Mamdani’s “homecoming” February visit to the sheikh’s mosque followed two other trips across Queens to see Al-Sahlani in January 2025 and July 2025, public records show.

By Jon Levine, The Washington Free Beacon

New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani (D.) has developed a close relationship with an influential Muslim sheikh in Queens with a history of Holocaust denial, the Washington Free Beacon can reveal.

Mamdani has met with Sheikh Fadhel Al-Sahlani, imam of the Al-Khoei Islamic Center in Jamaica, Queens, on at least three occasions since January 2025—despite the cleric’s past statements casting doubt on the Jewish death toll from the Holocaust and on the Holocaust being reasonable cause for establishing the state of Israel.

“It feels like returning home to be here,” Mamdani said during his most recent known visit to the sheikh’s mosque during Ramadan celebrations in February.

Photos from the event show Mamdani with a broad smile, warmly shaking Al-Sahlani’s hand.

(Facebook)

The sheikh, a native of Iraq, has wielded influence from his perch in Queens for decades and has participated in events with previous New York City mayors, including Eric Adams and Michael Bloomberg.

But in January 2006, during an interview with the New York Sun, Al-Sahlani told the paper that the figure of six million Jews killed in the Holocaust “has been exaggerated.”

“The numbers which have been mentioned are too much,” Al-Sahlani told Sun reporter Russell Berman. “The numbers, the reasons, we have to study more.”

The sheikh had been asked about the Holocaust following similar statements from Iran’s fiery then-president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who called the Holocaust a “myth” contrived to justify the establishment of Israel, which he said should be “wiped off the map.”

Sheikh Al-Sahlani, according to the Sun, “voiced his support for Iran’s proposal to hold a conference on the Holocaust in Tehran, saying there is ‘nothing wrong with studying more.'”

Ahmadinejad’s now-notorious Iranian conference, called the “International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust,” took place in December 2006 in Tehran and attracted Holocaust deniers from around the world, some of whom used their skepticism about the Holocaust to cast doubt on Israel’s legitimacy.

When the Sun asked Al-Sahlani about Ahmadinejad’s desire for the destruction of Israel, the sheikh waxed poetic.

“It is a kind of dream,” he said. “But we have to be realistic. Even we have to accept a fact that we don’t like.”

The Imam did concede the killing of innocent Jews during World War II had been “an injustice.”

The Sun said they had surveyed more than a dozen other Muslim leaders—all of whom denounced Ahmadinejad, with some calling his comments “irresponsible” or “offensive.”

The sheikh’s comments made significant waves at the time.

“I find this both offensive and outrageous,” Queens assemblyman Brian M. McLaughlin told the Sun in a follow-up article in April—vowing to rescind a $1,000 grant to the Imam.

In a follow-up interview with BeliefNet in April 2006, the author Walter Ruby said he didn’t trust the Sun’s conservative bent and wanted to speak to the sheikh himself.

“I went to see Al-Sahlani last week predisposed to believe that he might have been treated unfairly by the Sun, or, at least, deserved a chance to set the record straight,” Ruby wrote.

“Yet his responses to me only deepened the hole he dug for himself in the original interview.”

Indeed, Al-Sahlani said in his interview with Ruby that, “There are great scholars—specialists in the Holocaust—who do not believe what the other group of people believe…They say the number of victims is less than six million. Some of them say the reason for the Holocaust was (that it was) done by the Zionists.”

Al-Sahlani told Ruby he couldn’t remember the names of the “great scholars,” but when Ruby asked him if one of them was David Irving, the discredited British Nazi apologist, Al-Sahlani replied, “Yes, I believe that is the person, and probably there are others.”

At the time he referred to Irving, the disgraced academic was sitting in a prison cell in Austria after being convicted of Holocaust denial.

In addition to engaging in Holocaust denial, Al-Sahlani has also celebrated Palestinian terrorism—a position which has become de rigueur for many close to Mamdani—including Mamdani’s wife.

On November 3, 2023, less than a month after Hamas’s October slaughter, Sheikh Al-Sahlani lauded the effort.

“One movement can make a great change,” he declaimed from the pulpit.

“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.”

Footage of the remarks remains live and is easily accessible on the Imam Al-Khoei Foundation, NY YouTube page. “Mashallah” means “Allah has willed it.”

