First We Take Tehran, Then We Take New York

Are Mamdani and Khomeini Reading From the Same Script? 

There are books you read once and never fully put down. Being There by Jerzy Kosinski is one of mine. It belongs to that rare category of literature I think of as Kafkaesque: writing that seems absurd on the surface but cuts so precisely into the truth of how human beings actually function that it leaves you unsettled long after the last page. Kosinski understood something about us that most of us prefer not to examine — that we do not really listen to the people we elevate. We listen to ourselves, reflected back.

It’s a story about a gardener named Chance. When his employer dies, he is cast out onto the streets of Washington, D.C. for the first time in his life. He is nearly hit by a limousine belonging to the wife of one of the most powerful businessmen in America. She takes him in to recover. In the businessman’s living room, surrounded by power and wealth he cannot comprehend, Chance is subjected to small talk and asked about the economy. He says the only thing he knows: “In a garden, things grow — but first they must wither. Trees lose their leaves before they grow back stronger.” The businessman leans forward. A metaphor, he thinks. Brilliant. He repeats it to his colleagues.

Word spreads. Chance — now called Chauncey Gardiner, because someone misheard his introduction — is invited to meet the President. He is asked about the state of the nation. He says: “As long as the roots are not severed, all is well and all will be well.” The President quotes him on television that evening. Every person who met him heard what they needed to hear and filled the silence with their own hopes. By the end of the novel, he is being seriously considered for the presidency. He still only knows about the garden.

This story is telling us something we would rather not hear: that it is far too easy to make people believe. I am going to show you that through two men — Khomeini, who rode a revolution into Tehran in 1979 and turned one of the most sophisticated countries in the Middle East into a theocratic dictatorship, and Zohran Mamdani, the new mayor of New York, who is dismantling the city's unique fabric one executive order at a time. Two men, same playbook. Follow them with me and watch how free cities become dictatorships while everyone is busy celebrating the “free buses”.

The Seed — Who Planted the Hate?

Every garden begins with a question: who chose this soil, and what was buried in it? What turns a man into a destroyer? What is the wound that never closes, the moment that reorders everything that comes after it?

For Khomeini, the seed was death; his father was murdered before he could walk, his mother gone before he was a teenager. But personal grief alone does not build a revolution — it needs a theology. And the seminary in Qom gave him exactly that. At the heart of Shia Islam sits a wound that never healed: In Karbala. Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, rode out with 72 followers to meet a massive Sunni army, was surrounded, killed, and decapitated, his head sent to Damascus as a trophy.

For Shia Islam, this became the founding trauma — the proof that suffering has an address, that it has an enemy, and that the enemy is always the powerful force that crushes truth and justice in favor of worldly dominance. Khomeini absorbed both wounds — the personal and the civilizational — and spent decades fusing them into a single doctrine with a very clear enemies list: the Shah, who sold Iran's soul to Western money and dismantled clerical authority. America, the Great Satan, whose fingerprints were on every corrupt regime in the region. And Israel — the Little Satan — the outpost of Western imperialism planted in the heart of the Islamic world. The Sunni caliph who murdered Hussein at Karbala had a new face, wore a Western suit and spoke English.

Mamdani’s seed was indoctrination, and he tells the story himself, proudly. On the set of Mississippi Masala, a funder asked his mother about the film’s white characters. Her answer was immediate: don’t worry, they’ll be the waiters. Mamdani has cited this moment as formative — and it shows. What he learned from his mother’s arrogant statement was -not equality, but marginalization of whiteness as an act of justice. Whites in the background, holding the trays, decorative and subordinate. This is the founding myth he absorbed, and it is the exact hierarchy he has been building ever since — in his politics, in his appointments, in the way he governs a city that is supposed to belong to everyone.

His father provided the intellectual foundation. Mahmood Mamdani is one of the most cited post-colonial scholars in the world, a Columbia University professor whose books argue that suicide bombers are rational political actors responding to legitimate grievances, that the West is the structural architect of global suffering, and that violence against it is not terrorism but resistance. This is his work, and his son grew up inside it, breathing it like air.

Two men were handed a complete map of the world; on that map, the righteous and the enemy each had a name. Khomeini’s map was written in grief and scripture. Mamdani’s was written in postcolonial theory and served at the dinner table. But a map is a map — and both of them followed it to the same destination, two different soils, the same crop.

