The Dangerous Delusion of Zohran Mamdani

Zohran Mamdani has built his political identity on one central idea: that Israel — and by extension, the Jewish people who support it — are the villains of our time. His hostility toward the Jewish state and his glorification of its enemies aren’t footnotes to his politics; they are its foundation.

Right after the Hamas massacre on October 7, 2023 — when terrorists slaughtered more than a thousand people, burned families alive, and dragged civilians into Gaza — Mamdani couldn’t bring himself to condemn Hamas outright. Instead, he issued a statement mourning “the hundreds of people killed across Israel and Palestine,” a moral cop-out that erased the difference between murderer and murdered. Even in the face of barbarism, his instinct was to blame the victim.

Throughout his mayoral campaign, Mamdani’s message on Israel grew only more extreme. He repeatedly accused Israel of “genocide” — a grotesque inversion of truth — and championed the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement designed to isolate Israel and deny it the means to defend itself. He refused to say Hamas should disarm and would not distance himself from calls to “globalize the intifada,” a euphemism for spreading anti-Jewish violence worldwide.

When he won the New York mayoral race, his victory speech made clear

that his ambitions reach far beyond City Hall. “New York will be the light,” he proclaimed — casting himself as a savior leading a national movement against what he calls “oligarchy and authoritarianism.” He spoke of standing with Jewish New Yorkers and fighting antisemitism, but the irony is staggering. It is antisemites — not the Jewish community — who have reason to celebrate his rise.

The DSA’s Ideological Template

To understand Mamdani’s politics, one has to understand the world that shaped him. As a leading figure in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), he stands squarely within a movement that has redefined the progressive left’s relationship with Israel and the Jewish people.

The DSA’s platform is unambiguous: it endorses the boycott movement against Israel, has refused to condemn Hamas, and in the wake of October 7, several of its chapters even celebrated the attack as an act of “resistance.” At its 2023 convention, months before those atrocities, the organization passed resolutions blaming Israel for global ills — from militarism to policing. In that same spirit, Mamdani told the crowd: “When the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF.”

It was an outrageous claim, but also a revealing one. It turned Jews into scapegoats for America’s problems — the same reflex that has haunted history for centuries, now dressed up in the moral vocabulary of “decolonization.”

For Mamdani and his peers, anti-Zionism is not a side project; it’s the moral compass that guides them. In their worldview, Israel embodies all that is corrupt in the modern world — privilege, colonialism, and Western power — and therefore deserves relentless moral attack. That this narrative erases Jewish history, Jewish indigeneity, and the reality of Hamas’s genocidal aims seems not to matter.

The Two Faces of Antisemitism

Antisemitism today wears two faces. On the far right, figures like Nick Fuentes and other white nationalist agitators make no attempt to hide their hatred. They praise Hitler, traffic in Holocaust denial, and broadcast their loathing of Jews openly. Their antisemitism is crude, explicit, and easy to recognize — the language of swastikas and sieg heils.

But on the far left, the same hatred is cloaked in the language of social justice. It masquerades as “anti-imperialism,” “anti-Zionism,” or “decolonization,” but its substance is the same: a worldview that singles out the world’s only Jewish state as uniquely evil and excuses or even romanticizes violence against Jews in the name of liberation.

The difference lies only in presentation. The right’s antisemitism revels in transgression; the left’s hides behind moral posture. Yet both rest on the same delusion — that Jews, individually or collectively, wield sinister power and must be opposed. Mamdani is the respectable, elected face of that delusion: fluent in activist rhetoric, careful never to cross into open hate speech, but fluent in the moral inversion that treats Jewish self-defense as aggression and jihadist terror as resistance.

The Progressive Moral Trap

What makes left-wing antisemitism especially insidious is that it often convinces its adherents they are fighting bigotry, not practicing it. Wrapped in the prestige of social justice, it gives moral cover to some of the oldest prejudices on earth.

When activists chant “from the river to the sea,” they insist it’s a call for liberation — even though the slogan envisions a Middle East where Israel no longer exists. When they accuse Jews of “white privilege,” they erase centuries of persecution and exile. And when they compare Gaza to apartheid South Africa or invoke the Holocaust against Israel, they invert moral reality: turning victims into oppressors and murderers into martyrs.

Mamdani embodies that inversion. His brand of politics doesn’t look like hate; it looks like virtue. But its effects are the same. It isolates Jews, delegitimizes their history, and normalizes a discourse that makes violence against them thinkable again.

The Community Responds

The UJA-Federation of New York tried to respond diplomatically, congratulating Mamdani on his election while warning that his “core beliefs” stand in direct opposition to the Jewish community’s values. Many voters were blunter. Some are frightened for their safety, others for their children’s education — fearful that their city’s new leader will normalize hatred of Israel and, inevitably, hatred of Jews themselves.

That fear is not paranoia. Since October 7, New York has seen an alarming surge in antisemitic incidents, many perpetrated in the name of “Palestine.” Jewish students have been harassed on campuses; synagogues have required extra police protection. Yet Mamdani has used his platform not to calm tensions, but to accuse Israel of “genocide” and denounce those who speak out against Hamas as warmongers.

A Political and Moral Reckoning

Mamdani’s defenders insist his election was about housing, policing, or economic justice — not foreign policy. But that’s wishful thinking. His obsession with Israel is not a distraction from his agenda; it’s the lens through which he views the world. To him, the fight against “imperialism” justifies aligning with movements that glorify terror and erase Jewish suffering.

That’s what makes his victory more than a local story. It’s part of a broader moral confusion gripping American politics. Across the spectrum, antisemitism has found new language, new messengers, and new legitimacy. The right’s open bigotry and the left’s sanctimonious denial now feed the same fire.

New York — home to the largest Jewish community outside Israel — deserves a mayor who unites its people, not one who divides them along ideological lines and moral blind spots. The city that gave refuge to Holocaust survivors and Soviet Jews cannot now be led by someone who treats their homeland as a crime.

A Warning for the Nation

Mamdani’s rise should be read as a warning, not just to Jews, but to anyone who values truth over ideology. When a politician can vilify the Jewish state, excuse terrorism, and still claim to stand against antisemitism, something has gone deeply wrong in our moral compass.

The fight against antisemitism must be consistent or it means nothing. It must reject both the swastika and the slogan, the torch march and the protest chant, the hatred shouted from the right and the hatred whispered on the left.

Because history teaches one unmistakable lesson: antisemitism never stops at the Jews. It corrodes everything it touches — truth, justice, and democracy itself.

Mamdani’s victory is not just a political event. It’s a test — of whether America can still tell right from wrong, hatred from justice, and moral courage from moral cowardice. And if we fail that test, the consequences will reach far beyond New York.