Over the course of the last few decades, as violence seemed to become an accepted fact of American society, casting blame on political opponents for incidents that could often be reasonably described as random acts of deranged persons unrelated to policy debates became a common tactic.
That’s the defense being employed by supporters of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani in the wake of the stabbings of two people on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Only two days earlier, in a direct-to-camera video put out by his office, Mamdani had spewed forth yet another anti-Zionist tirade. In it, he recycled a compendium of blood libels about the actions of the State of Israel to back up his claim that its longtime prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was a “war criminal.”
A disingenuous alibi
Coming as it did as part of a long series of such false accusations that date back to the beginning of his political career, the 34-year-old mayor’s efforts to demonize the one Jewish state on the planet and its American supporters have become part of the fabric of the city’s political discourse.
He’s not alone in doing this. The accusations that what happened during the fighting in Gaza in the aftermath of the Hamas-led Palestinian-Arab terror attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, was “genocide” have been debunked. Still, leftist politicians and mainstream media outlets like The New York Times continue to float the lies about Netanyahu ordering Israeli soldiers to carry out deliberate efforts to starve or wipe out all Palestinians, in addition to a laundry list of other false charges.
The point of this effort isn’t merely to “criticize” Netanyahu or Israel. It’s being done in the context of a boost for the cause that is at the heart of Mamdani’s political career. His support for the eradication of the one Jewish state on the planet is no secret. That this also means backing for the efforts of Hamas and other terrorists to achieve that despicable goal via their intended actual genocide of Israel’s population is left unsaid by the mayor. But it is made obvious by actions such as his wife’s open support for the atrocities of Oct. 7, as well as his specific refusal to condemn the chants heard on college campuses by his fellow anti-Zionists calling for Jewish genocide (“From the river to the sea”) and terrorism against Jews wherever they live (“Globalize the intifada”).
As far as Mamdani backers go, such as the anti-Israel group T’ruah and New York Democratic congressional candidate Brad Landers, to link Mamdani to the stabbings of a kippah-wearing Jewish man outside a synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, along with an Asian male, by a person shouting Allahu Akbar, is unfair. Mamdani claims to be against antisemitism. Members of Mamdani’s Democratic Socialist faction and leftists of various stripes all say that the mayor’s comments are aimed solely at Netanyahu and Israel, not Jewish New Yorkers.
But their alibi for Mamdani is disingenuous. Anti-Zionists may claim to be merely opposed to the existence of a Jewish state and not violence against Jews. But if you are part of the only international movement to target the existence of a single country and seek to deny the rights of Jews to sovereignty and self-defense in their ancient homeland, then you are a Jew-hater, not a Netanyahu critic. Add in the dishonest efforts of anti-Zionists to pretend that devotion to the land of Israel—and the necessity of ensuring the survival and thriving of Jewish life there—is not one of the core principles of Judaism, and their case collapses entirely.
Political speech isn’t violence
Yet it’s also true that linking public figures to crimes they had no personal part in committing is a particularly nasty characteristic of modern American politics.
Such smears date back to the earliest days of the republic, when Federalists supporting U.S. President George Washington blamed Thomas Jefferson’s Republicans (ancestors of today’s Democrats) for insurrectionary violence related to tax protests.
It started becoming more routine in American politics more than 30 years ago, when then-President Bill Clinton outrageously and irresponsibly blamed the “angry voices” of his political opponents—a swipe universally believed to be a reference to conservative radio-show hosts like Rush Limbaugh—for the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995. Since then, examples of such finger-pointing have included notorious claims like The New York Times’ (ultimately retracted) scandalous and false claim that former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin incited a gunman to kill six persons and badly wound Rep. Gabby Giffords (D-Ariz.), who happens to be Jewish, in 2011.
This genre of political vilification became nearly universal on the left after President Donald Trump became an all-purpose scapegoat for anything liberals didn’t like. His coarse rhetoric has been blamed for all sorts of things, though few, if anyone, on the left have thought to hold their own side accountable for leftist attacks, whether the mass shooting of Republicans at a congressional baseball practice session in June 2017 by a supporter of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), violence associated with Antifa activists, the Black Lives Matter movement or even the multiple attempts to assassinate Trump.
Conservatives shouldn’t play that card, though they are entitled to accuse liberals of hypocrisy on this point.
The anti-Trump rhetoric of the Democrats and the left has often crossed the line that separates reasonable critiques of the president and his supporters from efforts to delegitimize and demonize them. One can point to innumerable instances of people posting intemperate and open support for violence against Trump and conservatives that deserve condemnation.
But to assert that this means that the leaders of the Democratic Party actually support violence against their Republican counterparts is probably going too far. After all, for all of the president’s over-the-top social-media posts and trolling of his opponents, neither he nor GOP leaders are any more responsible for the same sort of support for anti-liberal violence that can be found on the same platforms than the likes of Sanders.
There may be exceptions to this, such as when politicians use public statements to call for violence against their opponents. One such instance was when in 2022 Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer directly threatened U.S. Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch and Bret Kavanaugh because of their opinions on abortion. But even the veteran senator understood that he had to take that back—and has spent the past few years denying that he meant what he said.
Anti-Jewish incitement
As a general rule, a difference exists between the lamentable mainstreaming of harsh rhetoric from the governing class on both sides of the political aisle and what Mamdani has been doing in just the months he has been in office. And that is why—though it might often be wrong to blame American politicians for the bad behavior of those they influence—Mamdani cannot evade responsibility for the atmosphere of fear that pervades Jewish New York since he became mayor in January.
