Multiple news reports surfaced Thursday alleging that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani paid several visits to a Muslim cleric who has engaged in Holocaust denial and celebrated Oct. 7.

Mamdani met with Sheikh Fadhel Al-Sahlani, imam of the Al-Khoei Islamic Center in Jamaica, Queens, at least three times in the past year and a half, at one point saying of a visit paid to the mosque, “It feels like returning home to be here.”

Even pro-Israel leaders, however, do not have clean hands in this regard. Former NYC mayors Michael Bloomberg and Eric Adams also visited the cleric with antisemitic leanings.

The Iraqi native said in an interview with the New York Sun in January 2006 that the number of 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.” He even supported “Iran’s proposal to hold a conference on the Holocaust in Tehran, saying there is ‘nothing wrong with studying more,'” the Sun reported at the time.

The conference, which took place in December 2006 and was called the “International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust,” had been organized by Iran’s former president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and it drew all manner of Holocaust deniers and skeptics, who used it to delegitimize the State of Israel.

“It is a kind of dream,” Al-Sahlani said in response to the Sun reporter’s question about Ahmadinejad’s desire to destroy Israel. “But we have to be realistic. Even we have to accept a fact that we don’t like.”

Fast forward to November 2023, shortly after the worst massacre to befall the Jewish people since the Holocaust. Al-Sahlani celebrated the actual attempted genocide of Israelis.

“One movement can make a great change,” he said in a sermon. “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 [Allah has willed it].”