The liberal
establishment's war on the New York City mayoral candidate reflects
panic over a growing left challenge to Zionist orthodoxy and the
mainstreaming of Palestine solidarity
Zohran
Mamdani, Democratic candidate for New York mayor, speaks at a press
conference with labour union leaders celebrating his primary victory
over Andrew Cuomo, New York, 2 July 2025 (Angela Weiss/AFP)
The forces arrayed against Mamdani are not strange bedfellows, but
long-standing partners in the management of empire at home and abroad.
Their opposition is less about any single candidate than about the
kind of politics his election threatens to normalise: anti-imperialist,
grounded in Palestinian solidarity, and unafraid to name the mechanisms of racial and economic domination that liberal power prefers to obscure.
Refusing to fold
Full disclosure: I have known Zohran Mamdani since he was a young boy.
He is the son of two dear friends: my Columbia University colleague Mahmood Mamdani, and his mother, the towering Indian filmmaker Mira Nair, whom I have known even longer.
To understand Mamdani, one must go precisely in the opposite direction of what his enemies would have voters believe
Both my younger children campaigned for Mamdani. My children and daughter-in-law voted for him - as did I.
Like millions of other New Yorkers, young and old, we are all rooting
for Mamdani. We hope he will become our next mayor and radically
transform the obscene spectacle of corrupt politicians like Eric Adams and Cuomo.
Still, Mamdani's emergence as a spectacularly bold and brilliant
rising politician is beyond anything anyone could have imagined.
To get to know him, one must go precisely in the opposite direction of what his enemies would have voters believe.
He is a professed democratic socialist, but Trump calls him "a 100% Communist Lunatic". He is tall and handsome, but Trump derides: "He looks TERRIBLE."
Mamdani speaks boldly and beautifully in multiple languages,
including his native New York English. Trump and his chorus of genocidal
Zionists grumble that "his voice is grating". He has dazzled Americans with his disarming, gentle but defiant intelligence, while Trump opines: "He's not very smart."
Indeed, Trump's idea of all such qualities must be embodied by Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy and his white nationalist sweetheart - who, of course, looks like a cross between Warren Beatty and Omar Sharif!
Disgraced Democrats
In his primary victory, Mamdani has put the entire Democratic Party
establishment to shame - showing why they lost so disgracefully in the
2024 presidential election to a convicted felon and Guinness World Records-quality liar.
Remember the ageing and deeply compromised Democratic leaders and
strategists who, after Trump's humiliating defeat of their party, took
to the paper of record to urge surrender?
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"With no clear leader to voice our opposition and no control in any
branch of government, it's time for Democrats to embark on the most
daring political manoeuvre in the history of our party: roll over and
play dead." Such was the sublime wisdom of the so-called genius Democratic strategist James Carville.
It was precisely this frightened and paralysed - and let us not avoid
the word, corrupt - mindset of Democratic apparatchiks that prevented a single Palestinian from speaking during the disgraceful coronation of then-Vice President Kamala Harris at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last August.
Leaders were terrified of offending the genocidal Zionists in their midst, as delegates covered their ears while the names of Gaza's victims were read aloud.
While Palestinians were being slaughtered by the tens of thousands, Harris declared loudly and clearly the genocidal battle cry: "Israel has the right to defend itself."
At that moment, I thought: what this disgusting party needs in both
domestic and foreign policy is someone to the left of Senator Bernie
Sanders, not to the right of former President Barack Obama.
Little did anyone imagine that, in a matter of months, Zohran Mamdani would become the national standard-bearer of precisely that conviction.
Media attacks
In a recent New York Times opinion piece, Peter Beinart warned
Democrats that "opinions on Israel are changing fast", and cautioned
that "Mamdani's victory is not a fluke. It's a sign of things to come."
He is, of course, right.
But that sign has been clear
and bright for decades among ordinary Americans - Democrats and
Republicans alike. It is the corrupt leadership of both parties that has
long been beholden to billionaire Zionists like Haim Saban and Miriam Adelson.
The New York Times is scared - good.
