New York City mayoral hopeful Zohran Mamdani for years marked the Fourth of July by sharing a photo of a rap group that is infamous for its glorification of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda and for its praise for one of the 9/11 hijackers.
Mamdani wished his social media followers a “Happy 4th” on Independence Day in 2021, 2023, and 2024 — less than one year before the failed rapper and socialist activist became the Democratic Party’s nominee — in tweets accompanied by a picture from a music video of the two lead singers of the controversial rap group called The Diplomats (also known as Dipset), who were famous — and infamous — for some of their pro-terrorism-tinged lyrics.
Mamdani, a longtime rap aficionado who took a largely unsuccessful stab at being a rapper himself, has tweeted “Happy 4th” exactly four times — sharing the picture of the pro-terrorist Dipset rap group on the Fourth of July in 2021, 2023, and 2024 — and then, only after becoming the Democratic nominee, sent out a much more anodyne, standard-fare, politician-style tweet in 2025 wishing his followers “Happy 4th” featuring pictures from a Democratic Club BBQ held in Queens.
Rappers “worship” ringleader of 9/11 hijackings that murdered almost 3,000 people
The Harlem-based rap group’s own lyrics from the 2003 album that Mamdani repeatedly promoted describe the hip-hop collective as the “Dipset Taliban”, “Harlem’s own Taliban”, and “Harlem’s Al-Qaeda” and described the group’s songs as “9/11 music” — while one of the group’s main singers compared himself favorably to Al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden and declared in a song that “I worship the prophet” Mohamed Atta, the ringleader of the 19 terrorist hijackers on 9/11 and who piloted American Airlines Flight 11 crashing into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.