Roman Senator Cato the Elder famously ended every speech, regardless of the topic, with the same exhortation: “Carthago delenda est”; Carthage must be destroyed.
Zohran Mamdani, the novice mayor of New York, seemingly harbors a similar monomania when it comes to the Jewish state. He’s described the “Palestine” issue (in which Israel is the archvillain) as the paramount motive and passion fueling his political ambition, including his climb to the helm of America’s largest metropolis.
Mamdani’s Rise and Ideology
From his days at Bowdoin College, where he launched a chapter of the radical anti-Israel Students for Justice in Palestine and a failed boycott campaign against the Jewish state, to his eventual discovery of a talent for political campaigning in the embrace of the radical Democratic Socialists of America, his principal focus has been on attacking Israel.
A left-leaning academic setting, Bowdoin was the subject of a sharply negative 2013 study by the National Association of Scholars, which found the curriculum there overwhelmingly comprised of critical race theory-infused course work, whether regarding American history, the Middle East or gender studies. Mamdani, who graduated in 2014, majored in Africana studies, a department heavily tilted toward radical ideology where the default view is to cast Zionism as evil. A current course offering in the department, for instance, is “Settler Racial Capitalism: Topics in Race and Land,” and many others reflect the same tilt. (Bowdoin currently offers 27 Middle East-related courses, including one on Palestinian culture, but not one on Israel, Israeli history or Hebrew)
The NAS study concluded that, “Politics is enthroned at Bowdoin where Reason once reigned.” It also cites a notably prescient quote from Abraham Lincoln warning, “The philosophy of the school room in one generation is the philosophy of government in the next.”
Not that Zohran Mamdani, an only child of fiercely anti-Israel parents, hadn’t arrived at college with deeply imbued hostility toward the Jewish state, along with a family pattern of aggressive political activism. His Columbia University professor father, Mahmood Mamdani, who espouses virulent anti-Israel views, including calls to dismantle the Jewish state as an illegitimate colonial and Nazi-like enterprise, participated in the Columbia University encampments in the wake of the October 7th massacre of 1200 men, women and children in Israel and the abduction of 250 others. He boasted that he was the first faculty member to address the anti-Israel throngs.
Mahmood Mamdani’s ideology encompasses admiring reference to communist regimes, including those initiated by the Russian, Chinese, Vietnamese and Cuban revolutions – cataclysmic events that resulted in the deaths of more than 100,000,000 people.
The mayor’s filmmaker mother, Mira Nair, is also a vocal public critic, signing boycott petitions against Israel.
Zohran Mamdani has spoken of his intensely close relationship with his parents, saying in 2020: “These are people to whom I owe everything – not simply the person that I am but the thoughts that I have…I am in deep awe of my parents.”
The “thoughts” of his parents, in particular those of his father are, to say the least, alarming if also deeply held and acted upon by his adoring only child.
Nor is Zorhan’s young Syrian-American artist wife, Rama Duwaji, a counterweight. On the contrary, she is an equally ardent contributor to the family’s anti-Israel obsession. As quoted in a New York Jewish Week story, not only is her art heavily focused on Gaza, but, she says: “I’m always keeping up to date with what’s going on, not just here but elsewhere. It feels fake to talk about anything else when that’s all that’s on my mind, all I want to put down on paper. Everything is political; it’s the thing that I talk about with [Zohran] and my friends, the thing that I’m up to date with every morning…”
Indeed, the reality that “everything is political,” and anti-Israel, for Duwaji was apparent in her own anti-Israel social media posts and those endorsing the October 7 Hamas attack. What became still more challenging on the public relations front was the discovery that her drawings were to be used by infamous Israel-hater, Susan Abulhawa, in a collection of essays. The Mamdani team scrambled to repudiate Abulhawa’s rabid social media posts referring to Israelis and Zionists as “parasites”, “demons” and “ghouls” and the celebratory statement by Abulhawa in response to October 7. The Mamdani’s claimed a third party arranged Duwaji’s collaboration.
