Most people do not understand the danger of Mamdani.
Once you see the "Mamdani effect" for what it is, you'll realize just how severe this new chapter in the Western sociopolitical landscape is.
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Most people don’t understand the context and consequences of Zohran Mamdani’s victory this week as the next mayor of New York City.
They think this is just another chapter in the city’s famously turbulent politics — another populist victory, another Left-wing upset, another experiment in progressive governance.
But it’s not.
Mamdani’s victory transcends party and geography. It is not just a story about a city or a politician. It’s a story about the West itself — about the slow unraveling of classical liberalism, the reemergence of antisemitism into the mainstream, and the moral confusion that now defines our societies.
What happened in New York did not stay in New York. It was not local, and it was not normal.
Last year, Pennsylvania’s governor, Josh Shapiro — a centrist Democrat, a faithful Jew, and one of the most competent state leaders in America — was quietly passed over as a vice-presidential candidate. Two very experienced American political pundits, neither of them Jewish and both Democrats, claimed that the Democratic Party has a major anti-Jewish problem. One of them, CNN’s Van Jones, said that “antisemitism has become marbled into the Democratic Party.”1
A year later, New York City’s voters elevated a man whose defining political identity is his proud opposition to the Jewish state. Shapiro never said a negative word about any Muslim or Arab country. He never displayed an ounce of religious chauvinism. His only “fault” was that he was Jewish — and in today’s liberal circles, that’s enough to disqualify you from leadership.
Meanwhile, Mamdani, who regularly recycles the talking points of anti-Israel propaganda groups, was celebrated as a “symbol of progress.” That contrast tells us everything about where liberal politics is heading — not only in America but across the West.
The message could not be clearer: In the hierarchy of modern liberal politics, to be Jewish is suspect, while anti-Jewish sentiment cloaked in righteous language is rewarded.
Let’s be honest about what just happened. Zohran Mamdani made “anti-Zionism” a central pillar of his campaign, not as a passing comment or a side issue, but as a defining feature of his public identity. This was not a race about policing, housing, or subways; it was about symbolism. Mamdani made hatred of Israel his brand.
And here’s the most absurd part: Israel is an ocean and two continents away from New York City. He is not Palestinian. The city’s budget has nothing to do with Gaza, Jerusalem, or the West Bank. So why on earth would “anti-Zionism” be a plank in a New York City mayoral campaign?
There is only one answer that makes sense: “Anti-Zionism,” more accurately described as the socially acceptable form of 21st-century antisemitism, wins votes. It flatters the self-image of moral superiority. It positions the candidate as a warrior for “the oppressed” while providing a safe, permissible outlet for bigotry. “Anti-Zionism” is now the most fashionable form of hate in the Western world, precisely because it hides behind “progressive” language. And Mamdani understood that perfectly.
The truth is that “anti-Zionists” do not care about colonialism, occupation, or racism. If they did, they would be marching against the truly egregious abuses of power in China, Iran, Turkey, Russia, and North Korea. They would condemn the literal apartheid systems operating in parts of the Arab world, where entire ethnic and religious minorities are denied citizenship. They would call for boycotts of countries that imprison dissidents, stone women, or criminalize homosexuality.
But they do not. Because “anti-Zionism” is not about ethics; it is about obsession. It is the psychotic need to libel Israel, the world’s only Jewish state, and in so doing, to justify its destruction. It is a sociopolitical fetish masquerading as a principled perspective.
And in that sense, Mamdani’s campaign was not unprecedented. One of the first major political leaders to weaponize “anti-Zionism” as an organizing ideology was Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Anti-Zionism was central to the Iranian Revolution’s narrative — not because Iran had anything to do with Israel, but because hatred of Jews, dressed up as anti-Israel rhetoric, was a convenient tool for consolidating power and uniting the masses against an imaginary foreign evil.
The parallel between Mamdani and Khomeini should terrify everyone.
The day after Zohran Mamdani’s Tuesday victory, swastikas were graffitied on a Jewish school in Brooklyn. That was not a coincidence; it was a reaction.
What, you might ask, do swastikas have to do with “anti-Zionism”? Nothing, if anti-Zionism were truly about human rights. Everything, if it’s about antisemitism. The graffiti was a message: The newly elected mayor had implicitly given permission.
Hate needs validation. It thrives when the powerful flirt with it. Mamdani’s election did not create antisemitism in New York; it legitimized it. It told the city’s fringe that their views are no longer fringe. It told a new generation of activists that targeting Jews can be rebranded as moral courage.
