Minorities become majorities. Outlier opinions go mainstream. It happens all the time. Sometimes overnight.
Ideas that sound weird, off the wall, extremist or deranged can end up in routinized, accepted, conventional wisdom.
Readers may wonder why the IJN pays such close attention to the major’s race in New York City. Since Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic primary, the IJN has run a story almost every week on Mamdani. No municipal policy implemented in New York will likely have any impact in Denver. But this mayor’s race is about ideas, not just policies. Mamdani says that he has no power to implement any of his foreign policy ideas. True — and irrelevant. His ideas, once outliers, threaten to go mainstream far beyond the borders of New York City. His ideas, once extreme, acquire a gloss of respectability if repeated loudly enough. Whoever is mayor of New York has a megaphone. His comments on Oct. 7, 2025 had 22 million views on X (more on what he said, below). Any American Jew, wherever he lives, cannot ignore the Mamdani phenomenon.
Mamdani’s ideas threaten to undermine the safety of Jews across the United States. Lest that sound alarmist and grossly exaggerated, consider the impact of a single anti-Semitic incident in Britain: the Yom Kippur attack on a synagogue in Manchester. Suddenly, British Jews are wondering whether they still have a place in their own country. Stress word: suddenly. This attack was hardly the first anti-Semitic incident in Great Britain, hardly the first sign of a societal shift. But that’s how minorities become majorities: a gradual, sometimes even an unnoticed development, explodes.
I shall return to Great Britain. It’s a useful foil for Mamdani. Let’s look at what Mamdani says.
‘Genocide’has lost all meaning
Globalize the intifada.” He’s backtracked on that a bit, but so what. He gave visibility and power to an idea that once was on the fringe. What is the idea? “Intifada” is the mass murder of Israeli Jews. It’s not a term that applies to violence against anyone but Jews. “Intifada” is bombs thrown (or worn as a suicide belt) in Israeli pizzerias, public Passover seders and on random Israeli streets. The first intifada began in 1987, the second in 2000. Intifada violence is always terrorist: against Jewish Israeli civilians.
“Globalize” the intifada means: terrorist violence against Jews anywhere.
Mamdani can wordsmith away “Globalize the intifada” all he wants and can even stop using it. So? He given credence to the term in a way that uncouth screaming anti-Israel protesters on campuses never could. Thanks to Mamdani, “globalize the intifada” is out there in a way it never was before.
Look what Mamdani said on Oct. 7, 2025, the second anniversary of the launch of Hamas’ war against Israel: Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli government “launched a genocidal war,” in which the US has been “complicit.”
As used by Mamdani and others in the context of the Gaza war, the word genocide has lost all meaning. Try telling an anti-Israel protester or social media commenter to look it up and learn what it means and where it’s happened. That’s all become irrelevant. “Genocide” has become a slogan. “Genocide” simply connotes: Israel is evil. Israel is beyond the pale. That’s Mamdani’s intent, and that’s his potential influence beyond the mayoralty of New York City. As I noted, Mamdani’s characterization of Israel’s “genocidal war” gathered 20 million views on X.
Notice what gets lost in the evisceration of the actual denotation of “genocide”: the difference between an offensive war and a defensive war. Israel did launch a war at all. Israel defended itself against a war launched against it by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023. Again, go tell that to the protesters and the social media crowd. Tell them to look up the difference. Won’t happen. That’s the danger of a New York mayor launching his own verbal firebombs.
Go tell him to look up the idea and the reality of Hamas human shields to understand the depth of the destruction in Gaza. He won’t do it. It’s so much easier — and alluring — to cry “genocidal war.”
‘Apartheid,’ Israel-style: Free money for every Arab child up to the age of 18
Look what Mamdani also said on Oct. 7, 2025: “the [Israeli] apartheid must end.” Apartheid? In the Jewish state, one-fifth of the population that is not Jewish has the right to vote, the right to hold public office, the right to scholarship at Israel’s medical (and other) schools, the right to serve on the Supreme Court — and a lot more. Israel is still a socialist country in at least one critical way: Parents receive a monthly check from the government for every child they have, up to the age of 18.
In this, no distinction between a Jewish and an Arab Israeli child is drawn. People talk about large Arab families. The larger they are, the larger the check the parents receive, every month, from the Israeli government.
“Apartheid” means radical discrimination. What could be more unlike apartheid than Israel paying Arab families to have children, just as it pays Israeli families to have children?
Yet, here is Mamdani, ignorantly yet influentially mouthing the word “apartheid” and spreading it all around, as if it were a fact. He’s not the first, but now he is the loudest.
That is why the IJN covers Mamdani. Jews need to see the danger.
Why we cover Mamdani
That’s why I wonder: so goes New York, so goes the country? And that’s why it’s instructive to return to the British Jewish reality.
Before the Yom Kippur attack in Manchester, a survey in November, 2023, showed that two-thirds of British Jews said they are less likely to display any signs of their faith in public (so writes Tunku Varadarajan in the Wall Street Journal). Nine out of 10 British Jews say they wouldn’t set foot in a city center during an anti-Israel demonstration. “Globalize the intifada” is often chanted as these demonstrations.
Anti-Semitic attacks in Britain have increased dramatically since Oct. 7 — the date when the real attempt at genocide, the Hamas attempt, occurred.
It’s not just attacks. Dave Rich, director of policy for the Community Security Trust, a British charity charged with protecting British Jews, is quoted in the WSJ:
“Anti-Semitism has become much more mainstream and normalized. People encounter it at schools, workplaces and hospitals, where it just wasn’t present before.”
So goes Britain, so goes the US?
That’s why we cover Mamdani.
© IJN 2025