Abulhawa had exulted: “Palestinian fighters finally broke free on 7 October 2023 in a spectacular moment that shocked the world. In a stunning display of low-tech guerilla warfare, a few dozen sparsely armed commandos disabled Israeli watchtowers and paraglided over the electrified fences…These brave Palestinian fighters overtook Israeli colonies built on their ancestral villages, seeing their stolen lands for the first time in their lives…”
Rama Duwaji provided artwork for a publication by Susan Abulhawa who celebrated the Hamas invasion on October 7, terming killers of innocents such as 23-year-old Karina Pritika at the Nova Music Festival “brave Palestinian fighters.”
In March 2026, under pressure Mamdani felt compelled to disassociate himself from Abulhawa’s grotesque statements.
Though both of Zohran Mamdani’s parents are of Indian origin, Mahmood’s family members were among those encouraged by the British to settle in Uganda in the early 20th century as merchants and traders, only to be expelled by Idi Amin in 1972 before later returning. Mahmoud Mamdani has written of the trauma of the expulsion experience. Ironically, he is the son of a settler colonial family with no ethnic African roots in Uganda and is, rather, part of the 1% of Ugandans who are Indian and control 60% of the nation’s GDP.
At the same time, he promotes ending nationalism and “dismantling” the tiny ancestral homeland of the Jewish people – who repelled the colonial British to restore the Jewish nation.
Evidently, the intensity of his father’s convoluted hostility to Israel has given deep purpose to young Zohran’s own career path. He abandoned a try as a rapper (in this endeavor, he composed music lauding the five convicted terror-supporting CAIR co-conspirators in the famed Holyland Foundation terror trial involving funding of Hamas) and turned a few years later to run for state assemblyman. By his account, it was the Palestinian issue that drove him to join the Democratic Socialists of America as he took a shot at elected office.
Mamdani has related that he strongly rejected the so-called PEP trend (Progressive Except for Palestine), a phenomenon he encountered as he sought to find a political home suited to his core passion and ideology. PEP referred to groups aligned on all other issues with left-leaning politics but that did not support extreme anti-Israel positions on Palestinian matters. He says he discovered the only movement that shared and explicitly advocated for his radical perspectives on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict along with other far left goals related to housing, labor, Medicare and affordability was the DSA, Democratic Socialists of America.
In a revealing presentation in 2021 to a YDSA audience (Young Democratic Socialists of America) when he was one of seven DSA members in the New York State Assembly, he described how central the Palestinian issue was to his political purposes. He urged listeners, whom he strongly encouraged to be activists, to keep in mind that while there are many issues the DSA platform addresses, everyone should remember never to omit the Palestinian one. It should always be included.
He stressed that sometimes a topic, specifically the Palestinian issue, might seem unfamiliar to audiences but with repetition and emphasis it would grow familiar and take hold. He said DSA was an organization that sought to “lift up” what was going on in “Palestine” by endorsing BDS. He stressed that DSA needed “to meet people where they are at and also to organize for what is correct and for what is right” and to guide them to care (for “Palestine”).
His message underscored his determination to embed “Palestine” deeply in the movement, in particular for people who otherwise know and care little about it:
“…[I]t’s important to remember what it is that we are fighting for and to remember that our agenda is an agenda that must not be dictated by calculus but by conviction and what I mean by that is that the many things that we believe, some of them are already popular in this moment right now — if we’re talking about the cancellation of student debt, if we’re talking about Medicare for all.
