Guardian celebrates the new anti-Zionist hope

This past July, we posted about a Guardian column which erased the extreme and antisemitic views of then New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani.

We noted that, in 2023, three days after the worst antisemitic attack since the Holocaust, then New York State Assembly Member Mamdani issued his first statement on Hamas’s barbaric mass murder, rape, torture and mutilation of 1,200 men, women and children.

As you can see, he not only completely erased Hamas, the perpetrator of the mass murder that had occurred three days earlier, while focusing all his criticism towards Jerusalem’s response to the jihadist barbarism he refused to name, but blamed Israeli “occupation” and “apartheid” for the violence.

Though, under pressure, he later walked back his erasure of Hamas’s mass murder of Jews, the initial response to Oct. 7th by Mamdani, who would later come under fire for refusing to condemn calls to “globalise the intifada”, and for promoting an antisemitic conspiracy theory that the IDF is responsible for US police brutality, wouldn’t have surprised anyone familiar with the now New York City mayor-elect’s ideology.

For instance, he co-founded a Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter during his time at Bowdoin College, a group that expressed outright support for the Oct. 7th massacre.

A decade later, Mamdani, under his then-rapper alter ego “Mr. Cardamom”, sang “My love to the Holy Land Five”, a reference to the five heads of the group who in 2008 were convicted of funneling over $12 million to Hamas through pseudo-charities in what was the largest terror financing prosecution in US history.

Despite this record, or, more accurately, because of it, the Guardian has been celebrating Mamdani’s victory in the New York City election earlier in the month.

Their latest piece, “Zohran Mamdani is rewriting the political rules around support for Israel“, Nov. 27, by former Human Rights Watch director Ken Roth, referenced the latest row about Mamdani’s attitudes towards NYC’s Jewish community, in the following paragraphs:

After a major Manhattan synagogue hosted a group that was encouraging American Jews to emigrate not only to Israel (a normal enough appeal) but also to Israel’s settlements in the occupied West Bank, Mamdani noted the illegality of the settlements. That is an accurate reflection of article 49 of the fourth Geneva convention, which prohibits an occupying power from transferring its population to occupied territory.

It is hard to overstate how unusual such comments are on the part of a successful New York City candidate.

A more dishonest characterisation of the widely reported incident in question would be hard to find.

First, Roth erases the primary element of the story – the protest outside of an Upper East Side synagogue event promoting Aliyah, hosted by Nefesh B’Nefesh, by a mob who chanted hateful, pro-terror slogans such ass “death to the IDF,” “resistance is glorious,” “intifada revolution” and “Resistance you make us proud, take another settler out”.

Reports about the incident also noted that protesters hurled insults toward pro-Israel counter-protesters, including “f—king Jewish pricks.“. Another demonstrator told a Jew outside the synagogue that he should slit his own throat.

Mamdani was widely criticised when his press spokesperson issued a statement after the incident saying that “The Mayor-elect has discouraged language used at last night’s protest and will continue to do so“, that “he believes every New Yorker should be free to enter a house of worship without intimidation“, but “that these sacred spaces should not be used to promote activities in violation of international law.”

However, there was no basis for suggesting that the synagogue, by hosting Nefesh B’Nefesh, the nonprofit that facilitates immigration to Israel for North American Jews, was promoting the “violation of international law”. That charge is likely motivated by the antizionist ideology of the group who organised the protest, Palestinian Assembly for Liberation, which believes that all Jews who move to Israel (with or without Nefesh B’Nefesh’s support) are “settlers,” including those who live in cities within 1949 armistice lines.

Further, the most important issue, which also wasn’t addressed by Roth, is the outrageous fact that Jews, in the city which has seen a tsunami of antisemitic incidents in the months and years since Oct. 7th, were harassed and verbally abused by a pro-Hamas group outside a Jewish house of worship.

In publishing Roth’s ode to Mamdani, the Guardian has again done what it does best: gaslighting Jews about the abuse they suffer at the hands of those who’ve convinced themselves that their near theological belief in Jewish villainy puts them on the right side of history.