On New Year’s Day, Zohran Mamdani was sworn in as the new mayor of New York City.
Within hours of assuming the duties of mayor of the city with the second-largest Jewish community in the world, Mamdani, whose political orientation closely resembles that of Jeremy Corbyn, revoked two Executive Orders (EOs) of his predecessor, Eric Adams, enacted to protect the city’s Jews: one adopting the widely accepted IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism, and another protecting Jews and Israelis from BDS.
The following day, Jan. 2, most mainstream NYC-based Jewish organizations issued a rare joint statement condemning Mamdani for revoking Adams’ EOs. Also that day, the Israeli Foreign Ministry criticized Mamdani on their X account.
Later in the evening, the Guardian published an article on the row, focusing on the X post by Israel’s foreign ministry.
In line with the headline, the first two paragraphs of the article, written by Edward Helmore, focus on the Foreign Ministry’s criticism of Mamdani on social media.
While the Guardian reporter relegates criticism of Mamdani by the US Jewish community to the final two paragraphs of the article, he provides three paragraphs in the middle of the piece to uncritically citing comments by CAIR (the Council For American-Islamic Relations), without noting the group’s pro-terror, antisemitic record.
The CAIR comments quoted by the Guardian include their spokesperson’s claim that the IHRA antisemitism definition is an “unconstitutional, Israel First attack on free speech.”
“Israel First” is a way of expressing the antisemitic “dual loyalty” trope – the suggestion that American Jews are more loyal to Israel than to their own country – an accusation that’s especially rich coming from an organization which has expressed support for Hamas, proscribed by the US government as a terror organization.
Further, CAIR’s claim that IHRA undermines free speech is undermined by the text of the definition, which notes that it is “non-legally binding,” meaning that free speech laws, either on the state or federal (constitutional) level, supersede the definition.
However, the most important information relating to Mamdani’s decision to scrap IHRA omitted by the Guardian regards the fears of Jews in light of the post-Oct. 7 surge in antisemitism in the city and state. In 2023, for instance, 44 percent of all recorded hate crime incidents and 88 percent of religious-based hate crimes in New York State targeted Jewish victims, despite the fact that only 7 percent of the state’s 20 million residents are Jewish.
Turning to New York City, in 2024, the NYPD reported that Jews were targeted in 345 hate crimes in New York City, more hate crimes than all other minority groups combined. For instance, there were 43 Islamophobic hate crimes reported to police that year.
Mamdani himself, as we noted on these pages previously, has a record which includes promoting the antisemitic conspiracy theory that the IDF is responsible for US police brutality – comments he made in early 2023 as a member of the New York State Assembly.
Earlier in his life, he co-founded a Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter while at Bowdoin College, a group that expressed outright support for the Oct. 7 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. (CAIR, as noted in the CAMERA video above, was an unindicted co-conspirator in that federal terrorism trial.)
Mamdani also refuses to accept Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.
Despite this record, or, more accurately, because of it, the Guardian has been celebrating Mamdani since his November victory, while erasing his policies and views seen by most Jews, particularly in the aftermath of Oct. 7, as a threat to their community.
While the era of prophets may indeed be over, we expect the outlet’s coverage of Mamdani – the member of a radical-left political party which effectively supported Hamas’ massacre – over the next four years to resemble their coverage of the former Labour Party leader, highlighted by their editors’ near religious belief in the doctrine that socialists, progressives, and collectivists, by definition, can’t be antisemites.
This post originally appeared at CAMERA UK.