“You know, these are issues which have the ground swell of popular support across this country, but then there are also other issues that we firmly believe in, whether it’s BDS, right, or whether it’s the, the end goal of seizing the means of production, where we do not have the same level of support at this very moment. And what I want to say is that it is critical that the way that we organize, the way that we set up our, you know, set up our work and our priorities that we do not leave any one issue for the other…And that extends to Palestine…”
(When his casual reference to seizing the means of production, a fundamental tenet of communism, surfaced in 2025, Mamdani was compelled to deny he’s a communist while not specifically walking back the goal of seizing the means of production. Once in the mayor’s office, he hired Cea Weaver as Director of the Office to Protect Tenants. She seeks to abolish private property, which she claims is a “weapon of white supremacy”, and to “impoverish the white middle class.” She justified the October 7 atrocities against Israel for its alleged apartheid policies.)
On October 7, when Emily Damari was abducted from her home in Israel by Hamas, Cea Weaver, head of the Office to Protect Tenants, posted support for Hamas on social media and accused Israel of apartheid.
In another 2021 interview with a radical arts group, the South Asian Avant-Guarde (SAAG), Zohran Mamdani repeated baseless charges related to the apartheid lie, including the canard that Israel has instituted “Jewish only roads”. (His allegations against the Jewish state encompass virtually every bogus claim of the general propaganda assault on Israel, no matter how absurd. There are no Jewish-only roads, nor is there apartheid, in Israel or the West Bank.)
Here again Mamdani emphasized a core theme of his disciplined political activism – “connectedness.” This is a variant of the strategy of “intersectionality” – a broad aim of the far left to build connection among the aggrieved and oppressed globally in shared views, goals and action. Thus, he explains that New Yorkers should be asked the question: “How much of your money is going over there and how much of your needs are unmet over here? … We need to connect the funding of the NYPD to the funding of Israeli apartheid.”
There is no connection, of course. This is propaganda.
He articulated similar tactics in 2023 at a DSA conference that later raised questions. This time he was urging DSA listeners to pursue a strategy that injected “Palestine” into messaging aimed at working class New Yorkers using a police misconduct angle. Mamdani told his audience: “We have to make clear that when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF.”
This, like Mamdani’s other slanders, shamelessly misrepresents Israel’s involvement in law enforcement programs that share information with American police departments related to assisting counter-terrorism efforts and protecting American communities. It also echoes the basest of antisemitic tropes in blaming Jews for distant, longstanding and unconnected problems of another society, in this case incidents related to racial strife in America. It incites hatred.
The 2021 YDSA conversation with students was especially blunt in describing how to build attachment to the Palestinian cause among the public. First of all, Mamdani described screening fellow progressives for the DSA movement and as possible candidates for office. He stressed his laser focus on determining their stance on Palestine, saying:
“For me it’s easy. Somebody will identify as a progressive and I’ll ask them what they think about Palestine and it’ll be very quick to understand whether they’re a socialist. Now, I may be the first to critique a candidate asking them about the issue of the Naqba and the issue of Palestinian rights.”
When he was asked what YDSA students can do to advance the socialist/DSA cause, Mamdani reiterated his oft-repeated message:
“I think we have to make these struggles feel real to people. We can’t make them intellectual exercises. One way to do that is you know when I was at college, we had an economic boycott campaign and one of the aspects of that was to fight to stop study abroad at universities that were complicit in the occupation, many of which through the development of weapons technology for the IDF. Now by bringing the issue of Israel, Palestine, apartheid to voting, you bring it front and center to Bowdoin. You bring it front and center. It’s harder to ignore. So that is how to build international solidarity — to connect to something that’s going right here in your day to day. So, they also understand they really have a responsibility to act.”
The ubiquitous Mamdani grin faded briefly as he remembered the BDS effort he launched at Bowdoin that failed. He said he learned “hard” lessons in this experience about dealing with power structures and the discrepancy between what may be conveyed in words by those in power and what is enacted.
He also expressed shock that counter efforts seeking to thwart the boycott campaigns aimed at strangling and isolating Israel economically, such as the anti-BDS legislation many states have successfully passed. He called this pro-Israel response to the onslaught of BDS campaigns a “horrific movement,” seemingly appalled there could be successful opposition to his agenda. He said: “They will try everything to beat you down!”
