Some images capture a memory we desperately want to forget and a future we fear to face.

When Zohran Mamdani, the front-runner for mayor, posed for a photo grinning arm-in-arm with Imam Siraj Wahhaj of Masjid At-Taqwa on Friday, he made a statement that reawakened the trauma of the terror attacks on New York.

Visiting a radical Islamist like Wahhaj was not just another stop in Mamdani’s campaign, but part of a pattern of aligning with extremists.

Some politicians justify such alliances through ignorance of the countless shades of Muslims and Islamists.

But with Mamdani’s rich cultural background, he should know better. He should understand the distinction between extremists and moderates.

It raises a serious question about whether Mamdani intentionally chose Wahhaj and his ilk as allies in his campaign.

Wahhaj’s name appeared on the list of unindicted co-conspirators in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

He testified in court as a character witness for the Egyptian terrorist Omar Abdel Rahman, known as the “Blind Sheikh,” who led the Salafi-Jihadist organization “al-Gamaa al-Islamiya” and conspired to assassinate Egypt’s then-president Hosni Mubarak and bomb New York tunnels and the FBI headquarters.

From the witness stand, Wahhaj called Rahman “a respected scholar” and “bold preacher of Islam.”

Long before 9/11, he told American Muslims that their mission here was “to establish Allah’s religion [Islam],” and that politics should be “a weapon in the cause of Islam.”

In short, the man Mamdani chose to embrace, out of all New York imams, is someone whose radical ideological foundation challenges American values of democracy and liberalism.

The political symbolism and strategic risk of associating with such an ideology while seeking the City Hall of America’s most diverse city is hard to unsee.

I write this as a liberal Muslim who grew up in Egypt and has closely observed, studied, and resisted the radical Islamist ideology that Mamdani’s cozying up to Wahhaj represents.

For decades, the political Islamists and Wahhabi Salafists there mastered the art of using mosques as campaign platforms, transforming prayer halls into venues for political mobilization.

The coupling of Mamdani and Wahhaj simply mirrors the ugly scenes of exploiting Islamic piety in Arab countries. That alone is a red flag, not only for American Muslims, but for every American who still believes that democracy relies on moral boundaries, and fears that the line between practicing democracy and endorsing extremism is beginning to blur.

Mamdani, to his credit, represents a new generation of diverse, articulate, and ambitious Democrats. Yet he is also repeating the classic foolish mistakes of his party’s predecessors by mistaking a radical, vocal minority for the true voice of a community.

In doing so, he betrays the silent majority of moderate American Muslims who have risked their safety to keep extremism at bay. These are the quiet imams, the women advocating reform, the civic leaders who reconcile faith with freedom, and the community figures who puts the American identity and values first.

They are the ones who carry the future of Islam in America.

It is deeply disappointing, and almost offensive, to see Mamdani systematically seek validation from Islamist and leftist extremists rather than build alliances with moderates. It seems that he is doing this on purpose, rather than out of ignorance.

This should serve as a resounding alarm that America’s moral clarity is not the only value at risk. Far worse, the very foundations of American democracy are being slowly but surely undermined by the growing tendency of Mamdani-style candidates to emulate the practices of the radical leftists and the radical Islamists in some of the world’s most oppressive dictatorships.

Dalia Ziada is coordinator and research fellow at the Institute of the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy in Washington, DC.