Blood libels against Jews and the Jewish state are not the same thing as political combat between conservatives and liberals or Republicans and Democrats. We may be living through a hyper-partisan moment in American political history where the advent of social media and the bifurcation of the media have created a spirit of heightened antagonism that pervades the public square. As troubling as that may be, the notion that violence is an expected or even regular part of electoral behavior or governing, akin to those in banana republics or dictatorships, remains beyond the pale in the United States.
Americans may be angry about many issues and increasingly given to intemperate rhetoric about each other. But during and after some of the most bitterly contested elections in U.S. history, such as the ones we’ve seen in the last decade, no widespread political violence ensued.
Politicians high and low need to be careful about saying anything that could be interpreted as a license to attack their opponents, even though many on both sides of the aisle have been guilty of such statements during this time. But to date (and hopefully, for the foreseeable future), U.S. politics will remain a peaceful activity in which the rule of law prevails, even if the way people discuss it gets more hyperbolic and dangerous with each passing year.
Ideologies that justify hate
By contrast, the tradition of anti-Jewish violence, including genocidal attempts to wipe them out, dates back two millennia—and continues to this day. From ancient Roman wars and mass murder during medieval times to the pogroms of the 17th century and those of the last 150 years up to the Holocaust, antisemitic bloodshed is a historic fact.
Add to that Hamas’s genocidal cause, taped for all to see on Oct. 7.
All of this is to say that while it’s possible to assert that hyperbolic accusations against Republicans or Democrats are just political speech, credibly playing that sort of game when it comes to false accusations against Jews and the Jewish state of singular crimes against humanity is another thing entirely.
Those who seek to kill Jews have often used various pretexts to justify their murderous intentions—whether it was ideas about deicide, Nazi racism, Marxist dialectic about Jews and capitalism, “bourgeois nationalism” or Islamist ideas about wiping out resistance to the spread of their fanatical faith.
In recent years, a new “woke” variant of that same hate justifying the demonization of Jews arose under the banner of “anti-racism” as Jews and their state have been falsely accused of being “white” oppressors whose eradication will help bring on the end of oppression everywhere. This intersectional doctrine, rooted in toxic ideas about critical race theory and settler-colonialism, has gained widespread acceptance on the American left and been echoed on the extreme right as well.
The red-green alliance
But Mamdani’s public statements go beyond theoretical anti-racist and intersectional appeals that have become a familiar aspect of life in the American academy. Anti-Jewish violence has become more prevalent in the United States since Oct. 7, as murderous attacks in Washington, D.C., and Boulder, Colo., in the spring of 2025, preceded by an attempted firebombing of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s official residence in Harrisburg last Passover. And that’s not to mention the targeting of Jew students and faculty on college campuses.
Mamdani’s career embodies the red-green alliance of Marxists and Islamists that has endangered Jewish life in Europe and elsewhere in a way that is far more pervasive than what has happened in the United States. Support for his attempt to revive failed Marxist economic theories in New York reflects a profound ignorance of history and the disasters that led to totalitarianism and mass murder in the 20th century under the banner of that false secular faith. At the core of Mamdani’s rise has been his devotion to the cause of anti-Zionism and war against the existence of the State of Israel.
Let it be perfectly clear: Criticism of Netanyahu or his government isn’t antisemitism. Israel is a democracy; its own citizens criticize it every day, just as Americans complain about their government. And whether the world—and many Diaspora Jews—like it or not, Israelis voted in their political representatives in the last election. One doesn’t have to argue that Netanyahu or Israel is above criticism to comprehend that the big lie that it has carried out “genocide” against Palestinians is the justification for anti-Jewish violence.
When placed in the context of woke and Marxist ideas about the downfall of Israel and Zionism being the magic key to defeating global injustice, it becomes a license for even the most murderous attacks on Jews, such as the unspeakable crimes that Rama Duwaji Mamdani openly cheered after Oct. 7. Advocating for an outcome such as the end of the Jewish state, which can only be achieved by eliminating everyone in it, such rants cannot be considered ordinary or even hyperbolic political speech.
Such speeches filled with extreme and unproven charges whose purpose is to depict Israel as beyond the pale, such as the one that Mamdani made last week after admitting that he couldn’t legally arrest Netanyahu when he visits New York for the U.N. General Assembly in September, are not innocent expressions of opinion. They are part of a campaign of incitement whose only purpose is the delegitimizing of anyone who supports Israel, such as is the case with the overwhelming majority of Jews in New York. Indeed, Mamdani made that clear when he justified the siege of a Manhattan synagogue in November by an anti-Zionist mob because he falsely accused those within it of violating international law by facilitating the return of Jews to it.
When leftists persist in trying to libelously blame the rise of antisemitism in the United States on Trump and Netanyahu—in New York and anywhere Mamdani’s violent rhetoric is justified—that is called mainstreaming a pretext for Jewish violence.
The mayor’s anti-Zionist crusade isn’t one more instance of a politician going beyond the normal give-and-take of debate. It’s part of a hate movement directly linked to murderous attacks on Jews. Those who defend it aren’t protecting free speech. Nor are they acting as a check on unfair attempts to associate innocent people with crimes they never imagined, let alone committed. It’s granting a permission slip for an ideology that has only one intended outcome, in which the shedding of Jewish blood is the goal, not a by-product of rhetoric.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS. Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.