In his role as Assembly Member, Mamdani attempted in 2023 to create new sources of political pressure to stigmatize and harm Israel and its supporters. He sponsored US State Assembly Bill A11289 entitled “Not on our dime!: Ending New York funding of Israeli settler violence act.” A compedium of propagandistic distortions and falsehoods about Israeli settlements, settler actions and relevant legal statutes, the measure was never brought to the floor for a vote. It was blocked. Its aim was to “prohibit not-for-profit corporations from engaging in unauthorized support for settlement activity.” Severe penalties were included for groups and individuals violating the proposed law. The proposal was opposed not only by Republican members of the Assembly but by numerous Democrats.
Notably, Mamdani’s successor in his State Assembly slot reintroduced the measure in the Assembly in May 2026 where it currently awaits consideration.
Mamdani in Office
At nine months into his first year, the mayor faces challenges related to various promises and policies regarding property taxes, early childhood education, unions, transportation and more – but his obsession with Israel and its supporters has been the beating heart of his administration. That has been apparent since his first days in office in the myriad instances of insult and threat exhibited towards the large overwhelmingly pro-Israel Jewish community.
On day one, he revoked support for the widely endorsed IHRA definition of antisemitism that enumerates elements of anti-Jewish bigotry in ways that help policymakers, institutions and members of the public fight it coherently. In particular, the definition spells out when vilification of the Jewish state crosses into antisemitism. Phylisa Wisdom, Mamdani’s newly-appointed leftist head of the pre-existing Office to Combat Antisemitism, has not replaced IHRA with any definition, insisting bigotry will be judged on an individual basis.
He also abolished the City’s prohibition against collaborating in boycott campaigns aimed at isolating and weakening, if not destroying, Israel. Both revocations were actions diminishing restraints on antisemitism and, to the contrary, signaled animus towards Jews and their very deep concerns.
From the time of his victory in the mayoral election in the fall of 2025, Mamdani began populating his incoming administration with staff heavily drawn from the radical Democratic Socialists of America cadres of his prior activity. Many are individuals whose records underscore a similar obsessive antipathy for the Jewish state.
An audit by the Anti-Defamation League reported that “roughly 20% of Mamdani’s 400+ transition team members and early administrative appointees have ties to anti-Zionist groups or a public record of hostile statements toward Israel.”
One example is a “Faith Liaison” Mamdani enlisted, Rabbi Miriam Grossman. A far-left, anti-Zionist BDS supporter and member of the fringe Jewish Voice for Peace group, she subscribes to all the libelous charges Mamdani levels at Israel. Grossman advocates the dissolution of Israel as a Jewish state and the “return” of Palestinian refugees.
The appointment is a signal of contempt towards the vast majority of New York Jews who reject everything Grossman represents. A “liaison” role is ostensibly intended to facilitate positive communication and trust between the Mayor’s office and faith groups. Mamdani chose instead to express further malice and to exacerbate relations with the Jewish community.
Another major addition was the radical anti-Israel lawyer and activist Ramzi Kassem, Chief Counsel to the Mamdani administration. He has advocated for the dissolution of Israel as a Jewish state since the 1990’s and collaborates with extremist anti-Israel groups such as Nerdeen Kiswani’s Within Our Lifetime.
He is also in a personal relationship with radical anti-Israel activist Darializa Avila Chevalier, a recent victor in a Congressional primary election in which Mamdani supported and endorsed her against an AIPAC backed incumbant. Like Mamdani, she seeks to indoctrinate constiutents in believing support for Israel harms their own wellbeing. Following the DSA playbook, she campaigned, saying: “Every dollar that we send to Israel is a dollar that is stolen from the mouths of our children.”
