Civilization and its Discontents

It’s fair to say that everyone from the hardcore far right to the marshmellowy liberal center has been seriously unnerved by the victory of Zohran Mamdini, a Muslim and a member of the Democratic Party left, in the New York Democratic primary race for mayor.

The Right has lost its mind to the point you’d think that End Times were upon us and that Marx, Engels, Lenin and Mao had replaced the Four Horsemen.

Former shell of a shell of a shell Rudi Giuliani went on the Benny Show to call for Mamdani’s arrest. Trump sycophant and content-free Islamophobe Laura Loomer pulled every fire alarm she could find warning of a communist jihadi — from Africa! — taking over the city. Wingnuts like this one and this one depicted the Statue of Liberty in a burqa were Mamdani to become mayor.

Liberals played it a bit cooler but they had their own singular concern — Israel.

On the night before the primary Steven Colbert invited Zohran Mamdani and Brad Lander onto his show and, after a few warmup questions, went straight to the Big Question, requiring an answer with no nuance but every reassurance that Zionism remained sacrosanct:

“Despite this being a New York City race, foreign affairs have become part of it, partly because this has become such a multicultural city,” Colbert led with. “And so I’ll ask the same question of both of you; I’ll start with you, Mr. Lander. Does the state of Israel have the right to exist?”

Neither candidate was offered the opportunity to answer the question of what sort of state Israel should exist as, so questions of a secular democracy or a single state in which everyone has precisely the same rights were never open for discussion. Which is precisely the illiberal position “liberals” take on Israel.

Lander answered the question first with an oxymoron, “I support the vision of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.” Colbert then turned to Mamdani: “Mr. Mamdani, same question: does the State of Israel have the right to exist?” “Yes,” Mamdani quickly answered. “Like all nations, I believe it has the right to exist and a responsibility also to uphold international law.”

Both candidates chose the Liberal Zionist-approved formulation: two states with Israel preserving Jewish supremacy over its non-Jewish citizens, with the world pretending it’s a democracy. Everyone left the studio happy.

Despite Mamdani’s checking off all the correct boxes for the cameras, Democrats remained frosty to a candidate who has voiced reservations about both Zionism and Capitalism. The Forward reported that New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand refused to endorse Mamdani and condemned his support for international resistance to the Occupation. Axios reported that neither New York’s other Senator Chuck Schumer nor Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (NY) would be endorsing Mamdani either. Nassau County (NY) Rep. Laura Gillen called Mamdani the “absolute wrong choice for New York” and Nassau County Rep. Tom Suozzi also expressed “serious concerns” with Mamdani’s victory.

Axios also reported that Mamdani’s win had Democratic Party donors scrambling to find ways of breathing new life into the campaign of disgraced New York governor Andrew Cuomo.

And in an editorial intended to nip Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral aspirations in the bud, the New York Times suddenly felt it necessary to warn its readers that any outrage or anger over Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza and the joint US-Israeli attacks on Iran (which no doubt contributed to Mamdani’s win) were actually expressions of “antisemitism.”

Never mind that a flood of Islamophobia had just been uncorked in the City and could easily have been the subject of NYT editorial chastisement. But there was no way that was ever going to happen. Ignoring all the Muslim bashing, the Times plowed ahead, bashing the Left for its supposed “double standards” regarding Israel.

The Times editors chose the brutal arson attack on Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, the murder of Israeli embassy employees, and a gruesome arson attack in Boulder, Colorado for their readers to illustrate the severity of antisemitism (which is true enough) — but the well-documented daily slaughter of food seekers by Israeli occupation troops, systematic starvation of Palestinian children by Israeli policy, the head-bashing of anti-Zionist Jewish students in the U.S., McCarthyite repression and attacks on higher education demanded by far-right Christian and Zionist extremists — were all somehow irrelevant to any discussion of why people are so angry at Israel — or in the editors’ formulation, “antisemitic.”

The antisemitism “statistics” the Times cited are also questionable. Whatever passes for “antisemitism” nowadays is most often determined according to the IHRA definition which applies 16 tests, 11 of them related to Israel, to cast all criticisms of Zionism or the Zionist state as “antisemitism.” Other cases rely on largely unsubstantiated numbers from the ADL, a group Wikipedia considers unreliable, which has now abandoned any pretense of being a civil rights group and instead is little more than a domestic collaborator with the Israeli Foreign Ministry.

If criticism of Israel is weaponized to inflate antisemitism statistics, what is the real level of baseless hatred of Jews? Thanks to pro-Israel zealots, we have no idea.

Aside from extremely rare cases of murder and physical intimidation — easily matched by the murders of Muslims, Sikhs, Latinos, Black and trans people, and now Democratic politicians — many of these so-called “victims of antisemitism” are snowflakes like Shabbos Kestenbaum, a Harvard student who alleged he was targeted as a Jew because not enough Muslim and Jewish anti-genocide protesters were getting their heads cracked open by police in the encampments he so hated. For his “courage” Kestenbaum became a darling of Trump’s GOP.

