Thinking about Zohran Mamdani and Extreme Islamophobia in a Time of Genocide

The mayoral primary victory of Zohran Mamdani has been met with relief by millions in the United States who are grateful that a charismatic young candidate who promotes the welfare and interests of ordinary people—not powerful donors and special interests— actually won an election.

Yet Mamdani’s campaign and his upset victory over the scandal-plagued Andrew Cuomo nevertheless has provoked a torrent of blatant Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism. The volume of this undisguised bigotry has been stunning—in part because of the shamelessness of it, in part because the Islamophobia is clearly connected to anti-Palestinian racism, and in part because so many of those who are relentlessly attacking him claim to be concerned about antisemitism.

Mamdani has been defamed not only because he is Muslim. Rather, he is villified because, when asked, Mamdani says that he believes in equality for Palestinians. Mamdani, of course, did not make Palestine or the Palestinians the center of his campaign; his critics did by constantly smearing him as antisemitic.

Even Stephen Colbert noted that “foreign affairs” have become part of the mayoral race, “partly because this is such a multicultural city.” But the question Colbert asked Mamdani (and Brad Lander) was not really about foreign affairs as such, nor did he ask about the multicultural nature of New York and its historic mix of communities, ethnicities, religions and people. Instead, Colbert posed a litmus test that has been used for decades to trip up and put on the defensive those who support equality and justice for Palestinians. Colbert asked “does the state of Israel have the right to exist” (not do the stateless Palestinians like everyone else, have the right to humanity and freedom, do they have a right to an even basic life free from the cruelties of military rule and apartheid, do they have the right to childhood and education, let alone do they have the right to have an actual state?).

Colbert also raised what he called the “elephant in the room” which to him was the apparent refusal of “many people in New York” to support Mamdani because of the “Jewish community’s fear of a rising tide of antisemitism”—as if Mamdani were somehow implicated in this antisemitism. Colbert added that many were “very upset” with things that Mamdani “said in the past” (without specifying what Mamdani actually said).

Mamdani, of course, did not make Palestine or the Palestinians the center of his campaign to become mayor of New York City; his critics did by constantly smearing him as antisemitic.

And while he asked about antisemitism, Colbert did not ask about anti-Muslim hatred or anti-Palestinian racism that surely concerns many in New York as well, including many members of New York’s vibrant and diverse Jewish community who have been profoundly opposed to the oppression of Palestinians, and to anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia. Colbert did not address the cynical weaponization of charges of antisemitism to smear students in New York of all faiths, or the government campaign to terrorize international students that infamously began with the abduction of an actual New York resident Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil who spent months in an ICE jail in Louisiana.

Predictably, Colbert avoided mentioning the true elephant in the room which is the ongoing U.S.-funded Israeli genocide in Gaza. By now even Colbert is surely aware that Israel has waged a war of annihilation against the Palestinians in Gaza for twenty months (even if he described it in a later show gingerly as “this Israeli military action in Gaza”), whose cities and towns have been destroyed, whose children are being relentlessly starved, whose hospitals and schools have been devastated, and whose civilian population are daily being slaughtered before the world. Al-Jazeera reports as I write this now, for example, that the Israeli military massacred 95 more Palestinians in Gaza, including women, children, and journalists. The systematic Israeli shooting of starving Palestinians as they seek meager food rations has been widely reported. In the Israeli occupied West Bank, fanatical Israeli Jewish settlers have been engaging in yet another pogrom against defenseless Palestinians.

The relentless oppression of Palestinians is not disguised or hidden. Yet in American political and establishment circles, the genocide is not so much denied as rendered entirely irrelevant. It is not so much taboo as taken for granted. Genocide is apparently banal. Naming or protesting the genocide, and criticizing the ideology of the state that perpetrates it, is, however, beyond the pale and hateful. At least Colbert gave Mamdani (and Brad Lander) the chance to reply. The generous interpretation of Colbert’s line of questioning was that it was not intentionally designed to smear Mamdani as much as to give him the opportunity to clarify before a national audience what he actually believes and advocates for.

The same cannot be said for prominent politicians and officials who have smeared and defamed Mamdani in the wake of his primary victory. While the Democratic Party leadership have refused to endorse Mamdani, New York Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand accused Mamdani of threatening Jews. She said that he had failed to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada.” She suggested that Mamdani was, in fact, “permissive for violence against Jews.” Her radio interviewer pushed back and said that Mamdani had not actually suggested any of this, or used the phrase “globalize the intifada,” and had, in fact, repeatedly condemned antisemitism. Unfazed by facts, Gillibrand insisted “when you hear things like intifada, when you hear things like jihad, when you hear ‘from the river to the sea,’ it is received as ‘slaughter the Jews and destroy Israel,’ period.”

Republican Elise Stefanik was even more blatant in her Islamophobia. Stefanik has spearheaded a congressional inquisition against higher education claiming, falsely, that universities have been hotbeds of rampant antisemitism. She accused Mamdani of being a “Hamas terrorist sympathizer” and an “antisemitic, jihadist, Communist candidate.” The fanatical Republican Florida Congressman Randy Fine, who has actually endorsed the starvation of Gaza’s children and the killing of a U.S citizen and University of Washington alumna Aysenur Ezgi Eygi by the Israeli army in the West Bank, said that Mamdani’s victory would threaten to turn America into a “Shiite caliphate.” Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene posted a cartoon of the Statue of Liberty in a burqa on X after Mamdani’s victory.

When ethical historians (if any are left) look back at this time of genocide, they will surely narrate how this crude weaponization of antisemitism was not directed at fighting actual antisemitism, but rather how it was used to smear all sorts of people simply because they advocate for justice for Palestinians and to propagate unmistakable anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia. Mamdani’s primary victory, however, tells us that many people of all faiths and backgrounds can see through this ruse. To insist on the equal value of Palestinian life is a commitment to our common humanity precisely because so much of the official Western world has clearly indicated that such non-Western life is irrelevant, out of bounds, of lesser value, and dispensable.