In a token of honor, at a 9/11 ceremony, Mamdani handed Kassem the pen he used to sign documents related to the attack, although the latter is well known for having defended an al-Qaeda member who pleaded guilty to war crimes and whose brother was a 9/11 highjacker. Victim families and others were outraged. The gesture is precisely the sort Mamdani seemingly relishes — violating norms to convey insult and assert dominance.
Having surrounded himself, especially in his inner circle, with radical anti-Israel activists and canceled key protections for the Jewish community, Mamdani shortly into his tenure hijacked an unrelated annual commemorative event for the Irish community to inject blatant Palestinian propaganda, heedless of tradition, protocol and the sensibilities of the audience.
One might wonder why Mamdani even agreed to host a St. Patrick’s Day event, given his seeming disregard for his Irish constituents as demonstrated months later in July when he omitted them entirely in his immigrant map of the city’s neighborhoods. (Excluded, along with the Irish, were Italians, Puerto Ricans and others, including, of course, Jews. Present, on Mamdani’s map, were instead neighborhoods largely named for various Muslim groups, including Palestinians.)
Mayor Mamdani’s map of New York’s ethnic enclaves neglected to include the Irish, Italian and Jewish ones, among others, but did include “Little Palestine”
But the reason he’d hosted the March 17 event was obvious: It was an opportunity to attack Israel and promote “Palestine.”
The guest of honor at the Gracie Mansion event was former president of Ireland Mary Robinson. Mamdani lauded her, saying in part, “Over the past few years, as we’ve witnessed a genocide unfold before our eyes, there has been deafening silence from so many. Palestinians are so often left to weep alone, yet former President Robinson has never been silent. Not when she was president and not when she was High Commissioner for Human Rights and not in the decades since.”
He went on: “Who can better understand those who weep than those who have been made to weep for so long? The story of the Irish both in Ireland and in New York City is at one time a story of oppression, of subjugation, and of discrimination…”
Even The New York Times commented on the jarring performance, writing: “Mr. Mamdani’s comments were a notable departure from the St. Patrick’s Day greetings offered by past mayors,” adding that “some critics took issue with his invocation of Palestinians on St. Patrick’s Day.”
Minority leader of the New York City Council David Carr denounced Mamdani on social media writing, “I’m not sure what’s worse: the Mayor’s false take on history, or his co-opting of a Catholic feast day that is central to Irish faith, culture, and identity to fit his distorted political ideology. Not every road leads back to Gaza.” Similarly, Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, criticized the mayor saying he had turned a St. Patrick’s Day message into “a radical Muslim rant.”
As with so much of Mamdani’s commentary on his favorite topic, both his reiterated false charge of “genocide” and reference to Palestinians “left to weep alone” are the opposite of reality. Regarding the genocide claim, the facts are undeniable that Israel has not committed such a crime. There is no evidence of “intent” to annihilate a people in part or in whole as apparent in actions taken by Israel to warn Gazan civilians via phone calls, broadcasts, leaflets and other means away from IDF strikes, in the canceling of IDF activity to avoid civilian injury, in the provision of millions of tons of humanitarian aid to the populace, in the mass vaccinating of Palestinians against disease and more.
Nor is his ludicrous second claim accurate. Far from “weeping alone,” Palestinians have for decades been the epicenter of global attention, thanks to Soviet inspired and Islamist implemented anti-Israel propaganda campaigns. Whether the vast coverage by the media of every aspect of their lives or the concentration on Palestinian issues by NGO’s, filmmakers, academics and political figures, no other group of people, however worthy of public concern, has been given anything like this focus. It should be underscored that such singular attention to the Palestinians is the direct corollary of the ceaseless, bigoted denigration of Israel as wrongdoer. Indeed, it’s often argued that were Jews not the adversary, the Palestinian cause would be of no interest.