The Germination — How a Seed Becomes a System

Khomeini spent decades in lecture halls and prayer rooms turning personal grief into political theology. The West was the new enemy, the Shah was its puppet, and he, the jurist, the scholar, the rightful heir of Hussein’s legacy, was the only man who could set things right. The establishment rejected him, and he was exiled to a small village in Paris

He did something no revolutionary had done before at that scale: he recorded his sermons on cassette tapes and smuggled them across the border. The tapes were duplicated in mosques, passed hand to hand in bazaars, played in living rooms across a country the Shah believed he controlled. The language was intoxicating — not dry theology but fire. “We will cut the hands of the foreigners from our country.” “The Shah is an agent of America, and America is the enemy of Islam.” “The oppressed will rise, and the oppressors will fall.” Simple. Binary. Total. Every grievance had a face, and the solution was revolution.

The world came to him; foreign journalists descended on that village outside Paris. Young Iranians flew in from across the diaspora to sit at his feet. He gave five or six interviews a day, and in every one he was the humble servant of the people, the reluctant revolutionary, the man of God who wanted only justice. The feminists saw a liberator. The Marxists saw an ally. The Western intelligentsia — including the philosopher Michel Foucault, who flew to Tehran and called the revolution a thrilling new form of political spirituality — saw whatever they needed to see.

When Mamdani arrived at Bowdoin College in 2010, the ideology his parents had built found its first institutional home — and he left a paper trail that nobody in New York bothered to read before handing him the keys to City Hall.

Over four years, he wrote 32 columns for the student newspaper, and the obsessions were consistent: Israel, which he called a colonial occupier engaged in "racist policies." Whiteness, which he argued held a "stranglehold" over American discourse and needed to be broken. He attacked fellow students who disagreed, accused them of racial blindness, and framed every editorial imbalance as evidence of systemic white domination. He was not a student exploring ideas; he was a student building a following — exactly as Khomeini had built his, one sermon at a time, among young people hungry for a simple map of who was guilty and who was righteous.

In 2013, while still a student at Bowdoin, he flew to Egypt — arriving just as the military deposed the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi, an event he witnessed as proof that Western-backed forces crush Islamic political power. He wrote his longest college piece about the experience, a romantic portrait of belonging. For the first time, he wrote, he fit. And that same year, his mother gave an interview to the Hindustan Times that said everything. "He is not an American at all," Mira Nair declared proudly. "We are not firangs" — a Hindi term for Westerners, used with open contempt. "He thinks of himself as a Ugandan and as an Indian." This was a woman who had built her career in America, raised her son in New York, sent him to elite American universities, and was now governing the largest city in the country, proudly announcing that America meant nothing to their family. The contempt for America that had given them everything was not hidden but celebrated.

Mamdani co-founded Bowdoin’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter and invited As’ad AbuKhalil — a man who argued that America had brought September 11 on itself — to lecture on campus. This was not a provocative booking by an idealistic student. This was Mamdani at twenty-two, curating his own intellectual circle — exactly as Khomeini had done

After Bowdoin, Mamdani had the ideology but not yet the machine. Palestine had shaped him, the BDS movement had trained him. But hatred alone does not win elections in New York — it needs a vehicle, a language, and a crowd that can carry it into power without recognizing what it is carrying.

In 2016, watching Bernie Sanders — a Jewish senator from Vermont — declare himself a democratic socialist on a national stage, Mamdani understood something crucial: the revolution does not come from the outside. It comes from within. The beliefs his parents had handed him had not changed. What changed was the vehicle. The DSA was not just an organization — it was a movement systematically taking over the Democratic Party from the inside, reshaping it, pulling it toward an ideology that most Democratic voters had never voted for and never would.

Under the umbrella of Palestine, Mamdani found the perfect weapon: a cause that united the hatred of Israel his father had academically justified, the rejection of Western whiteness his mother had taught him on that film set, and the contempt for an America he had never considered his own. "It was Palestine that brought me to this movement," he said on camera, at a 2021 DSA conference. He wasn't hiding it. He was proud of it.

Two men who were handed a version of the world in which they were the righteous and the West was the disease. Two men who, in very different rooms, reached the same conclusion: the system must be destroyed, and they are the ones to do it. The gardener does not grow the poison; he just tends it until it’s ready.

