The Blogs: Mamdani and the Replacement of the Victim

Zohran Mamdani’s response to being called out for promoting the antisemitic slogan “Globalize the Intifada”—a call to extend Islamist violence and terror internationally—offers a textbook example of what might be called the logic of victim-supersession and replacement central to antizionist ideology. “Globalize the Intifada” is not a metaphor: it is a call to bring the tactics of Hamas and other Islamist movements into the heart of Western societies. We have already seen the consequences of such rhetoric in the murder of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, the terrorist attack in Boulder, and other acts of antizionist violence that deliberately target Jews under the guise of “solidarity.”

Rather than acknowledging the antisemitic character of this call, Mamdani responds by reasserting himself as the true victim—breaking into tears and speaking of his own experiences with Islamophobia. While Islamophobia is real and must be condemned, Mamdani invokes it precisely at the moment he is caught justifying a genocidal, antisemitic politics. His performance enacts a familiar reversal: when confronted with the consequences of his own words, he appeals not to accountability, but to displacement—displacing Jewish vulnerability with his own.

This is the essence of the antisemitic double bind. Jews are accused of “playing the victim,” yet antizionism depends entirely on the weaponization of victimhood—not as a call for repair, but as a claim to moral supremacy. The very history of Jewish suffering, especially the Holocaust, is treated not as a source of empathy, but as an obstacle to be overcome. In this framework, Palestinians (or more broadly, Muslims) are cast as “the new Jews,” appropriating the identity of Jewish victimhood while denying its present reality.

Mamdani’s final move is entirely predictable: he accuses others of “weaponizing” antisemitism. But the only thing that cannot be called “weaponized” in this rhetorical economy is his own invocation of victimhood, used precisely to suppress Jewish experience and obscure the violence his politics incite. The result is not a politics of justice or solidarity, but one of symbolic erasure, moral inversion, and discursive abuse—where those who call out antisemitism are cast as aggressors, and those who promote it are cast as victims.