Such observations about the Jewish component driving the story are persuasive in view of the undeniable double standard regarding neglected, suffering populations where Israel has no role, such as the Sudanese whose plight has prompted UN charges of actual genocide but negligible media attention. Likewise, the mass murder, abduction and rape of thousands of Nigerian Christians in an ongoing siege of that community is largely ignored in comparison to the relentless, daily attention to Palestinian grievances and alleged Israeli fault.
Nor has the international community – in particular the media – rallied in any sustained, major way to the immense tragedy of Iranian civilians slaughtered by the tens of thousands in a matter of days by the Mullahs’ regime.
Notably, neither Sudanese nor Nigerian nor Iranian agony, nor their tormentors’ conduct, has prompted Mamdani to interject messages of sympathy or harsh accusations and threats into unrelated ceremonial events in New York City. Nor has he vowed to arrest these nations’ leaders should they set foot in Manhattan as he has Israel’s Prime Minister.
Such abuse is reserved for the Jewish state only.
The Israel Day Parade
New York’s annual Israel Day parade brought more of the same naked bias, with the new mayor refusing to participate as his predecessors traditionally have each spring in solidarity with the large pro-Israel, Jewish community. Instead, with equal disregard for the norms of respect and tradition he’d shown Irish constituents earlier, he tweeted on May 15: “Today marks Nakba Day, an annual day of remembrance to commemorate the expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinians between 1947 and 1949 during the creation of the State of Israel and the year that followed.” The post and accompanying video attracted eleven million views.
The mayor’s action in promoting not just a partisan message on a contentious issue, but outright libels and incitement against Israel crossed still further the boundaries of normal mayoral conduct.
Mamdani’s “Naqba” pronouncement is as false as his “genocide” and
“apartheid” lies.
As Middle East scholar Efraim Karsh has written in his book, Palestine Betrayed, the number of Palestinian Arabs forcibly removed in the wake of the November 15, 1947, UN Partition resolution dividing the Palestine Mandate territory into Jewish and Arab areas was negligible.
There was, indeed, widespread flight by Palestinian Arabs, but it was driven by the spectacle of their own middle class running away, an occurrence that frightened and demoralized the Palestinian masses.
Karsh quotes British High Commissioner of Palestine Sir Alan Cunningham saying in December 1947 the “panic of [the] middle class persists and there is a steady exodus of those who can afford to leave the country.” Karsh notes, “In the largest and best-known example, tens of thousands of Arabs were ordered or bullied into leaving the city of Haifa on the AHC’s (Arab Higher Committee) instructions, despite strenuous Jewish efforts to persuade them to stay.”
A telegram from Cunningham to London on April 26, 1948, reported that the true catalyst for mass panic was the early abandonment of the city by its Arab leaders. It read: “The Jewish authorities have done everything in their power to persuade the Arab population to stay… [but] the evacuation by Arab municipal officials, military leaders, and the chief Arab magistrate [was] probably the greatest factor in the collapse of Arab morale in the city.”
In the immediate aftermath of the 1948 war and for several years, the Palestinian Arab view of the Arab exodus from Palestine was that the people had been abandoned by their fellow Arabs. They had been urged or compelled to leave with the promise the Jews would be defeated, and they’d return to their former lives.
Karsh cites the experience of Sir John Troutbeck, head of the British Middle East Office in Cairo. Described as “no friend of Israel or the Jews,” Troutbeck expressed surprise during a fact-finding trip in 1949 to Gaza that: “while [the refugees] express no bitterness against the Jews (or for that matter against the Americans or ourselves) they speak with the utmost bitterness of the Egyptians and other Arab states. ‘We know who our enemies are.’ They will say, and they are referring to their Arab brothers who, they declare, persuaded them unnecessarily to leave their homes…”
Mamdani’s Naqba propaganda obviously fuels false beliefs about the Middle East and animosity towards New York’s Jewish residents and other supporters of the Jewish state.