Mamdani now faces an uphill battle against the most reactionary forces in the United States, led by their chief Zionist propagandists.
This so-called legacy media giant is a retrograde Neanderthal
- ageing, out of touch, and best and solely suited as an anthropological
curiosity for those diagnosing the decline of a dysfunctional empire.
First, The Times ran a nasty infomercial
disguised as an editorial diatribe: "Mr Mamdani is running on an agenda
uniquely unsuited to the city's challenges...He seems to lack the
political savvy and instinct for compromise that has made Senator Bernie
Sanders, his fellow democratic socialist, an effective legislator."
Then came successive articles suggesting Mamdani would divide the Democratic Party and alienate
Jewish voters - as if those constituencies were otherwise united in
support for genocidal Zionism, for which The Times is a permanently
reliable bellwether.
Following Mamdani's "stunning showing" came the sleaziest hit piece from The Times.
The paper leaned on hacked college admissions data to accuse Mamdani
of manipulating racial or ethnic identifiers on his Columbia
application. In fact, he had simply navigated a form that forced him to
approximate his lived realities as a human being within a narrow set of
racist categories.
The Times transformed a banal administrative detail into a scandal, while sourcing the story from a known white supremacist - Jordan Lasker (aka Crémieux) - whose history of eugenics-inspired race pseudoscience it failed to disclose to readers.
Losing control
But why is The New York Times so scared witless of Mamdani?
Careful observers have long documented the paper's notoriously anti-Palestinian, fanatically pro-Israel record. But others have also laid bare the domestic political reasons behind its hostility to Mamdani. One reason, in particular, demands to be highlighted.
The Times is afraid because its editors know they are losing control
of a city whose name they carry in their very claim to infamy.
The Times and its allies are throwing everything they have at
Mamdani...but they know the truth: genocidal Zionists have lost control
of New York
They marshalled the obscene branding of student protests against Israel's genocide - many of them led by Jewish students - as "antisemitic", and cemented the alliance between Zionist enablers in academia and Trump's administration, thinking they had that piece of trouble under control.
And then, right from under their noses, Mamdani emerged: a bold,
brilliant, dashingly handsome, disarmingly gentle young Muslim who
blasted the incurably corrupt Cuomo out of the race.
Now, The Times and its allies are throwing everything they have at Mamdani – just as Israel does against Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran.
They may yet succeed in demonising a mayoral candidate who pledged
to arrest the war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu if he dares set foot in
New York. But they also know the truth: genocidal Zionists have lost
control of the city - just as they are losing the rest of the US.
A 'sea change'
Every time the liberal establishment tries to smear Mamdani as an antisemite, they are forced to confront reality: his base includes a large community of principled, progressive Jewish New Yorkers, young and old.
A significant number
of caring, proud and committed Jews have refused to be used as shields
for oppression -Jews who have joined a principled coalition to elect a
progressive Muslim mayor in the midst of a political landscape shaped by
both antisemitism and Islamophobia.
They thought fanatical Zionists like Jerry Seinfeld and his wife defined New York's Jewish community. They had another thing coming.
Meanwhile, the broader public is shifting too. A recent poll found a
56-point swing among Democrats over just eight years towards
dramatically more critical views of Israel - a shift CNN polling expert Harry Enten called a "sea change" that he said he "rarely" sees in opinion polling.
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Among Democrats today, only 12 percent sympathise more with Israelis, while 60 percent sympathise with Palestinians - representing "an all-time low for Israelis and an all-time high for Palestinians".
The Times cannot grasp the depth of this transformation - but it had better get used to it.
Suddenly, from the very intellectual and activist communities it
tried to silence and dismantle, the son of a Columbia professor rose up
as a dashing political leader, threatening to pull the delusional rug
out from under their feet - not only at the university but across the
city they thought they owned.
That is why The New York Times is going berserk. That is why it is leading a Zionist crusade against Mamdani.
It is "New York". It is their city - or so they thought.
Forget about a few college campuses here and there. Mamdani has shown
them that their city - and with it, perhaps the entire country - is
slipping from their grasp, escaping the arrogant pipe dream that they
ever owned it.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.