Mamdani’s Intifada

By Andrew C. McCarthy

Thursday, August 20, 2026

 

Zohran Mamdani, a glib 34-year-old Muslim immigrant from Uganda, cruised to a ten-point victory in New York City’s 2025 mayoral election over Andrew Cuomo — a Democratic establishment luminary, albeit one who’d resigned amid the scandals of his second term as the Empire State’s governor. In a city whose party politics were dominated for decades by Jews, mostly but not exclusively Democrats, one controversy notably did not derail the upstart Democratic Socialist’s bid: his obdurate refusal to condemn the phrase “Globalize the intifada.”

 

This remains a slogan that rolls easily off the tongues of Mamdani’s core supporters — Islamists and leftists who stoked the blatantly antisemitic uprisings at Columbia University (where Mamdani’s father teaches and his mother has taught) and on other elite campuses across the country. These protests had followed the atrocities of October 7, 2023, when Hamas and its allied Palestinian militants murdered nearly 1,200 Israelis (including 46 Americans), raped and maimed thousands more, and abducted more than 250 hostages, many of whom were killed or detained and tortured for more than two years.

 

The dispute over the phrase is all one needs to know about the new mayor’s notorious vow to have Benjamin Netanyahu arrested, on a warrant issued by the International Criminal Court, when the Israeli prime minister attends September’s annual General Assembly confab at the United Nations in Manhattan. Legally, a municipal official — even the chief executive of the nation’s largest, most cosmopolitan city — cannot take law enforcement action against a foreign head of state, let alone execute the order of a rogue international tribunal that the United States government has never recognized (and whose operatives it is currently sanctioning). Still, the mayor did not stand down until he’d goaded President Donald Trump, Israel’s ally and the Democrats’ archnemesis, into a public admonition that Netanyahu was not to be touched — he’d be afforded the immunity the U.N.’s host nation customarily grants to hostiles and friendlies alike.

 

Of course, Mamdani well knew that he couldn’t arrest Netanyahu. Yet he calculated that demagogy — the issuance of hollow but insistent threats to apprehend the “war criminal,” the embodiment of Zionism — was very much in his interest.

 

New Yorkers of a certain age, raised in a political environment where Jews punched way above their weight, might look at a few data points to mitigate their astonishment at today’s seismic shift. The voter turnout that drove Mamdani’s election seems modest, at around 42 percent  — so a candidate with highly motivated supporters had a big advantage over unexciting rivals such as Cuomo and Curtis Sliwa (a perennial of the Big Apple’s moribund Republican Party). But look closer: Voter participation in Mamdani’s sweeping victory was more than double that of the 2021 election (won by the unpopular Eric Adams). In fact, it was the highest rate in 57 years.

 

This surge occurred amid profound demographic change. It is not enough to say that, today, there are many more Muslims in New York City  — a cauldron of racial, ethnic, and religious politics — than the roughly half a million residents of Italian descent (a population that has declined by more than 25 percent since 2000, when it was still a solid base for the Cuomos). Muslims immigrate to the U.S. from dozens of countries, and our government’s decennial census does not track religious affiliation, so estimates of the city’s Islamic population involve guesswork. These range from 650,000 to more than 900,000. One higher-end City Hall estimate in 2025 claimed that “one in nine New Yorkers” is Muslim. Supporting evidence was scant, but if correct, that would total 940,000.

 

Although it remains true that the Jewish population of New York City dwarfs that of any other city in the world (including Jerusalem and Tel Aviv), it has dropped to an estimated 960,000. That’s down from over 2 million in the 1950s. Back then, that was around a quarter of the city’s nearly 8 million inhabitants. While the Jewish population has more than halved, the city has grown by 700,000 people. New York’s Muslim and Jewish populations are nearing parity, and the trends indicate that Islam is surging — as it is in other major American and European cities, dramatically altering their character.