AIPAC “Monsters”
Zohran Mamdani doesn’t like effective opposition. June 18, 2026 saw another instance of his demonizing of those who oppose him on the Israel issue. At a campaign rally he told a large crowd that AIPAC members are “monsters [who] move millions in dark money to accomplish a single goal – to preserve their power, so that they can turn us against one another.”
In a press briefing days later, on the 22nd, he took pointed questions about his AIPAC slur and the indignation of the Jewish community. Without apologies – or facts – and with a grim fury that often characterizes his demeanor in commentary on Israel, he reiterated distorted child-killing charges against the IDF once again, saying:
“I want to be very clear we’re talking about a status quo where children are being killed on a daily basis. More than 1000 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli military since the so-called cease fire. Even an Al Jazeera journalist Ahmed Washah was killed this past Saturday by an Israeli strike. And when I am speaking about AIPAC I am speaking about an organization that has been supportive of the status quo that has fought any attempt to actually deliver safety to people not just in Palestine but frankly through much of the region. And it is a status quo for immorality.
“It is one that I will not accept. And when it comes to the way in which they defend the status quo often times they defend it through direct contributions as we’ve seen right now in New York… Often times they also support the status quo through dark money by filtering money that would have previously come directly from AIPAC now through shell organizations whose identities of their contributors are only made clear AFTER an election and I think that it is important that when we ask ourselves how such death and destruction is taking place overseas, we also name those who allow it to take place.”
Pressed by a questioner about whether he regrets smearing AIPAC as “monsters,” Mamdani sidestepped, saying he was quoting Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci about times of great social change when the old world is receding and a new era arriving. This is a time when, according to Mamdani, there are “monsters” that oppose the new order.
As many had quickly noted, Gramsci did not, in fact, refer to “monsters” but wrote: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
Mamdani readily utters extreme charges, demonizing Israel and its supporters in public statements, casting them in this instance as child killers thwarting the dawn of a new age. His depiction of AIPAC as immoral because it works with the support of thousands of fellow American citizens to elect members of Congress in a cause they believe benefits both America and Israel, just as thousands of other groups muster like-minded citizens for their favored causes, echoes the bigoted double standard to which he continually subjects Israel and Jews.
The “monster” language also reflects the very visible rage Mamdani evinces at those who stand in his way. Notably, in this angry statement he yet again accused Israel of reckless killing of Gazan children.
His public statements are delivered to many audiences who are almost certainly unaware of essential truths about Gaza, truths that would provide a far different and clearer picture of why children are dying there. In June, for instance, when Mamdani claimed Israel had killed an Al Jazeera journalist along with 1000 Palestinians, including children, he grossly misrepresented and omitted key information:
The “journalist” was, in fact, a Hamas sniper, Hamas has broken the ceasefire continuously, Hamas refuses to comply with the agreement to disarm and works continuously to ambush, capture and kill Israelis. Often, Hamas implants its gunmen among Palestinian families, sometimes in tents abutting those of families and children. Disregarding the threat to civilians, indeed hiding among them, they conceal weapons and explosives, using families as human shields and when Israel seeks to conduct targeted strikes, innocent lives can be tragically lost.
Many of the Hamas members targeted, and hence many of those 1000 killed in clashes with Israel since the ceasefire, are members of the Nukhba Force, the elite Hamas group that spearheaded the October 7th massacre and kidnapping of Israelis. Thousands of Nukhba members as well as agents of Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other radical groups that murdered, raped and abducted Israelis remain alive and actively seeking to kill Israelis and repeat their atrocities.
Mamdani’s obsessive and brazen libels against Israel clearly fit the playbook he has exhorted DSA trainees to follow. They were urged to raise continuously the Palestinian cause among audiences, even when listeners have no connection to or interest in the subject. Pound the topic at every chance. Connect it to other progressive concerns, such as policing, cost of living, race and so on to make people care. Urge action – to stigmatize, ostracize and punish Israel.
All this, Mamdani himself is doing.
