Localize the Intifada: Mamdani Seizes New York City Mayoralty
Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani secured a comfortable victory in the 2025 New York City mayoral election, ushering in a new era of Marxist governance in the United States’ largest city.
Mamdani clinched his win with 50.4 percent of the vote when the Associated Press called the race. Former governor Andrew Cuomo (D.), who finished in second place in the party’s June primary, came up short again with 41.3 percent. Republican Curtis Sliwa—whom Cuomo’s camp has described as a spoiler in the race—netted 7.5 percent, not enough to have cost Cuomo the election outright.
Mamdani will enter Gracie Mansion as a historically left-wing mayor: He called for “seizing the means of production” while a New York state assemblyman and has long argued in favor of defunding the police, though he attempted to walk back that position after winning the nomination. He has also pledged to target “negligent” landlords and seize their properties, marking a significant expansion of city power and decreasing the quality of affordable housing for New Yorkers.
Other items on his to-do list include government-run grocery stores, free busing, free childcare, and rent freezes funded by the city’s taxpayers.
Mamdani’s history of radical anti-Israel rhetoric has caused concern for Jewish New Yorkers since he began his campaign. He has refused to condemn slogans like “globalize the intifada,” instead telling a group of New York CEOs that he stands by “the idea.” He has also pledged to arrest Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu should he visit New York and campaigned with a radical Islamist cleric who once urged “jihad” against the city Mamdani will now lead.
During his time in the New York State Assembly, Mamdani sponsored legislation that would have barred New York-based charities from working with Israel and declined to support Holocaust remembrance measures.
Mamdani said during a 2017 podcast appearance that he has helped his father, Mahmood, edit his speeches and writings in an effort to “stay engaged” with his work. The elder Mamdani, a radical Columbia University professor, has called for a “Third Intifadah against settler colonialism,” described suicide bombers as a “category of soldier,” and wrote shortly after 9/11 that there was a “moral equivalence” between the al Qaeda attack and retaliatory U.S. bombing of Afghanistan, the Free Beacon reported.
He devoted his most recent book, Slow Poison, to defending Ugandan dictator Idi Amin. Amin, often known as the “Butcher of Uganda,” was responsible for the killings of about half a million people during his eight-year reign. Mahmood Mamdani calls Amin’s expulsion of Uganda’s Asian population—described in the book as “captive to a self-aggrandizing elite”—one of the projects that helped make the dictator “the father of the Ugandan nation.”
Mamdani’s radical history earned him public condemnation from rabbis across the religious spectrum, with more than 1,000 signing an open letter opposing his candidacy.
“When public figures like New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani refuse to condemn violent slogans, deny Israel’s legitimacy, and accuse the Jewish state of genocide, they, in the words of New York Board of Rabbis president Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, ‘Delegitimize the Jewish community and encourage and exacerbate hostility toward Judaism and Jews,'” the letter reads.
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