 

There was, therefore, political logic to Mamdani’s rejection of calls from the city’s formerly predominant, pro-Israel center-left that he condemn rhetoric that lionizes “intifada.” The term refers to the violent Palestinian uprisings, particularly in the periods 1987–93 and 2000–2005, which were putatively against Israel’s occupation of disputed territories in Judea and Samaria (collectively, the West Bank) and the Gaza Strip but principally against its existence as a Jewish state. The First Intifada saw the birth of Hamas. The Second Intifada’s terrorism wave — bus bombings, restaurant bombings, and the like — killed more than 1,000 Israelis, mostly civilians. To “globalize” the intifada, according to the slogan — in essence, to fuel hatred, intimidation, and violence against Jews the world over — puts paid to mainstream Democratic pretensions that the left’s ferocious agitation over the current war targets only Israel as a nation (or, even more narrowly, the Netanyahu government) rather than the Jewish people.

 

Nevertheless, there is far more to Mamdani’s stance than counting votes in America’s premier urban center. He could no more denounce “Globalize the intifada” than renounce his life’s work.

 

The extirpation of the Jewish state, the suppression of its supporters: These are driving aspirations of a fraught alliance. It pairs Islamists (or, more accurately, sharia supremacists) with socialists, including a vanguard of leftist Muslims and their mostly young, white, college-educated fellow travelers. For Islamists, these aspirations are scriptural imperatives; for the hard left, they are central to the armed liberation struggle against Western colonialism. In this narrative, Israel is caricatured as America’s domineering puppet (or puppet master, depending on the narrative’s needs).

 

Throughout many 20th-century uprisings — in Greater Syria, Mandatory Palestine, Iraq, Egypt, Algeria, Iran, etc. — Islamists and socialists collaborated against Western-backed regimes but eventually fractured over their contradictory visions of utopia. The Islamists are determined to impose sharia: “the path,” Islam’s discriminatory law and societal framework, developed largely — and, in theory, immutably — between the seventh and tenth centuries. The socialists are driven primarily by an Arab nationalist model centered on indigenous peasants supposedly oppressed by foreign powers (a refinement of Marx’s class-struggle model, driven by economic determinism). Socialists seek to develop a new collective consciousness — the new nation — by forcibly supplanting the brutal colonizer regime and the “superstructures” by which it divides and co-opts the colonized society’s elites.

 

The intifada that the left wants to globalize cannot succeed unless these two factions are united. Despite his youth, Mamdani has spent over a decade positioning himself to be a bridge between them. Now, he is executing the plan from his strategically vital pedestal — the most visible, influential American executive political office ever held by a socialist or a Muslim.

 

In the United States, he has distinct advantages. Here, leftists and Islamists are not factions of a population subjugated by a totalitarian regime or a foreign colonizer. For all the campus left’s loopy “land acknowledgments” and “Jim Crow” rhetoric, the American people created and freely elect their government. Socialism and sharia supremacism, even if they are disturbingly on the rise, are decidedly minority positions; there is no prospect of their vying with each other for power after toppling the regime. Indeed, because the left’s disparate factions are relatively small, “intersectionality” is all the rage: socialists, Islamists, and other fringe elements band together under the banner of the “oppressed.” For the sake of tribal solidarity and electoral viability, they paper, rather than obsess, over their doctrinal differences. That’s how you get such groups as Queers for Palestine on American campuses. You’re not apt to find them in, well, Palestine.

 

What anneals leftists and Islamists, what keeps them collaborating, is their mutual loathing of the West. “Eradicating America,” particularly by vanquishing the Israeli ally by which the U.S. allegedly projects colonial power over the Muslim Middle East, is how Students for Justice in Palestine sum up their ambition. SJP is a Marxist organization with a significant Islamic membership. Its advocacy of violence, intimidation of Jewish students and staff, seizure and vandalism of property, disruption of classes, and harassment of trustees have led to suspensions and outright bans at numerous universities — even the likes of Columbia, Michigan, and UCLA, whose administrators typically turn deaf ears to “protests” that echo Hamas rallies.

 

The SJP chapter at Bowdoin College was founded by none other than Zohran Mamdani, an undergraduate there from 2010 to 2014. Majoring in Africana studies, Mamdani did his capstone project on the anti-colonial oeuvre of Frantz Fanon, the Martinican psychoanalyst who died at 36 in 1961 — on the verge of Algeria’s independence after a brutal, eight-year war against French colonial rule. That conflict was the basis for Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, the canonical work for violent revolutionaries ever since. Fanon’s philosophy is more complex than some of his most ardent admirers suggest, but Mamdani was not wrong in relating that “for colonized subjects to experience human liberation,” per Fanon, it was essential not just to defeat the colonizing power but to eradicate root and branch the structures by which it exercises influence.