And it told the Jewish community that their city, once the beating heart of Jewish life in the Diaspora, no longer sees them as partners in the New York City story.
You see, politics is not just about budgets or transit routes. It’s about what kind of civilization a society wants to be. It’s about what a city symbolizes to itself and to the world. In electing Mamdani, New York has made a statement far more powerful than any policy proposal: that moral confusion is now a virtue, that hatred of Israel is a credential, and that identity politics has replaced moral clarity as the dominant faith of the Left.
Leftists have incessantly claimed since 2015 that U.S. President Donald Trump’s rhetoric emboldens Right-wing extremists. But they refuse to see the mirror image now playing out in their own ranks. Mamdani’s rhetoric emboldens Left-wing extremists who burn Israeli flags, harass Jewish students, graffiti swastikas on Jewish buildings, terrorize Jewish civilians in the streets, and call it justice. The mechanisms are identical; only the slogans differ.
Theoretically, it should not matter what religion a mayor or any other politician belongs to. It matters only when that religion, or more precisely, its political expressions, begin to influence governance in ways that contradict the broader society’s values.
Why, then, was Zohran Mamdani’s campaign so heavily bankrolled by the Council on American–Islamic Relations, an organization with a long anti-American history?
The question is not whether a Muslim can lead a Western city. Of course they can. The question is whether political Islam, with its identity-based mobilization and its ideological hostility toward liberal democracy, should be allowed to define the culture of Western politics. Mamdani’s victory is a sign that, increasingly, it already does.
To understand the broader implications, look across the Atlantic. In London, massive Ramadan displays were recently installed across the city’s public transport system, while Christian holidays quietly fade into the background. Even more bizarre, a middle-aged British woman was arrested last month by the police after she objected to the public broadcast of Quranic verses. In Leeds, a man stood atop a police van holding a Quran aloft as cars burned below him. These are not fringe spectacles anymore; they are the new normal.
And when anyone dares to question this new orthodoxy, the response is immediate: “Islamophobia.” This is one of the most effective linguistic manipulations of the modern era. The term “Islamophobia” has been weaponized as a powerful tool to constrain thought and shut down critical discourse, thereby posing a significant challenge to the principles of an open society.
“Islamophobia” is a linguistic distortion that asserts that one thing means another. Here, any action that “targets expressions of Muslimness” is made equivalent to racism. This reframes a vast and undefined category of potential speech and inquiry as a form of bigotry by definition, bypassing the need for argument or evidence.
The codification of the “Islamophobia” strategy serves a distinct psychological function, one that can be understood through the lens of predatory psychology. Certain ideas and communication styles can be used not to engage, but to manipulate, control, and disarm. By defining “Islamophobia” as a form of racism, its architects leverage society’s moral opposition to bigotry to suppress uncomfortable truths.
It’s a rhetorical judo move: Turn criticism of ideology into evidence of prejudice. “Seeing both sides” is the new baseline expectation; questioning real fears about Islam is labeled as hate. The “Islamophobia” strategy achieves this by shifting attention away from the ideas being examined and toward the supposed pathology of the examiner.
The result? A two-way dysfunction where the critic’s alleged “phobia” becomes the greater offense than the abuse of power or ideology he was exposing. This is not inclusion and justice; it’s coercion and moral blackmail. It’s “anti-Zionism” becoming virtuous, “Islamophobia” now the ultimate sin, and Western societies becoming trapped in a hall of mirrors where morality depends on who’s talking, not what’s true.
The danger of Zohran Mamdani’s politics goes beyond symbolism. His policy agenda — defunding police, abolishing prisons, erasing borders — is not just utopian; it is suicidal. It guarantees more chaos, more violence, and yes, more attacks on Jews.
His infamous condemnation of the New York Police Department as “racist, anti-queer, and a major threat to public safety” was not just reckless demagoguery; it was an assault on the very notion of public order. It is the language of revolution, not governance. It erases the complexity of law enforcement and replaces it with moral absolutism.
This is how democracies hollow themselves out — not with tanks in the streets, but with words that make civic order sound like oppression.
Underneath it all lies a deeper sickness: Western pathological guilt. The belief that Western nations, uniquely among the civilizations of the world, must forever atone for colonialism, slavery, and power itself.
But colonialism was not a Western invention. It was a universal human practice, as old as history. The idea that Europeans or Americans must bear eternal moral guilt for doing what every empire on every continent once did is absurd. It’s like feeling that your country is the worst on earth because someone once committed a misdeed there.
