Zohran Mamdani and the Anatomy of a Bogus “Antisemitism” Scandal

This particular meta-scandal began when Mamdani appeared on the conservative Bulwark podcast and was asked about the phrase in question. He said that while he sympathizes with some people’s visceral reaction to the word ​“intifada” and its associations with violence in Israel — and made clear that he had never used the phrase himself — he refused to denounce it because, he argued, doing so would be to effectively denounce the Arabic word for ​“resistance,” which he wouldn’t do. As Mamdani said in the interview:

I think what’s difficult also is that the very word has been used by the Holocaust Museum when translating the Warsaw ghetto uprising into Arabic because it’s a word that means struggle. And as a Muslim man who grew up post-911, I’m all too familiar in the way in which Arabic words can be twisted, can be distorted, can be used to justify any kind of meaning. And I think that’s where it leaves me with a sense that what we need to do is focus on keeping Jewish New Yorkers safe. And the question of the permissibility of language is something that I haven’t ventured into.

Immediately, pro-Israel groups and their Democratic Party and media allies pounced, working to jam the scary-sounding phrase into as many interviews with Mamdani as possible, seeking, over and over again, to bring it up and insist that he denounce it.

Mamdani himself was being interviewed on Meet the Press around the same time as Jeffries’ interview. Host Kristen Welker asked Mamdani twice to ​“condemn” the phrase. He refused to do so, instead reciting his now routine answer: making clear it’s not a term he uses but did not ​“believe that the role of the mayor is to police speech,” especially in light of Trump putting New Yorkers like Mahmoud Khalil in jail for their speech around Palestine.

This comes after Jake Tapper had Mamdani’s main surrogate, New York City comptroller Brad Lander, on last Thursday and asked Lander three questions—all three were about Mamdani’s alleged antisemitism and refusal to condemn ​“globalize the intifada.” Literally no other questions were asked. Nothing about lowering the cost of groceries, freezing rent or providing free and fast transit — all central tenets of Mamdani’s platform that led to his upset victory last week. 

It’s worth noting that Sunday news shows ABC’s This Week and NBC’s Meet the Press, which demagogued Mamdani over an expression he’s never used, and CNN’s State of the Union, which is co-hosted by Jake Tapper who did the same last Thursday, have not once, in 89 episodes and 632 days of live-streamed genocide in Gaza, platformed a single Palestinian or Palestinian-American. Gaza has been talked about, its depopulation casually discussed, while Serious Pundits and U.S. and Israeli officials debated how many civilians was ​“too many” or the appropriate amount to kill. But at no point did any of the anchors, panelists, bookers or producers seemingly think to ask any Palestinians how they felt about their own people’s mass killing and liquidation. They are treated as a faceless abstraction — cartoon terrorist or passive victim — only to be feared or pitied, but never considered or seen as fully human, much less as an impacted constituent who needs to be heard from in any meaningful sense. 

Many of these same anchors and Sunday show producers scrambled, however, to cover and prioritize the potential — theoretically violent — impact of a slogan that Zohran Mamdani, the new Democratic nominee for mayor of New York, again, never actually said or endorsed. 

The ADL and the anatomy of a Meta-Scandal. 

At this point we can identify a general playbook for trying to gin up controversy when a target of pro-Israel groups has never said or done anything actually antisemitic. Absent any evidence of discrimination or prejudice towards Jewish people, the tactic is to pose to them a hypothetical statement, or statement by a totally unrelated party, and demand they ​“condemn” or ​“denounce” it — typically assisted by slippery misunderstandings of Arabic words. 

One saw almost the exact same tactic during the late 2023 university president ​“antisemitism” show trials on Capitol Hill, where university presidents were dragged in front of Senate cameras and asked if they would disallow protest chants that never actually took place, spurned by a deliberate misunderstanding of a spooky Arabic word ​“Intifada”.

Beginning in December 2023, college presidents came ​“under fire” for ​“evasive answers” to questions as to whether or not they would bar students for ​“calling for the genocide of Jews” on campus. The confusion emerged initially because Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) asked administrators whether universities would punish students for using the word ​“intifada,” which she asserted was, per se, a call ​“for the genocide of Jews.” The presidents balked at this characterization of the term, which — once it found its way into media and pundit discourse — drifted into a generalized call for ​“genocide against Jews.” The university presidents said they would punish any speech that resulted in targeted intimidation or physical violence, but said punishing pure speech, even if calling for violence against any group, fell into a legal grey area of policing speech. What resulted was headline after headline about how ​“leaders of Harvard, M.I.T. and Penn appeared to evade questions about whether students should be disciplined if they call for the genocide of Jews,” and ​“Calling for genocide of Jews doesn’t violate school policy, university presidents tell Congress.”

“‘It’s unbelievable that this needs to be said: calls for genocide are monstrous,’ White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates said in a statement,” read one Washington Post subheadline.

There was, of course, one problem: There never was any such documented call for genocide of Jewish students made by college activists anywhere on any campus. The question was entirely hypothetical, resulting from a bad-faith interpretation of the word ​“intifada.” It was all smoke and no fire. It wasn’t a scandal, it was a textbook meta-scandal, which is a scandal that is manufactured out of whole cloth by leading questions, sensationalized by the media, and designed to demagogue and misinform the public. The intended and predictable result of the December 2023 ​“college antisemitism” show trials was an uptick in criminalizing campus Gaza activism, which, by the end of 2024, saw some 3,100 students throughout the U.S. detained or arrested, and thousands more facing harsh university discipline—suspension, expulsion and loss of degree. This crackdown culminated with the Trump administration seizing on the bipartisan moral panic to arrest and deport upwards of 300 Gaza activists as of March 2025.