After his 2006 interview with the sheikh, Ruby lamented that, “I am saddened that publication of this article may further deepen Al-Sahlani’s isolation from the American religious and political mainstream. Rather than shunning this pious and upright man, who is a source of spiritual inspiration for the nearly 3000 members of the Al-Khoei Islamic Center, would it not be preferable for Jewish and Christian leaders to reach out to Al-Sahlani in the hope that sustained communication will convince him of the moral squalor of belittling the genocide of six million Jews?”

But Ruby was wrong—far from marginal, Al-Sahlani’s stature has only grown with the election of Mamdani, the city’s first Muslim mayor.

Mamdani’s “homecoming” February visit to the sheikh’s mosque followed two other trips across Queens to see Al-Sahlani in January 2025 and July 2025, public records show.

In August 2025, Mamdani also took part in a fundraiser hosted at the Long Island home of the Al-Khoei Foundation’s representative to the United Nations, Syed Meesam Razvi.

In a 2020 interview with a fact-checker at Reuters, Al-Sahlani disputed the Sun article, telling the wire service: “at no time and under no circumstances did I mention that the tragedy of [the] Holocaust is not true, nor did I ever question the historical facts relating to the number of Jews killed during the Second World War.”​

But when reached by phone by the Free Beacon on Wednesday, Al-Sahlani declined to discuss his past statements about the Holocaust.

“It’s really difficult to talk with you people, because you change some statement and you put a very big what you call headline for a speech … but you just want to make it a bigger story. So I don’t comment on that one,” Al-Sahlani said.

When asked if the Oct. 7 attacks had been a good thing, Al-Sahlani responded, “I don’t know.” He said he had not attended Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust conference and does not have a close relationship with Mamdani.

In a statement to the Free Beacon, Mamdani spokesman Sam Raskin said the mayor condemned the sheikh’s words—but not the sheikh himself.

“Sheikh Fadhel Al-Sahlani’s Holocaust denial and comments about Hamas are diametrically opposed to the mayor’s values and everything he has said and stood for,” Raskin said.

“Like many elected officials, the mayor has visited many houses of worship and religious institutions across New York City. No visit should ever be construed as an endorsement of every statement made by every individual affiliated with those institutions.”

Raskin directed the Free Beacon to a 2021 tweet in which Mamdani wrote that, “We mourn & honor the memories of the 6 million Jews & millions of Romani, queer, & disabled people murdered by the Nazis.”

City Hall also pointed out that Adams and Bloomberg had visited the imam’s mosque.

Mamdani is far from the only city pol who has been glad-handing the Holocaust denier.

Darializa Avila Chevalier, an anti-Israel, Democratic Socialists of America-backed candidate making a primary challenge to Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D.) in New York City’s 13th congressional district, addressed the Al-Khoei Islamic Center on March 6, 2026, where she recounted her conversion to Islam three years earlier.

In February, Chevalier also attended a fundraiser hosted at the Long Island home of Syed Meesam Razvi.

The Al-Khoei Foundation also has had financial connections to Islamic radicalism.

According to tax forms, the group has received funding in the past from the Alavi Foundation, a charity originally established by the shah that U.S. officials later linked to the Iranian regime that overthrew him.

In March 2026, a settlement dissolved the Alavi Foundation and required $318 million to be paid to victims of Iranian-sponsored terrorism from its assets.

The post Mamdani paid multiple visits to Holocaust-denying sheikh who claimed Jewish death toll ‘was exaggerated’ appeared first on World Israel News.

For the emerging class of Bibas Deniers, the truth doesn’t matter. All that matters is how to absolve the killers and harm Israel.

By Rafael Medoff, Jewish Journal

There are Holocaust-deniers, who claim that accounts of the Nazi genocide are all a hoax. There are October 7 deniers, who say that Hamas did not commit any atrocities during its 2023 invasion.

Now it seems that a new type of denier is emerging—the Bibas deniers.

Killers and their cheerleaders hope to obscure their crimes in a mass of impersonal statistics. It’s hard for the public to identify with millions of victims.

But focusing on one or two individuals, with names and faces, dramatizes their suffering in a real and immediate way. That’s why the story of Anne Frank is so compelling.

And that’s why the murders of four year-old Ariel Bibas and his nine month-old brother, Kfir, by Palestinian Arab terrorists has become such a problem for Israel’s enemies.

