By Noah Rothman
Friday, October 17, 2025
The New York Times apparently thought better of
the original headline gracing its ostensibly straight-news coverage of the
blowback that followed when New York City mayoral candidate Zoran Mamdani
encountered, for perhaps the first time, an issue relating to Israeli security
on which he had no opinion: the necessity of Hamas’s disarmament.
“Mamdani Faces Islamophobic attacks After Comments About
Hamas,” read the original headline of Emma Fitzsimmons’s article.
Subsequently, Mamdani faced only unspecified “attacks” that were presumably as vague as his “comments”
about the barbarous terrorist sect.
The Times would have been better off scrubbing the
item entirely. It is about as deliberately uninformative as a piece of
journalism could conceivably be. It fails not only to inform the reader of the
basic contours of the event about which she is reading, it does so in such a
consciously motivated manner that it makes the reader doubt the paper’s
capacity for institutional neutrality.
Mamdani did encounter “vitriolic attacks” that
suggested he was a “terrorist sympathizer” from some quarter on the right.
Congresswoman Elise Stefanik did, for example, call him a “jihadist,”
and one state-level Democratic representative did accuse Mamdani of
being “pro-Hamas.” But for what? Only for giving “an indirect answer” to the
inquiry by Fox News Channel host Martha MacCallum about his views on the virtue
of a terrorist group’s disarmament.
That’s not really what happened, though, is it? Mamdani
said he had no views on a subject about which he has never had anything other
than a multiplicity of views. And when pressed on the matter during last
night’s debate, he gave a far more explicit call for Hamas to “lay down their arms.” Why did the candidate form an opinion
all of a sudden? Does it even matter? In fact, why are you so concerned, huh?
Sure, a reasonable observer can infer quite a lot from this sequence of events.
But the Times regards your capacity for logical inference as not only
unjustified but bigoted.
A reader of Fitzsimmons’s article could be forgiven for
assuming that her sources for this piece were drawn exclusively from the
Mamdani campaign. She noted that Andrew Cuomo accused Mamdani of failing to
“denounce” Hamas, even though the candidate “has done so repeatedly.” The
evidence the reporter marshals in support of the claim is a May 30, 2025, clip
in which Mamdani literally tells a heckler, “I
denounce Hamas.” But in the intervening months, the candidate himself has
introduced a substantial element of ambiguity about his outlook on the
terrorist group.
After all, who could disagree with Mamdani’s “allies,”
who describe his critics as “xenophobic and dangerous.” Like whom? Like Mamdani
campaign spokeswoman Dora Pekec and Governor Kathy Hochul. How’s that for
authority? And after all, the term “jihadist,” which “refers to a Muslim person
who is engaged in a holy war against the enemies of Islam,” doesn’t even apply
to Mamdani, who has said that his anti-Israel activism was rooted in a “shared
sense of humanity” with the Palestinians. Doesn’t sound very holy-war-ish to
me.
And what is Mamdani’s beef with Israel, anyway? His
objection is rooted in the foundational enterprise in which Israel has been
engaged since its founding – its identity as a Jewish state. The candidate
would rather it be a “place of equal rights for all,” Fitzsimmons contended,
lending implicit veracity to Mamdani’s slanderous characterization of Israel as
an apartheid state, and it will be until its founding mission is abandoned.
Mamdani’s views have opened him up to “attacks and
threats,” rendering him the real victim of persecution and bigotry. Just to add
some fairness as a garnish, Fitzsimmons allowed one of Mamdani’s critics a full
sentence. “Whether or not to disarm terrorists is not a hard question,” said
Long Island Democratic Representative Laura Gillen. “And I’m going to call out
anyone who gets it wrong.” But Gillen didn’t get the last word. That was
reserved for Brooklyn-based City Councilman Lincoln Restler, who shot back at
Gillen, “Do better.” Touché.
There are shades of 2009 in this style of coverage –
reflexive, pretense-free wagon-circling around the object of the left’s
affections. It’s coupled with a thinly veiled effort to anathematize his
critics and strip their frustrations with him of context to frame them as the
product of thoughtless racial or creedal animus. It’s quite a throwback to the
Obama era. If it is a sign of things to come, Mamdani’s mayoralty is going to
be excruciating.
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