The Lies — What the Gardener Promises Before He Picks Up the Scythe

In Shia Islam, lying (taqiyya) is a doctrine, a tool of the revolution. And it works because people are tired of what exists; they are hungry for something new and far too willing to hear the word “change” and then stop listening.

Khomeini understood this with surgical precision. Standing before the Iranian people in February 1979, days after returning from exile, he spoke the language every hungry crowd has always wanted to hear. “We will provide free water and electricity for the poor,” he declared. “We will provide free buses for the poor. We are building homes for the weak all over Iran. Free utilities. Free transportation. Free housing. Justice for the oppressed”. A new order that would finally serve the people the Shah had trampled.

The feminists believed him, the Marxists believed him, and the secular intellectuals who had spent years dreaming of exactly this moment believed him. None of them asked what would come after the free buses. None of them asked who, exactly, would be defining justice once the revolution was complete. They heard what they needed to hear — and filled the silence with everything they hoped he meant.

Sounds familiar?

Now read this: “Free buses for every New Yorker, rent frozen across the city. City-run grocery stores to break the corporate stranglehold on food. Healthcare for all. A new city, finally built for the people the system has left behind”. This is Zohran Mamdani’s platform, delivered with the same warm certainty, aimed at the same exhausted crowd that has stopped believing anything can change and is suddenly, desperately, ready to believe again.

This is how dictatorships are born. Not with tanks in the street, but with a smile and a promise. Find the people who are suffering — and there are always people who are suffering — tell them you see them, give them a villain to blame and a dream to chase, and never, not once, mention what you actually intend to build. Trust that they hate what exists enough to stop asking what comes next. Trust that intellectual laziness will do the rest. Why study history when someone is finally offering you free buses? Why examine the record of a man who hates Jews, despises the West, and has spent his entire adult life in rooms full of people who want to burn it all down — when he speaks the language of justice so fluently, and the rent is so high, and you are so tired?

This is not a new story. It is the oldest story. And the only people who know how it ends are those who have already lived through it.

The Iranians who escaped Khomeini’s theocracy — the ones who watched their country dismantled from the outside, who carry in their bodies the memory of what revolutionary promises actually deliver — recognized Mamdani the moment he appeared. The language. The posture. The warm certainty of a man who knows exactly what he is building and has no intention of telling you until the doors are locked.

They tried to warn New York. But intellectual laziness combined with a desperate hunger for change is one of the most impenetrable combinations in human nature. When someone is finally offering you free buses and a villain to blame, the last thing you want is an Iranian exile telling you they have seen this movie before.

 The Bloom — What Grows When the Gardener Takes Power

What does a dictator do the moment the votes are counted and the useful idiots have served their purpose? He governs according to what he actually believes, which is something he was always very careful never to mention during the campaign.

Khomeini’s mask came off within weeks of landing in Tehran. The feminists who had marched for him, the Marxists who had smuggled his tapes, the secular intellectuals who had written breathless essays about the dawn of Iranian liberation — they watched, slowly, as the doors closed around them. Labor unions dismantled. Newspapers shuttered. Opposition parties banned. And then the executions began. The leftists who had carried him to power were imprisoned, tortured, and killed by the very regime they had built with their own hands.

By 1988, Khomeini had issued a fatwa ordering the mass execution of political prisoners — thousands killed in months, many of them the same young idealists who had once celebrated the revolution as the birth of justice. The revolution, it turned out, was for Islam. Not for them. The free electricity never came. The free housing never came. Instead, Iran’s oil wealth poured into Hezbollah, into militias across the region, into exporting the revolution from Beirut to Baghdad. Iran’s infrastructure rotted, its currency collapsed, and the water reserves dried up.

Mamdani’s mask came off on January 1, 2026, before the inauguration champagne was warm. His first three executive orders targeted Jewish safety directly — revoking police protection for synagogues, abolishing the internationally recognized definition of antisemitism, lifting the ban on city officials boycotting Israel.

Within days, he appointed Cea Weaver — a housing official whose social media posts called for seizing private property, described homeownership as a “weapon of white supremacy,” and explicitly called for policies to “impoverish the white middle class”- to run the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants. When the backlash came, Mamdani did not address the substance of her posts; he defended her record and moved on.