“Anne Frank’s baby brothers,” as the human rights scholar Thane Rosenbaum has aptly described them, are no longer part of an anonymous body count.

The brutal murder of the two little boys in Gaza has come to symbolize the horrors of October 7 the same way the story of the young girl hiding in an attic in Amsterdam has come symbolize the Holocaust.

Haters of Israel understand that publicizing the truth about the Bibas murders generates sympathy for Israel and undermines the Palestinian Arab cause. That’s why they are trying to deny, or at least minimize, the Bibas killings.

The denial campaign is being led by Hamas itself—at least in its statements to the outside world. Hamas spokesman claim the boys were killed in an Israeli air strike.

Israeli forensic experts who examined the children’s bodies found that in fact they were murdered with the terrorists’ bare hands.

Afterward, the bodies were mutilated in a transparent attempt to disguise what had been done.

Who to believe? On the one hand, there are medical professionals who were trained in respected educational institutions.

On the other hand, there is an international terrorist group that calls the Holocaust a hoax and claims The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is genuine.

The Protocols is actually quoted in the Hamas charter, a fact which illustrates Hamas’s fealty to the truth.

For the emerging class of Bibas Deniers, the truth doesn’t matter. All that matters is how to absolve the killers and harm Israel.

The French politician and European Parliament member Rina Hassan tweeted that the Bibas children actually were killed by the Israelis. She reiterated that claim in a radio interview, in which she added that “Hamas has a legitimate cause.”

Omar Dajani, a law professor at the University of the Pacific, in California, recently retweeted a message asserting it is “unclear” whether Israel or Hamas killed the Bibas children. That’s like saying it is “unclear” whether the Nazis killed Jews, or they died from other causes.

Another way to help Hamas escape responsibility is the “everybody does it” approach.

Zaid Tyam, who is stationed in The Hague as the representative of Fatah, the Palestinian Authority’s ruling faction, said on Egyptian television last week that Israel is in no position to accuse Hamas of abusing hostages such as the Bibas children because Israel itself has “abused” the families of imprisoned terrorists by not releasing them sooner.

Meanwhile, Whoopi Goldberg, co-host of ABC Television’s The View, disrupted comments by one of her colleagues about the Bibas children.

Goldberg asserted that while many people say “Hamas is the bad guy,” that is not the whole story. “But what happened to Russia?” Goldberg asked. “Is Russia not bad with all they’ve been doing?”

Challenged by her co-hosts, Goldberg continued: “My point is, when do we stop saying it’s these folks or these folks?…This is what the enemy does to children. This is what the enemy does to children in Africa. This is what the enemy does to children all over the world because they’re the enemy….What’s happening, y’all?”

Others have different ways of trying to distract attention from the Bibas children. At the University of Michigan, students painted a large boulder in orange with the names of Ariel, Kfir, and their mother, Shiri.

Pro-Hamas vandals promptly used spray paint to cover their names with the words “Free Palestine” and Hamas symbols.

Ironically, many average Gazans are not denying the Bibas murders—they’ve been celebrating them. Hamas held a public ceremony in the town of Khan Yunis, at which the Bibas children’s little coffins were displayed, just before they were handed over to Israel (in exchange for the release of killers of other Israeli children).

Large, joyous crowds gathered at the scene. Families relaxed on lawn chairs, played music and sang songs. Sweets were distributed, hookah pipes were puffed. Fathers lifted their children for a better view of the coffins, in a scene eerily reminiscent of the crowds that cheered the lynchings of African-Americans in the old South.

Like Holocaust deniers, the Bibas deniers come in different varieties but they are all part of the same team: the killers, the cheerleaders, the deniers, the minimizers—they all share the same agenda: to hurt the Jews.

The appropriate way to deal with Bibas deniers is the same way decent people deal with Holocaust deniers: ostracize them. The Constitution protects their right to engage in hate speech. But it does not obligate anybody to offer them platforms.

The post The Bibas deniers – analysis appeared first on World Israel News.

Out of nine siblings, only he and one brother survived the gas chambers.

By Jewish Breaking News

“If someone comes to me who’s a Holocaust denier, I’d rather shake the hand of an SS man who was my guard at Auschwitz rather than them.”

Those are the powerful words of Holocaust survivor Ivor Perl who spoke to Metro News on Monday marking the 80th anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation.

