Thursday, June 25, 2026
When a mayor calls Jews ‘monsters’
At his Brooklyn rally last week, Mayor Zohran Mamdani stood before a roaring crowd and reached for a word with a very long history. The pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC, he declared, was among “the monsters that we are up against,” an organization moving “millions in dark money” to “turn us against one another.” AIPAC is not a shadow cabal. It is a mainstream, bipartisan organization with a large and openly Jewish membership. To brand it a “monster” trafficking in secret money is to revive one of the oldest libels in the Western canon.
That word should chill anyone who knows the history. For a thousand years, Jews have been drawn as demons, beasts, and monsters, in medieval woodcuts, in blood-libel sermons, and most infamously in Nazi propaganda that rendered them as vermin and devils to make their slaughter thinkable.
Dehumanization is not a rhetorical flourish; it is the first step on a known road. So the question is not academic: how does the leader of one of the most diverse cities in the world, with an esteemed Jewish community, stand on a stage and cast an institution as a monster?
This was not a slip. It is the logic of a worldview Mamdani has been building for two decades. By his own account, co-founding the Students for Justice in Palestine chapter at Bowdoin College was “the crux” of his political awakening. That movement’s character is no mystery. Days after the October 7 massacre — the largest mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust — National SJP distributed a “Day of Resistance” toolkit hailing the slaughter as “a historic win for the Palestinian resistance” and proclaiming, “Glory to our resistance, to our martyrs.” The chapter Mamdani founded once rallied for Rasmea Odeh, convicted in connection with a 1969 bombing that killed two students in a supermarket bombing, and later deported for immigration fraud.
The networks behind that movement are now under serious legal scrutiny. A federal court has allowed a lawsuit by October 7 victims to proceed against American Muslims for Palestine and National SJP, alleging they operate as American propaganda arms for Hamas, and a judge ordered AMP to disclose its funding sources. Congressional investigators allege that AMP, whose predecessor organizations courts have tied to a Muslim Brotherhood network, helped incubate the very campus movement that shaped Mamdani. The Muslim Brotherhood, at its core, has a political agenda to replace democracy with Islamic rule and to destroy the United States (the great satan) and Israel (the little satan or, you may perhaps say, the little monster). This describes the ideological environment in which Mamdani’s politics are formed, and he has never distanced himself from it.
This is the pattern of a radical political movement, some on the hard left, some among Islamist activists, that learned to launder its agenda through the language of justice while singling out one people for demonization. They refuse for months to condemn “globalize the intifada.” They call a Jewish advocacy group a monster. They are anti-democratic in method and corrosive in effect, and they have now found a foothold in City Hall.
People of good will across every faith and party, the very people who built the civil-rights tradition, should see this clearly. You cannot champion equality while dehumanizing your neighbors. A mayor who casts Jews and their institutions as monsters is not merely intemperate; he is a threat to the social trust that holds a diverse city together. Decent New Yorkers of every background should say so, plainly, and now, before that old, dangerous word is allowed to do what it has always done.
If this hate goes unanswered, the future of social cohesion and security for all New York citizens will not be guaranteed, and subsequently for all Americans, as we have taken for granted for decades. The time has come, regardless of our political perspective, the political parties we support, or the communities we are associated with, we must defend our democratic way of life. As the US celebrates 250 years of independence and democratic way of life, we must stand up, now, to this scourge of hate and the demonization.
That word should chill anyone who knows the history. For a thousand years, Jews have been drawn as demons, beasts, and monsters, in medieval woodcuts, in blood-libel sermons, and most infamously in Nazi propaganda that rendered them as vermin and devils to make their slaughter thinkable.
Dehumanization is not a rhetorical flourish; it is the first step on a known road. So the question is not academic: how does the leader of one of the most diverse cities in the world, with an esteemed Jewish community, stand on a stage and cast an institution as a monster?
This was not a slip. It is the logic of a worldview Mamdani has been building for two decades. By his own account, co-founding the Students for Justice in Palestine chapter at Bowdoin College was “the crux” of his political awakening. That movement’s character is no mystery. Days after the October 7 massacre — the largest mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust — National SJP distributed a “Day of Resistance” toolkit hailing the slaughter as “a historic win for the Palestinian resistance” and proclaiming, “Glory to our resistance, to our martyrs.” The chapter Mamdani founded once rallied for Rasmea Odeh, convicted in connection with a 1969 bombing that killed two students in a supermarket bombing, and later deported for immigration fraud.
The networks behind that movement are now under serious legal scrutiny. A federal court has allowed a lawsuit by October 7 victims to proceed against American Muslims for Palestine and National SJP, alleging they operate as American propaganda arms for Hamas, and a judge ordered AMP to disclose its funding sources. Congressional investigators allege that AMP, whose predecessor organizations courts have tied to a Muslim Brotherhood network, helped incubate the very campus movement that shaped Mamdani. The Muslim Brotherhood, at its core, has a political agenda to replace democracy with Islamic rule and to destroy the United States (the great satan) and Israel (the little satan or, you may perhaps say, the little monster). This describes the ideological environment in which Mamdani’s politics are formed, and he has never distanced himself from it.
This is the pattern of a radical political movement, some on the hard left, some among Islamist activists, that learned to launder its agenda through the language of justice while singling out one people for demonization. They refuse for months to condemn “globalize the intifada.” They call a Jewish advocacy group a monster. They are anti-democratic in method and corrosive in effect, and they have now found a foothold in City Hall.
People of good will across every faith and party, the very people who built the civil-rights tradition, should see this clearly. You cannot champion equality while dehumanizing your neighbors. A mayor who casts Jews and their institutions as monsters is not merely intemperate; he is a threat to the social trust that holds a diverse city together. Decent New Yorkers of every background should say so, plainly, and now, before that old, dangerous word is allowed to do what it has always done.
If this hate goes unanswered, the future of social cohesion and security for all New York citizens will not be guaranteed, and subsequently for all Americans, as we have taken for granted for decades. The time has come, regardless of our political perspective, the political parties we support, or the communities we are associated with, we must defend our democratic way of life. As the US celebrates 250 years of independence and democratic way of life, we must stand up, now, to this scourge of hate and the demonization.
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