Mamdani Missed The Point. On Purpose?
No mention of the thread between ‘global intifada’ and the murder of Jews.
Intentionally or not, New York City Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani is ignoring the connection between the massacre of 15 Jews at a Chanukah celebration in Sydney, Australia and pro-Hamas supporters calling for “global intifada.”
In a lengthy statement issued on Sunday morning, Mamdani described the attack at Bondi Beach as a “vile act of antisemitic terror” and noted that “what happened at Bondi is what many Jewish people fear will happen in their communities, too.”
A major reason why so many Jewish people share that fear is because pro-Hamas, anti-Israel activists have adopted phrases like “global intifada,” a call to wage war against Jews everywhere, and “from the river to the sea,” urging the fulfillment of the Hamas mandate to destroy Israel and create an Islamic state in its place.
Mamdani has avoided condemning such phrases, asserting that they champion universal rights and oppose Israeli occupation but do not call for violence. Tell that to the Australian Jewish community whose members saw their relatives and friends murdered on the beach, and to Jews around the world who know their history – of a people that all-too-often has seen hateful rhetoric morph into murderous attacks.
“Mamdani’s distinction between accepting Jews and denying a Jewish state is not merely a rhetorical sleight of hand or political naivete, though it is, to be clear, both of these,” noted Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove in a recent sermon to Park Avenue Synagogue congregants in New York. “He is doing so to traffic in the most dangerous of tropes, an anti-Zionist rhetoric that, as we have seen time and again … has given rise to deadly antisemitic violence.”
That was in October.
Mamdani has been meeting of late with rabbis and Jewish leaders, seeking to convince them that as mayor he will protect the Jewish community. But as long as he refuses to recognize Israel as a Jewish state – acknowledging the Jewish people’s right to settle in their homeland – and as long as he refers to Israel as “genocidal” and “an apartheid state,” he is making such language normative and implicitly, if not explicitly, giving license to those who would commit violence against Jews. Another Pittsburgh, Poway, Boulder, Washington, D.C. And now Sydney.
