a petition demanding that Mamdani stay away from the ceremony. They will speak at this rally.

This rally is not about anyone’s faith, and it’s not about party. Extremism disqualifies on the left and on the right.

The DSA supplies legitimacy to extremism. An Islamist movement can’t make its own case in America. It needs a translator - someone fluent in civil rights and anti-colonialism - to carry the argument into a lecture hall and a city council chamber without ever naming what it serves. This is what the DSA does, and it’s good at it.

Twenty-five years ago, this city learned what armed struggle means when it arrives here. Today, the DSA endorses that armed struggle.

Their headquarters are at 14 Jefferson Street, 1.4 miles from Ground Zero. On September 8, at 6:00 PM, we will be rallying there, and we are asking you to be there with us. United we stand.