The Whitewashing of Zohran Mamdani Has Begun

Now that Zohran Mamdani has been elected mayor of New York City, the media have been cleaning up his history, trying to make him seem less threatening to the city’s Jews and more acceptable to the general public. More on what is being whitewashed, or deliberately overlooked altogether, for the benefit of Zohran Mamdani, can be found here: “Media Amnesia: Zohran Mamdani’s Extremism Forgotten as Pro-BDS Socialist Wins New York City Mayor,” by Rachel O’Donoghue, HonestReporting, November 5, 2025:

The clean-up has begun.

As votes rolled in and it became clear that Democrat nominee Zohran Mamdani had secured the landslide victory long predicted, the media whitewash was already underway.

Mamdani’s rise – from relative unknown to mayor of America’s largest city – is, politically speaking, extraordinary. He won more votes than any candidate in a New York City mayoral race in 50 years.

Mamdani’s “landslide” and “spectacular victory” was not, in fact, a landslide, and furthermore, not all that “spectacular.” He squeaked by, with only 50.4% of the vote, while running against one of the weakest candidates in recent years, Andrew Cuomo, who was fatally tainted by charges from eleven women of sexual harassment during his time in office as governor.

But it was also a campaign haunted by allegations of antisemitism, anti-Israel extremism, and sympathy for radical Islamist movements. Those allegations were well-founded, which is precisely why the media – until now – felt obliged at least to mention them, if only to dismiss them as “smears.”

Now that he’s won, even that pretense of scrutiny is vanishing.

The Record the Media Are Erasing

These facts are not in dispute – and they have all been previously documented by HonestReporting and others:

• May 2021 – Pro-Palestinian rally, Manhattan:
  Led BDS chants and attacked city officials who traveled to Israel.

  Aug 4–6, 2023 – DSA National Convention, Chicago:
  “When the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF.” (Video resurfaced Oct 2025)

  2023–2025 – Multiple posts and interviews:
  Repeatedly labeled Israel an “apartheid” state and accused the U.S. of “subsidizing genocide.”

  June 5, 2025 – Media interview:
  Refused to affirm Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, saying instead that he supports “a state with equal rights for all” and opposes any “hierarchy of citizenship… on the basis of religion.”

  June 8, 2025 – Cornell Tech boycott call:
  Urged a boycott over the university’s partnership with Israel’s Technion.

  June 2025 – NBC’s “Meet the Press”:
  Refused to condemn the slogan “globalize the intifada,” saying it’s “not language I use,” but stopping short of disavowing it….

“Globalize the intifada” means that “just as Jews in Israel were killed during the First and Second Intifadas, so now Jews everywhere (“globalize”) must be killed.

July 16, 2025 – Private meeting:
Said he wouldn’t use the phrase “globalize the intifada” going forward, but defended it as “a protest slogan against occupation.”

Is calling for the murder of Jews worldwide a legitimate “protest slogan against occupation”? How does the murder of Jews in France, or Germany, or the United States express one’s opposition to “occupation”? And since every last Israeli pulled out of the Strip in 2005, how can the word “occupation” conceivably apply to Gaza?

Oct 1–2, 2025 – ABC’s The View:
Called the Gaza war a “genocide” to audience applause….

And now that he’s Mayor, when the hurly-burly’s done, and the battle lost and won, can he be asked to explain on what evidence does he rely to call the Gaza war a “genocide”?

Oct 27–28, 2025 – Debate fallout:
Told an emotional story about a hijab-wearing “aunt” who stopped riding the subway after 9/11 over “Islamophobia” fears – but discrepancies later emerged, forcing him to walk back the claim and clarify that he had actually been referring to a cousin….

Mamdani did more than confuse his aunt with his cousin in this tale, but almost certainly made up the whole story of her supposed worry over “Islamophobia” out of whole cloth. Perhaps he could explain how he knows that a cousin had been “afraid” to go out in public wearing a hijab after 9/11. Does he know of any attacks on Muslims in New York after the 9/11 terrorist attacks? No, I thought not. So why should any Muslimah have been fearful of wearing a hijab in public? Tens of thousands of Muslim girls living in New York have appeared in public after 9/11 unconcernedly wearing their hijabs.

Then there’s Rolling Stone, which bizarrely claimed Mamdani “hasn’t said or done anything antisemitic” and “did not call to ‘globalize the intifada.’”

Mamdani has not “said or done anything antisemitic”? Is repeatedly and falsely accusing the Jewish state of committing genocide not antisemitic? Does his refusal to condemn the use of the phrase that calls for the mass murder of Jews worldwide — “globalize the Intifada” — not amount to antisemitism? Does his insistence that BDS — that is, the plan to devastate the Jewish state’s economy through boycotts, divestment, and sanctions — should be adopted everywhere not reveal Mamdani’s antisemitism? For he has not proposed applying BDS to any other country in the world — not to Putin’s Russia, despite its aggression against Ukraine, not to Iran, despite that country’s support for terrorism worldwide, not to China, despite its ruthless campaign to suppress the Uighurs. Mamdani has one measure for the Jewish state, and another for all other countries on our giddy globe.

The whitewashing of Zohran Mamdani in the media, whether by failing to note so many examples of his anti-Israel animus, or by misinterpreting them so as to soften their meaning, is already well underway. But when next January he becomes mayor, and then begins to implement his hugely expensive economic measures — the free buses, the free and universal childcare, the city-owned food stores — to be paid for by a rise in taxes for the well-off that will lead many of them to move out of the city, thereby shrinking New York City’s tax base, and with companies also moving out of New York, in response to Mamdani’s increase in corporate taxes, shrinking that tax base still further, people will become less willing to overlook or forgive his animus for Israel.

All the excitement about this young Lochinvar come out of the east, the best thing, we are being asked to believe, to happen to American politics in many years, or so his supporters devoutly insist, will eventually die down as Mamdani’s supreme incompetence undermines his supreme self-confidence.