Then came the 375-page Preliminary Racial Equity Plan — a whole-of-government framework that reviewed every city service through the lens of racial hierarchy, directing resources explicitly toward Black and Brown New Yorkers while the Department of Justice opened an investigation into whether it constituted straightforward discrimination against white residents. A $127 billion budget agenda followed, including a potential 9.5 percent property tax increase and the elimination of 5,000 police officers from a city already struggling with public safety.

This is what his mother taught him on that film set — hatred and discrimination against white people, encoded in municipal policy, enforced by city government, and funded by New York taxpayers, including the white middle class his own housing official wanted to impoverish. And what his father taught him — that the West is the disease, that violence against it is legitimate, and that Israel is its most deserving target — we see that too, in every appointment he makes, in every protection he strips away, and in every Islamist he installs in a position of power in a city that is supposed to belong to everyone.

He also appointed as a legal advisor a man who had defended Mahmoud Khalil — the Columbia activist deported for his ties to terrorist organizations — and who had publicly justified the September 11 attacks. Khomeini bled Iran's economy dry to fund his ideology. Mamdani is doing the same. Citadel CEO Ken Griffin fled to Miami. Apollo Global Management opened a second headquarters outside the city. Over 15,500 high-income taxpayers left New York in the eighteen months before he even took office — and the pace is accelerating. To plug a $5.4 billion deficit he created, he proposed a 9.5 percent property tax hike on three million households and floated the idea of raiding the city’s teachers’ pension funds.

Meanwhile, he declared New York a sanctuary city, cut 5,000 police officers, and opened the doors to unlimited illegal immigration — all funded by the same middle class he is simultaneously driving out. This is not mismanagement; this is the plan: empty the city of the people who built it, fill it with people who depend on him, and consolidate power and dependency.

For Khomeini, the enemy was theological: the Shah, America, and Israel — the forces that opposed Islam. For Mamdani, the enemy is racial: whiteness, Israel, and the West. Are you paying attention? This is not socialism. This is fascism — the same fascism that has always worked by giving an angry crowd a face to hate and a promise that everything will be better once that face is gone.

Every leader who governed primarily against an enemy rather than for his people delivered the same result. Hitler defined the enemy by race and built a war machine on the backs of the German working class who had voted for bread and gotten bombs. Stalin defined the enemy by class and collectivized the farms of the same peasants who had carried the revolution — seven million Ukrainians starved while he exported grain to fund industrialization. Khomeini defined the enemy by theology and spent Iran’s oil wealth on Hezbollah while his people stood in line for bread, their daughters forced into hijab, their sons sent to die in a war with Iraq that lasted eight years and killed half a million Iranians.

And while New York argues about whether to call it racism or equity, the gardener is quietly doing what gardeners do: clearing out everything that was here before, making room for what he actually intends to grow. The cultural institutions, the economic engine, the democratic fabric that took generations to build — all of it is being hollowed out, one executive order at a time, by a man who speaks the language of justice while his city bleeds.

Mamdani has his enemy, and he is governing against it before he is doing anything else. The question is what happens to a city when its mayor is more interested in punishing the wrong people than in serving all of them — and whether they are willing to wait for the answer, as Tehran did.

We have a responsibility — to our children, to the generations that follow, to every person who will inherit the world we are building right now with our silence, our intellectual laziness, and our desperate hunger for free buses. History is not a warning. It never was. It is an instruction manual — and every generation that refuses to read it is condemned to become the next chapter.

Share this with every force you have. Because in Iran, they didn’t.

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“I'm guided by a signal in the heavens
I'm guided by this birthmark on my skin
I'm guided by the beauty of our weapons
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.”

Leonard Cohen, in one of his most haunting songs, described how ideas move through the world, not with armies, but with quiet, patient inevitability. First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.

First they took Tehran. Then Lebanon. Then Egypt, Syria, Judea and Samaria. Fifty-seven countries across three continents, half of Europe. And they are coming for Manhattan — not with tanks, but with executive orders, DEI mandates, and candidates with ties to Al-Qaeda fronts who lead in the polls. The left no longer serves us; they traded our daughters’ safety for ideological purity, our neighborhood’s security for a racial equity plan. They traded our city’s future for the approval of those who have never had to live with the consequences of their ideas.

Thank you for reading. If this work matters to you, please become a paid subscriber, make a one-time donation, or pick up one of my books. All links are in the bio.

The gardener is already in the garden. And he knows exactly what he is growing. Much love.

Yama Bar