 

Activists for the Palestinian cause have long framed the conflict with Israel along Fanonian lines, even though Fanon wrote about a significantly different context. Unlike France’s more than century-long colonization of Algeria, Israel has been the Jewish homeland for millennia, long before the birth of Islam, let alone the emergence of today’s Palestinians. (The formative Palestine Liberation Organization did not even exist until three years after Fanon’s death.) Nevertheless, Fanon’s philosophy is congenial for Islamists as well as socialist revolutionaries. Both rabidly oppose the American-led Western order, and both support violent conquest. Fanon, moreover, was ambivalent about religion. He saw national consciousness as something newly derived from the violent liberation struggle itself, not as the replacement of a despotic system with a theocracy rooted in ancient beliefs. He was cognizant, though, that religious fervor fortifies the commitment of downtrodden masses to engage in the struggle.

 

Some history of the SJP, where Mamdani cut his teeth. The organization was founded at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1990 by Hatem Bazian, a Palestinian academic infamous for declaring, “It’s about time we had an intifada in this country,” and later posting antisemitic memes (for example: a depiction of a Jewish man above the caption, “Mom look! I is chosen. I can now kill, smuggle organs & steal the land of Palestinians. Yay! #Ashke-Nazi”). Bazian has long-standing ties to the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP), which was established by Muslim Brotherhood luminaries in the early 1980s. As the Justice Department proved in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism-financing case, the IAP became a U.S.-based support system for Hamas, which is the Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch. In 2006, Bazian founded another organization, American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), which the Anti-Defamation League has noted “promotes antisemitic tropes and support for violence against Israel, such as praising Hamas for the Oct. 7, 2023 attack.” In an Illinois civil lawsuit, AMP is alleged to be IAP’s alter ego (continuing some of its operations after the IAP formally shut down, following the plaintiffs’ winning a $156 million verdict against it for financing a terrorist attack that killed their son).

 

The Muslim Brotherhood’s abhorrence of Jews has scriptural roots. Under sharia principles, the presence of a Jewish ruler on what is deemed to be Islamic land triggers the obligation of violent jihad until the interloper is eradicated. That is why the Brotherhood and its scores of affiliated Islamist tentacles oppose a peaceful settlement of the conflict. In the West, the Muslim Students Association (MSA) is the Brotherhood’s most successful sharia-supremacist indoctrination project. Founded in the mid-Sixties, the MSA now has more than 600 chapters at universities across the United States and Canada. It is a habitual partner of SJP at campus rallies and events — including October 7 anniversary observances that condemn Israel and mourn Palestinian “martyrs.”

 

In 2011, SJP held its first national conference. The keynote speaker was a prominent Columbia University scholar of postcolonialism, Mahmood Mamdani — the father of New York’s current mayor. Both Mamdani parents are intense detractors of Israel. Voicing the oft repeated canard, the mayor’s mother, Mira Nair, a filmmaker of some renown, accuses Israel of practicing “apartheid.” Professor Mamdani led “teach-ins” at Columbia’s student encampments during the post–October 7 campus unrest and later blasted the university’s curtailment of the protests and suspension of SJP. He has, naturally, been publicly defended by Bazian.

 

Before he ran for mayor, Zohran Mamdani’s most notable proposal, as a young socialist in the New York State Assembly, was “Not on Our Dime!,” a bill that sought (unsuccessfully) to revoke tax-exempt status for pro-Israel charities. When he entered City Hall this year, among his first official acts were to reverse the city’s adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism and to lift the restriction on city officials from participating in boycotts or divestment campaigns against Israel.

 

Yes, Mayor Mamdani knew he couldn’t arrest the prime minister of Israel. He repeatedly threatened to do it, however, for two reasons. Depicting Netanyahu as a colonizer and oppressor who kills Muslims en masse buoys two constituencies, socialists and Islamists, whose energy and cooperation he needs in a city where they wield increasing political influence. The second reason? Mamdani is a true believer.