Zohran Mamdani is the progressive candidate surging in New York’s Democratic mayoral primary. It’s difficult to get to that position as a progressive without being sufficiently hostile to the Jewish state, and Mamdani certainly checks that box. But this week he crossed a line that was staggeringly militant even in our current age of say-anything shock-jock politics.
To be clear, Mamdani has never been subtle about his extremism. He founded his alma mater’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, the campus pro-Hamas organization that has been most vocal in support of violence against Jews in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks. Mamdani instituted a policy of “non-normalization,” meaning he would not allow the group to work with anyone who believed in the Jewish right to self-determination.
These days, Mamdani spends his time promising to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and getting fundraising help from the Democratic Socialists of America, which just endorsed the murder of two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, D.C., outside the Capital Jewish Museum. A key campaign ally of his is Linda Sarsour, among the most infamous and virulent anti-Semites in the modern history of New York City politics.
As if all that weren’t enough, Mamdani, currently an assemblyman, refused to support a resolution condemning the Holocaust. When pressed on the move, his campaign manager made clear it was a campaign-related decision—essentially the product of a left-wing candidate running further to his left, banking on gaining more voters than he’d lose by refusing to take sides on the Holocaust. He has also attended rallies organized by Within Our Lifetime, whose founder has said, “I hope that a pop-pop [of a gun] is the last noise that some Zionists hear in their lifetime.”
Mamdani, then, is a post-Oct. 7 vessel for the de-stigmatized tidal wave of anti-Semitism in the West. And yet, his comments at a campaign stop this week at a mosque showed he could sink further still.
He brought up Israel’s pager operation, likely the most carefully targeted such operation in the history of warfare, in which the pagers only of Hezbollah exploded, maiming thousands of terrorists after the group had waged months of war on Israeli civilians.
Here is how Mamdani characterized the operation:
“Israel’s blowing up of thousands of pagers across Lebanon and killing scores of Lebanese civilians including a young girl by the name of Fatima, who picked up her father’s pager in an act of love and lost her life.”
It is categorically untrue that “scores of civilians” were killed, and not even Lebanese authorities claimed as much. The only way that number is accurate is if Mamdani considers Hezbollah terrorists to be civilians—which is possible, because he does not mention Hezbollah at all in his remarks. Incredibly, Mamdani frames a successful, unimaginably well-targeted counter-terror operation as a wanton attack on random Lebanese civilians. He closes with a classic child-murderer swipe at the Jewish state.
In fact, it’s not clear to me that Hezbollah itself has ever characterized the pager operation in as wildly pro-Hezbollah terms as Mamdani has. It is an unprecedented display of incitement and pro-terrorism propaganda from anyone let alone an elected official who is seeking to become mayor of the city with the largest Jewish population outside of Israel.
Mamdani closed his brief mosque rant by saying that he understood why so few registered Muslims voted in past mayoral elections, but this time the Muslim community has an opportunity to vote “for one of us.” Is that true? Does Mamdani’s radicalism represent the broader Muslim community in New York? One certainly hopes not. That Mamdani’s views would represent anyone at all is a deeply dispiriting comment on trends in American public life.