Every day in the late 1930s, young Perl would make his way by foot to school in Mako, a small town in southeastern Hungary. Like other Jewish children at the time local children would pelt him with rocks and hurl antisemitic slurs, shouting “Dirty Jew” as they passed by.

But those cruel childhood experiences were only a prelude to the horrors that awaited. He was only 12 when he was forced into Hungary’s ghettos before being transported by train to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Out of nine siblings, only he and one brother survived the gas chambers.

“You could see a German officer with white gloves pointing left and right,” Mr. Perl told the British-based news outlet.

“And he comes to me, stops. He said, ‘How old are you?’ And then I realized what he said. I said, ’16’… he looked… for a millisecond, I could see in his eyes he knew I wasn’t telling the truth. But he said, ‘All right, go on, go to the right.’”

Unknown at the time, the SS officer pointing him away from the gas chambers was none other than the infamous Nazi Josef Mengele.

“Left meant gas chamber, depending which side you’re on,” he said. “But when he pointed you to the right, it meant life. Well, we didn’t know that at the time. It meant you would go with the men who could work. So I said I was 16.”

His life was saved because he lied about his age.

For fifty years afterward, Mr. Perl kept his experiences locked away, sharing them only with his wife and children. It wasn’t until 1995, during a VE Day commemoration at his local synagogue, that he finally began speaking publicly about what he had endured.

Despite everything he experienced, he warns against hatred, believing it damages both the hater and the hated equally.

“Unfortunately, I can see this is what life is. It’s a vicious cycle. I don’t think the Holocaust, per se, won’t happen again – but it will come in a different overcoat,” he says.

“Can you think of a time in your life, in humanity’s lifetime, when the whole world was at peace? There’s always been a war of some sort or another.”

Today, at 93 years of age, Mr. Perl remains one of the last few remaining witnesses to humanity’s darkest days.

The post Auschwitz survivor would rather ‘shake hands’ with SS guard than Holocaust denier appeared first on World Israel News.

Many of Carson’s fellow speakers at the events have preached anti-Israel rhetoric for years.

By Chuck Ross, The Washington Free Beacon

Rep. André Carson (D., Ind.) will speak at the annual convention of an Islamic group linked to Hamas, along with one imam convicted in Israel of serving in terrorist groups and another who has denied the Holocaust, praised Adolf Hitler, and more recently said he doesn’t care about the October 7 attack.

Carson, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, is slated to speak at the Islamic Society of North America’s convention in Dallas on a Sept. 1 panel with Mehdi Hasan, a journalist formerly with MSNBC and the Qatar-funded network Al Jazeera.

Many of Carson’s fellow speakers at the events have preached anti-Israel rhetoric for years. Yasir Qadhi, who will appear on a panel with Hasan and socialist presidential candidate Cornel West, once claimed that “Hitler never intended to mass-destroy the Jews” and has called the Holocaust a “hoax.”

He expressed ambivalence about the October 7 attack at a campus rally last month, telling students, “I don’t care about that one particular day.”

Mohammad Qatanani, who will speak on the panel “Standing in Solidarity with the Victims in Gaza & Palestine,” reportedly faced deportation proceedings in the United States for failing to disclose that an Israeli court convicted him for providing material support to Hamas, “as well as his membership in the terror organization,” according to Canary Mission.

The imams’ appearance at the conference is perhaps no surprise given the Islamic Society of North America’s longstanding ties to Hamas.

Federal prosecutors in a 2007 terrorism finance investigation labeled the organization an “unindicted co-conspirator” of Hamas.

Carson’s appearance at the event comes as some House Democrats have faced blowback for affiliations with anti-Israel extremists. Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D., N.Y.), a member of the far-left “Squad,” lost his primary this week amid scrutiny for downplaying Hamas’s attack and for his intense hostility to Israel.

Rep. Summer Lee (D., Pa.), another “Squad” member, in March pulled out of an event for the Philadelphia chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) after several speakers were found to have made anti-Semitic and homophobic remarks.

Carson spoke at a January rally in Washington, D.C., alongside CAIR director Nihad Awad, who has said he was “happy to see” Hamas attack Israel on October 7. Carson’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

The post House Dem to speak at anti-Israel conference with Holocaust denier and ex-Hamas member appeared first on World Israel News.