Sen Kirsten Gillibrand Dons a Hijab at Bronx Mosque, Alongside

Kirsten Gillibrand walked into a Bronx mosque last week in a hijab, smiling next to a cleric who has celebrated Hamas for “causing so much trouble for the Jews” and called Osama bin Laden’s mentor a hero. That’s not a caricature. That’s the actual company she chose to keep, and the visit was so under the radar you have to wonder if she hoped nobody would notice. She chairs the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. This is the person tasked with putting more Democrats in the Senate.

The cleric’s record isn’t obscure. It’s public, it’s ugly, and it’s exactly the kind of thing a national party leader should check before accepting a seat beside him. Instead, Gillibrand posed for photos and let the moment pass without a word of distance or rebuke. A hijab doesn’t sanctify a handshake with a Hamas apologist. It just makes the photo easier to share. And that’s the real problem: the performance was the point. The vetting was optional.

You don’t need to be a foreign policy expert to know that praising Hamas and lionizing bin Laden’s mentor is disqualifying company for an American senator. But Gillibrand’s team apparently decided the optics of the hijab outweighed the substance of the person next to her. That tells voters everything about how she views religious symbolism: as a costume for political convenience. The left will call this outreach. Real outreach doesn’t require ignoring antisemitism.

Maybe she didn’t know. But “she didn’t know” is its own indictment. A quick search, a staff memo, a single uncomfortable question. None of it happened, or none of it mattered. Gillibrand chose the photo op over basic decency. New York deserves better, and so does anyone who expects their leaders to know who they’re sitting with.