Virtually the exact same meta-scandal playbook is currently being employed to tarnish the 33-year-old democratic socialist upstart Mamdani. Because Mamdani — like campus Gaza protest leaders—has never actually said anything antisemitic, a meta-scandal is underway, forcing him to comment on theoretical phrasings or random social media posts he never said or had anything to do with. Like with the university presidents, the goal here is to vaguely associate him with hate speech by asking him the same question over and over again, waiting for him to slip up or waffle, at which point his critics can pounce. This approach uses the liberal language of anti-racism and identity politics to compel compliance on issues that are entirely secular and political in nature — namely toeing the line in support for Israel. It is effective because it uses the media’s liberal tendencies against itself. The mopey language of ​“safety,” the desire to calm ​“fears,” the idea that ignorance or prejudice could inform these fears, is simply never entertained as a possibility. Solipsism and squishy feelings rule the day, no matter how selective and racially charged they may be. This is an attack the ADL and other pro-Israel pressure groups found all the more urgent because Mamdani has consistently polled a strong second among New York Jewish Democratic voters and is backed by the highest-ranking Jewish official in New York.

The ADL is also trying out a new approach: demanding that Mamdani condemn random social media posts. Taking a page from the ​“Bernie Bro” playbook of selectively holding candidates accountable for what their nominal supporters say on social media, the ADL issued a press release and a posted a thread on X where they insisted candidates ​“call out” what they deemed hateful social media posts after Mamdani’s primary win last Tuesday. The ADL ostensibly called on ​“all candidates” to denounce the posts, but since the thread was framed as a response to Mamdani’s victory after other candidates had conceded, the focus was clearly on him. 

In These Times reached out to the ADL and asked if the organization could cite any previous examples of demanding a pro-Israel politician denounce random social media posts from accounts and people they had no relation to. The ADL did not point to instances of asking politicians to condemn social media posts from supporters, but instead sent a series of unrelated examples and a statement saying: 

“We believe all public officials have a responsibility to speak out when their inner circles, campaigns, staff members and/​or candidacies are championed by the rhetoric of individuals promoting hate, antisemitism, racism or other forms of bigotry, even if those individuals are not officially affiliated with their office or campaigns.”

Based on their response, it appears this is not a demand the ADL has made of any other politician or candidate until Zohran Mamdani in June 2025. 

The goal of the, ​“Do you condemn random social media posts?” approach, of course, is the same as the, ​“Do you condemn this expression you’ve never said?” approach: keep the target on their back heels, give the vague impression they only criticize Israel because they’re antisemitic, distract from popular economic messaging and — perhaps most important of all — send a signal to future candidates for office: If you don’t toe the line on Israel, we will pile on and call you antisemitic until you do. Meanwhile, genuine antisemites like Donald Trump and Elon Musk, because they support Israel, can get away with the most virulent antisemitic displays, including a literal Nazi salute on live TV, which the ADL dutifully downplayed and defended. 

Democrats join the pile-on

It’s not just mainstream media and Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. Other top Democrats joined the pile-on over the weekend, all outright lying about what Mamdani said. First was Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) in an incoherent diatribe telling listeners on WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show Thursday that Mamdani ​“condoned global jihad” (she has since claimed she ​“misspoke”). Then Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) said on CNN Saturday, ​“I do not associate myself with what [Mamdani] has said about the Jewish people.” Democratic Rep. Laura Gillen (D-N.Y.) said of Mamdani the same day on News Nation, ​“His comments about intifada, calls for violence against Jewish people, it’s really inappropriate for someone like that to lead the city of New York.”

What’s important to note here is that Mamdani never said anything like this. Not even close. He never said ​“intifada” or to ​“globalize” anything, and certainly never said anything about harming ​“the Jewish people.” 

And that’s how the DO YOU CONDEMN game works. Through nonstop repetition and vague association, what started off as a nuanced response to a question about a phrase Mamdani never used, somehow comes out the other end — while wildly lying about what ​“intifada” means — as Mamdani calling for violence against ​“the Jewish people.” It’s a total fiction, but because it’s targeting a Muslim-American and is in service of U.S.-Israeli military interests, few people in positions of power notice or care. Just as with the December 2023 university president ​“antisemitism” show trials, what begins with purely theoretical questions goes through the media demagoguery machine and comes out the other end as established conventional wisdom that Mamdani has somehow called for violence against Jewish people — with almost no media pushback. 

Mamdani’s approach so far has been to brush off the bad faith DO YOU CONDEMN game and focus, instead, on the bread and butter issues of affordability and fairness, rather than caving and mumbling through some defensive apology. This could, of course, change as the pressure heats up. But there’s a very good reason for him to take his current approach: giving into extortionists only invites more extortion. If he condemns ​“globalize the intifada,” then he’ll have to condemn the word ​“intifada,” which is to say condemn any Palestinian resistance to subjugation and occupation, violent or nonviolent, in the language Palestinians themselves speak. Then he’ll have to condemn this obscure social media post, or that one. He’ll have to condemn this protester or that sign. It will be an infinitely regressive game he simply cannot win. 

People need to be held responsible for what they say, not hauled before the court of public opinion and given a list of seemingly awkward or provocative phrasing they need to ​“condemn.” It’s a selective game, not one the ADL has ever asked any pro-Israel politician to play. But it’s one that — when it comes to Mamdani and his rapidly rising profile — is almost certainly just getting started.