This civilizational guilt has become a weapon. It has created a vacuum of confidence that leaders like Mamdani exploit. In a world where many Westerners no longer believe in their own moral legitimacy, any ideology that presents itself as a moral corrective, no matter how extreme, gains traction.
And so here we are. The Democratic Socialists of America, Mamdani’s political home, increasingly defines itself through purity tests, conspiratorial thinking, and moral fanaticism. It is not an exaggeration to say that the Democratic Socialists of America’s ideological DNA is uncomfortably close to that of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, better known as the Nazis. Both manipulate the fusion of socialism with tribal identity. Both harness resentment as a political force. Both need scapegoats. And both found them in the Jews.
The parallels are not perfect, but they are instructive. Hitler’s rise was not inevitable; it was a response to national humiliation, economic despair, and a crisis of meaning. Germans voted for him not because they loved him, but because they wanted to protest their defeat in World War I. They wanted to feel strong again. Most of Mamdani’s voters are not fascists, but many share the same impulse: anger at the system, resentment of power, and a desperate need to blame someone else for their disillusionment.
Many New Yorkers did not vote for Mamdani’s housing policy or childcare plans. They voted against the humiliation of Republican domination in last year’s presidential election, against being sore losers, against the fact that most Americans detest the obvious hypocrisies in “Woke” and “progressive” politics, against perceived “elites,” against their failure to understand that socialism on a grand scale never works and you can’t just make things free because “I said so.”
Meanwhile, Mamdani has not even taken office yet and, already, liberal leaders are hailing him as “the future of the Democratic Party.” Senator Elizabeth Warren, when asked whether “Democratic socialism” is what her party should look like, replied without hesitation: “You bet.” That endorsement, perhaps more than the election itself, should tell every leftist what time it is.
And yet, Mamdani’s rise is not just about New York City, the Democratic Party, or America; it’s also about Western Europe, Canada, Australia, even South Africa. It’s about Westerners who take for granted the West while no longer knowing how to define freedom, how to defend democracy, or even how to tell right from wrong.
The greatest danger is not that Mamdani will mismanage New York City; it’s that his ideology will metastasize across Western politics, where self-loathing masquerades as progress and moral clarity is treated as extremism. This is the new pattern: Elevate the demagogue who hates the West enough to be seen as authentic, and sideline the Jew who believes in it too sincerely to be trusted.
In the end, Mamdani’s victory is not about one man; it’s about people losing faith in themselves. It’s about a political class that confuses surrender with virtue. It’s about what happens when societies forget that freedom and law and order are not natural states; they are moral achievements.
New York was once a beacon of modern Jewish life. Baghdad once was, too — far more Jewish, far more vibrant, far more central to the Jewish world than New York ever was. Today, Baghdad has no Jews left. Its synagogues are ruins, its scrolls scattered, its memory erased. The comparison is chilling, but if the West keeps mistaking tolerance for cowardice and pluralism for moral blindness, it will meet the same fate.
Because what begins with the Jews never ends with the Jews. Pick up a history book if you don’t know what that means by now.
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Fantastic article. One to read twice.
I am particularly grateful, personally and perhaps therapeutically, for naming things boldly, such as “ psychotic” Jew-hatred and other felicitous utterances.
Mamdani made a triumphant Islamist speech after his election, praised in exhilaration by Islamic totalitarians in the Middle East , and in US Islamic media.
The speech was outspoken , verbatim, about power coming to Muslims in the USA. He also promised to end Islamophobia.
Beyond Democratic politics , the true woes of many who voted for him and his rabid Jew-hatred and Zionism -indeed psychotic - obsession, his statements, including a salutation in Arabic, publicly declared a manifesto of Islamic ambition for dominance of the West.
Imagine if a Jew had said such things, speaking Hebrew, promising Jewish power to begin controlling the USA. Or even dear Charlie Kirk, as a Christian. Where is the outrage at Mamdani’s speech?
In Arab lands, October 7 was celebrated as the reason for Mamdani’s triumph. Encouraging Islamic fervour is the worst that Mamdani’s shocking victory has wrought.
Jews need to beware of his sure attempt to influence education and be alert to his intent of suppression of free speech. I read today that perhaps Senator Stefanik might run for Governor of NYC. Amen to that. I can only hope Trump and others make Mamdani’s lunacy unworkable. And that better candidates will oppose him in the future.
This was a brilliant piece! So true, we have a Muslim Mayor in London , over eight years we have seen the steady decay and Islamification of our city. Jewish people and non Jewish Zionists must stand together! Fight!