By Jonathan S. Tobin
In electoral politics, as in war and sports, the best defense is always offense. And like any skillful politician, Zohran Mamdani has been on the offensive throughout the course of his run for mayor of New York City.
When faced with criticism of his longstanding affiliation with antisemitic groups like Students for Justice in Palestine and the Democratic Socialists of America as well as opposition to the existence of the one Jewish state on the planet, he has two standard responses.
One is to talk past the issue by blandly claiming that, as mayor, he would protect Jewish New Yorkers against antisemitism. The other is to question the morality and decency of anyone who dares to point out that his entire political career is rooted in support for Israel’s destruction and those working to achieve that genocidal goal.
The former is utterly disingenuous. He has been vocal in his encouragement of the mobs on college campuses and elsewhere who target Jews and chant for their genocide (“From the river to the sea”), as well as call for terrorism against Jews everywhere (“Globalize the intifada”), which he won’t disavow.
Breathtaking mendacity
Such breathtaking mendacity is enough to satisfy those who already support the Democratic Socialist candidate’s bid to lead the world’s largest Jewish city outside of Israel. The ploy is simple. Just accuse those who have the temerity to hold him accountable for his antisemitism of engaging in Islamophobia.
In a society founded on principles of equality, calling someone a bigot is a devastating attack. Doing so has become especially effective in an era when victimhood has become the greatest political prize. And few groups have been more skillful in claiming that status than American Muslims.
At the heart of this claim is a myth about the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Muslims have been speaking as if they, and not the nearly 3,000 persons murdered by Islamists on that awful day, were the real victims of Al Qaeda’s assault on America.
And that’s why the recent dustup between Vice President JD Vance and Mamdani about 9/11 victimhood is not a meaningless kerfuffle or, as many Democrats and liberal journalists seem to be asserting, one more piece of evidence of the Trump administration’s racism and insensitivity. To the contrary, it betrays exactly how Mamdani and other supporters or fellow travelers of Islamist extremism and antisemitism have been able to mainstream their particular form of hate by accusing their critics of being prejudiced.
Vance is being bashed in the legacy media for a post on X in which he pointed out that a recent speech by Mamdani centered on calling his critics Islamophobes rested on a particularly deceitful reference to 9/11. As Vance put it, “According to Zohran, the real victim of 9/11 was his auntie who got some (allegedly) bad looks.”
Mamdani said Vance’s comment was inappropriate. “This is all the Republican Party has to offer,” he retorted. Cheap jokes about Islamophobia so as to not have to recognize what people are living through, attempts to pit peoples’ humanity against each other.”
But Vance was exactly right.
For more than two decades, Muslim extremists and their apologists like Mamdani have been alleging that America was swept by a wave of Islamophobia after 9/11. That theme was enabled in part by a laudable concern on the part of then-President George W. Bush that the response to Islamic extremism should not turn into unfair targeting of American Muslims. Unfortunately, his attempts to claim that those Muslims who hate the West and support Islamists were a small minority that misrepresented their religion—and repeated insistence that “Islam is a religion of peace”—were inaccurate.
No evidence to back it up
But while people like Mamdani continue to float unverifiable allegations of prejudice against Muslims, the plain fact of the matter is that there has never been any empirical evidence of such a backlash against American Muslims. On the contrary, FBI hate-crime statistics over the last 24 years have consistently shown that anti-Muslim crimes have been relatively few and overwhelmingly outnumbered by those committed against Jews. Indeed, in the FBI’s latest report, nearly 70% of religion-based hate crimes committed in the United States were against Jews, despite the fact that they make up less than two percent of the population.
But that has never stopped those who purportedly represent Muslims, whether the openly antisemitic Council on America Islamic Relations (CAIR) or politicians like Mamdani, from asserting that Muslims are suffering disproportionate and widespread discrimination in the United States.
This started out as an attempt to flip the narrative about 9/11, such as when opposition to an attempt to build a mosque in the footprint of one of the buildings in the shadow of the World Trade Center that was destroyed by the attack was falsely portrayed as prejudice against Muslims. By claiming that Arabs and Muslims were suffering discrimination because of anger about the Islamist assault on America, the entire discussion shifted.
Rather than seeing the issue of the religion-based hatred of jihadist Muslims for the West, America and the Jews not as mere unkindness, but one that resulted in mass murder, liberal journalists—and apologists like CAIR, obsessed with anecdotal evidence of anti-Muslim discrimination—deemed anyone with a justified fear of Islamic terrorism after 9/11 to be a narrow-minded bigot.
In the last decade, Islamophobia also became a talking point for those who sought to silence criticism of the way in which CAIR and other members of the red-green alliance of Marxists and Islamists engaged in open antisemitism in the course of their agitation against Israel. Jewish groups and individuals, as well as non-Jewish supporters of Israel and the Jews, were targeted and denounced as Islamophobes. But in almost every case, all they were actually guilty of was pointing out that Israel-bashers were engaged in Jew-hatred, as they advocated for Israel’s eradication, denied Jewish history and rights and appropriated the memory of the Holocaust in order to falsely demonize Jews.
Post-Oct. 7 tactics
This dishonesty became even more blatant after the Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Many Muslims and their left-wing allies celebrated what was the largest mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust because they hated Israel. Echoing the language of toxic leftist ideas about race, falsely branded Jews as “white” oppressors and the Jewish state as a nation that had no right to exist.
It is no exaggeration to say that this fraudulent and hateful stand is at the core of Mamdani’s political identity. When he spreads blood libels about Jews committing “genocide”—as he did just last week in the final mayoral candidate debate— while opposing the right of the Jewish people to their own state in their historic homeland and won’t condemn calls for genocide and terrorism against Jews, he’s engaging in behavior that is intrinsically antisemitic. But instead of owning up to his prejudice and that of those who share his views, he bemoans the way Muslims are treated and says that anyone who notices his antisemitism is an Islamophobe.
This is enormously popular among Muslims and also appeals to the left-wing intersectional base of the Democratic Party—and its journalist cheerleaders—who believe the war that Islamists are waging against the West is a function of a racial conflict in which victimized people of color are “resisting” white oppressors. In this way, Islamist terrorism is justified, while Jewish and American victims are erased.
No one should be targeted for his or her religious faith or ethnic identity. And the only people who should be blamed for Islamist terrorism are those who commit and support it. But the idea that American Muslims are in the crosshairs of a vicious backlash based on religious prejudice is still a myth. And those “pro-Palestinian” activists like Mamdani who support a war against the Jews deserve to be identified and held accountable for it.
Gaslighting the Jews
The purpose of promoting the dubious claim that Islamophobia is spreading is clear. It is a perfect example of gaslighting, as it is almost only used when it concerns efforts to identify the hate for Jews that is mainstream in the Arab and Muslim communities. Through this endeavor, the real hatemongers get to play the victims of prejudice, while the victims of their hatred are wrongly accused of being bigots.
The phenomenon is particularly egregious as Jews confront the likelihood of Mamdani—whose public career has revolved around antisemitism—becoming the mayor of New York City. The message they are getting from media outlets like The New York Times that are promoting this false narrative about Mamdani is that to raise the question of Muslim antisemitism is to be an Islamophobe.
If New York is to elect an antisemite as the city’s mayor, let’s be clear about what those seeking to clear the path for such an outcome are doing. Their goal is much like the tone that has characterized coverage of the post-Oct. 7 war against Hamas, in which terrorist propaganda and lies are treated as truth, and the truth about the genocidal goals of Israel’s opponents is sent down the Orwellian “memory hole.”
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate).