And while he disseminates lies about Israel at every turn, inciting public enmity towards the Jewish state and its supporters, he simultaneously pledges to protect New York’s Jews now subject to unprecedented antisemitic threats and violence. His expectation that Jews should tolerate such duplicitous treatment by a public official is a measure of both his arrogance and apparent enmity toward the community.
Mamdani: No to a Jewish State
In many media interviews, the Mayor has been asked, given his relentless injection of the Palestinian issue into local New York politics, whether he agrees that Israel should be recognized as a Jewish state living side by side in peace with a Palestinian state. His answer is no, he doesn’t agree at all.
In, for instance, an ABC interview on June 28,2026, shortly after a New York primary election in which three radical DSA candidates he’d endorsed won their races, he reiterated his rejection of Israel as a Jewish state. In a formulation he continuously repeats, he stated that he cannot support any state that “privileges one religion over another” and “a lot of that comes back to believing that we should all be considered equal no matter what our faith is.”
But, of course, Israel does provide equal rights for all its citizens to practice freely and is the only Middle Eastern nation that does so.
He also reiterates as he denounces Israel for being a Jewish state that it’s “important to be honest with others”. He says: “My politics is one that has no exception. When I’m speaking about the importance of dignity and international law and human rights, I speak about that with an application to everyone.”
About the 23 Muslim-majority countries in which Islam is enshrined in constitutions he is silent— evidently making 23 “exceptions” routinely. About the safe existence and growth of Christian communities only in Israel among Middle Eastern states, he is silent. (About the extinction of Jewish life in Middle Eastern states, he is obviously indifferent.)
It’s notable that Mamdani’s continuous self-congratulatory references to his personal honesty, elevated morality and unswerving support for a single standard in judging all nations and peoples are a constant in his interviews, yet typically elicit very little challenge from journalists.
This is so, even as Israel itself is, of course, being subjected to singular, biased scrutiny and a flagrant double standard by the mayor.
The Netanyahu Slander
Likely the most egregious single attack on Israel was the brazen and egregiously false July 21, 2026 video narrated by the Mayor who had threatened nonsensically to arrest the Israeli Prime Minister.
Its litany of fabrications and propaganda are thoroughly rebutted here by FTI Senior Fellow Zac Schildcrout, who rightly terms Mamdani a demagogue. The spewing of lies and incitement against the elected leader of the Jewish state, a foremost American ally, and a nation revered by many millions of Americans once more brought shame on the mayoral office, in an affront to New Yorkers and all Americans, not only Israel and its people.
Not surprisingly, antisemitism has surged in New York since Mamdani’s tenure began in January. Beyond physical violence on city streets, there’s been harassment against individual Jews and communal institutions across the five boroughs, and according to NYPD data an 8.5% increase in antisemitic offenses.
The data reveals that Jewish New Yorkers have borne the brunt of over 56% of all recorded hate crimes since the beginning of 2026 despite making up only 10% of the population.
The Lies of New York’s Cato the Elder
Zohran Mamdani’s incessant false attacks against the Jewish state, his hijacking of unrelated city events to inject lies about Israel, his strategy of stoking hatred of Israel among New York city’s “working people” by falsely linking their unrelated personal circumstances to American support for Israel and his overt hostility towards New York Jews, all underscore an irrational personal obsession. They also echo the cynical political manipulation he worked relentlessly to promote in DSA operatives, urging them to advance as a paramount necessity allegiance to “Palestine.”
Cato the Elder’s obsession was ultimately satisfied with Carthage’s destruction. Mamdani, as he has made clear, seeks a similar end to Israel – couched in his oft-stated opposition to the existence of a “Jewish state” and relentless demonization of Israel and its supporters.
The answer to the mayor’s immoral agenda is to spread truth far and wide and expose the lies. The question for New York and the nation is how long it will be before such countering truths are advanced with the prominence, force and consistency required to expose and puncture Mamdani’s obsessive pursuit of his destructive monomania.