Or Yoav Segev, a Harvard business student and son of two Israeli Foreign Ministry “diplomats,” who stepped on protesters as he tried to doxx them at a “die-in” and ended up claiming that he was the victim of assault. Both were student members of the Brandeis Center (not to be confused with the university), a far-right Zionist attack group whose secondary goals are dismantling DEI and affirmative action.

The New York Times appears to subscribe to the old Zionist saw that Jews are always the victim, no reason, no exceptions, and this inexplicable, primeval force has led, precisely now, to a spike of “hate crimes” unrelated to anything happening in the world. In emphasizing ahistorical antisemitism the Times essentially invokes biblical Amalek.

The more mysterious and inexplicable any phenomenon is, the better propaganda it makes. Statistics that portray anti-Israel protests as antisemitic are no longer burdened by having to account for actual geopolitical events like the slaughter of civilians or unprovoked military assaults on other countries. No sir. Just chalk up every expression of disgust or anger at Israel’s actions to an eternal, mysterious — even biblical — source. Needless to say, arguments like the Times’s are irrational hogwash.

Part of the unfairness of all Jews taking the blame for the crimes of Zionism is that mainstream Jewish organizations, from Jewish federations to congregations, insist on conflating Zionism with Judaism. Mainstream Jewish institutions have embraced Zionism in a death grip so tight that Jews who regard Zionism’s immoral nationalism as diametrically opposed to Judaism’s ethical values are marginalized and reviled as “self-hating” by their own communities. A good example is New York’s YeshivaWorld magazine, which attacked Brad Lander in precisely this way.

It was no coincidence that the New York Times’s “reminder” of the sins of Left “antisemitism” appeared so quickly following Mamdani’s primary victory. The Times not-so-subtly placed its fat thumb on the mayoral race by tag-teaming with MAGAworld to attack both Mamdani and the Left.

The Times perfunctorily dinged Trump for his crackdown on campuses — but not with much enthusiasm or consistency. The Times editors actually agree with Trump, Elise Stefanik, Virginia Foxx and the Brandeis Center that antisemitism is “exploding” on college campuses. Except that it is not, at least in comparison to Islamophobia.

If you read the studies that Harvard’s Task Force produced, 80% of Muslims feel unsafe on campuses — a much higher number than that of Jewish students — and this is largely because of the constellation of Zionist groups like Canary Mission which doxx Muslim students, because of police and government repression, and because their own cowardly university administrations have been collaborating with the Trump administration.

Trump’s State Department never targeted Jewish and Israeli students as it did Muslims (culminating with summarily withdrawing student visas and then “disappearing” them), but the Harvard study took far more seriously the hurt feelings of Zionist students whose Israeli hostage posters were ripped down.

Showing perfunctory “balance” by offering a couple of examples of right-wing antisemitism, the editors pointed a finger at Trump for dining with a Holocaust denier. But since the NYT itself denies the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, this only highlights the editors’ hypocrisy.

But the heart of the NYT editorial was to overtly push the pro-Zionist IHRA definition, to use it to excoriate the Left, and to discredit any mayoral candidates who just might, coincidentally, belong to the anti-Zionist Left:

“Natan Sharansky, the former Soviet dissident, has suggested a “3D” test for when criticism of Israel crosses into antisemitism, with the D’s being delegitimization, demonization and double standards. Progressive rhetoric has regularly failed that test in recent years.”

Sharansky, who worked for the Israeli Foreign Ministry at the time, concocted the IHRA definition, and his 3D test was its first iteration.

The NYT uses this handy multi-tool to elaborate upon various examples of supposed “double standards” on Israel — none of which are worthy of addressing here because such criticisms simply do not reflect double standards.

There is no other nation that the United States throws so much money at, devotes so many UN vetos to, provides so much funding for (in even our domestic budgets), or is so often involved with in military aggressions — as Israel. Furthermore, since the end of South Africa’s apartheid state, Israel has been unique in the world as the only pro-Western state anything like Afrikaaner South Africa.

Historically, Israel is an aberration, an anachronism, a relic that still embraces 19th century nationalism and 18th century settler-colonialism. It is a state that historian Tony Judt predicted would not and could not survive into the 21st century in its present form. In 2003 Judt wrote with amazing clarity: “The true alternative facing the Middle East in coming years will be between an ethnically cleansed Greater Israel and a single, integrated, binational state of Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians.”

Liberals seem to have a preference for the worst choices.

So if anything is a double standard, it is the coddling of Israel by the U.S. and other Western imperialists, who routinely slap sanctions on savage, repressive regimes that violate human rights — but not Israel. While these nations themselves claim to embrace secular democracy and the rule of law, and in the U.S. Democrats claim to oppose Christian nationalism, they spare no effort to promote ethno-nationalism abroad, undermine democracy even in their own countries and to violate domestic, international, and moral law in defending one of the worst human rights abusers on the planet.