On Tisha B’Av, the saddest day in the Jewish calendar marking the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and the long history of catastrophes that followed, an assailant armed with a knife walked up to two men on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and stabbed them. One wore a yarmulke.

Witnesses said the assailant shouted, “Allahu Akbar.” The victims, ages 50 and 57, survived. A suspect is in custody, and police are examining the motive. But New York City did not need to wait for a formal designation to understand the gravity of the crime that had been perpetrated.

Only a day earlier, Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of the city with the largest Jewish community in the Diaspora, released a video accusing Israel of war crimes and genocide — and declared that Benjamin Netanyahu, the elected leader of the region’s only democracy, should be arrested.

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The mayor of an American city has no such power. Municipal leaders are forbidden by law from carrying out their own foreign policy. Nevertheless, Mamdani’s public relations stunt, amplified not only on social media but by the media of record, used language decrying the Jewish state as a criminal enterprise and that its defenders are fair game, setting the stage for bloodshed.

Jewish organizations had warned that the climate in the city was becoming dangerous. Their prescient warnings became prophetic as police officers cleaned up the crime scene.

It would not be appropriate to claim that any politician placed the weapon in the hands of the man who allegedly stabbed two innocent New Yorkers while attempting to terrorize the American Jewish community.

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I contend something far more uncomfortable and dangerous: words and ideas lead to such actions, and a public culture that brands the Jewish state as genocidal or apartheid and treats “resistance” as a virtue normalizes a permission structure — in the dockets of justice and in the halls of power — in which such violence becomes thinkable.

This is the argument of a report that the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism & Policy (ISGAP) published on Mamdani in 2025. It is the argument that the events of this week have tragically underscored.

The report traces the origins of Mamdani’s worldview. As a student at Bowdoin College, Mamdani co-founded a chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine. In the aftermath of Oct. 7 — the largest single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust — he downplayed the atrocity while characterizing Israel’s legally justified defensive response as genocide.

FILE – A woman reacts as the community of Kibbutz Kfar Aza commemorates their members who were killed, taken hostage and who died in captivity, following the deadly Oct. 7, 2023 attack by Hamas terrorists, in Kibbutz Kfar Aza, southern Israel, Oct. 16, 2025. (Hannah McKay/Reuters)

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He repeatedly declined to condemn the slogan “globalize the intifada,” offering only that he would “discourage” its use, as though a call to export anti-Jewish violence to the streets of America were merely a matter of etiquette. He introduced legislation to punish New York charitable institutions that support Israel. His first act as mayor, before addressing police unions and garbage collection, was to remove the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism from the city’s lexicon.

He accepted a $100,000 donation from the Council on American-Islamic Relations, an organization identified by federal prosecutors as an unindicted co-conspirator in a terrorism-financing case, and he has associated with figures such as Imam Siraj Wahhaj, who served as a character witness for the man convicted of masterminding the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

These are not stray data points. His close friend, influencer Hasan Piker, and political candidates Mamdani has openly endorsed assert that the United States deserved what it got on Sept. 11, 2001 — a travesty as we prepare to honor the 25th anniversary of the attack on New York City itself. Mamdani’s words and actions form a dangerous pattern, and that pattern has a name: the Muslim Brotherhood.

ISGAP research on the Brotherhood’s strategic entryism into North America describes a centurylong campaign that its own internal documents lay out plainly. “The Project” of 1982 and the “Explanatory Memorandum” of 1991 — evidence entered in federal court — describe a strategy the authors call “civilization jihad”: to exploit the freedoms of Western democracies to hollow them out from within, patiently, over generations, until the host society no longer recognizes what has been done to it.

FILE – Twitch streamer Hasan Piker is facing renewed scrutiny after viewers spotted a framed newspaper front page from Sept. 12, 2001, in his background. (Sam Barnes/Web Summit via Sportsfile via Getty Images)

Front organizations advise governments, shape civil-rights policy, embed themselves in universities and cultivate media, all while presenting a moderate face. Qatar underwrites much of it. Students for Justice in Palestine and American Muslims for Palestine sit within this ecosystem, and Hamas, which calls itself the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood and which the U.S. has designated a foreign terrorist organization, is what the ideology produces.

The Brotherhood is Sunni; the revolutionary regime in Tehran is Shia. On almost everything else, they are rivals, yet they converge on one project: the destruction of Israel and the humiliation of the West. When an American mayoral candidate adopts the same moral and political map, in which Israel is the aggressor and its enemies are the aggrieved, he is not dissenting bravely from consensus. He is translating a dangerous ideology into the fluent, sympathetic idiom of Western progressivism, where it does its most effective work precisely because it no longer seems foreign.

This is why the antisemitism at the center of Mamdani’s politics cannot be waved away as a mere progressive ideology. Antisemitism is the oldest early-warning system a society has. It begins with Jews, and it never ends there. The same worldview that marks Jews as obstacles also marks pluralism, free exchange and the liberal democratic order itself as enemies. An assault on the Jews of New York is an assault on the idea of New York, on the essence of the American democratic experiment.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani later released a video admitting that he lacks the legal authority to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, though it did little to ease Jewish leaders’ concerns. (NYC Mayor’s Office via YouTube/Handout via Reuters)

Listen closely to how Mamdani talks about his own city. The wealthy, landlords and the “billionaire class,” in his telling, are a shadowy few who hoard the city and lock everyone else out. The language is reminiscent of Der Sturmer and the films produced by Joseph Goebbels. Presented as economic justice, this is familiar and dangerous rhetoric.

The oldest antisemitic libels have always relied on the image of a rich, rootless minority pulling the strings while ordinary people suffer. When a politician’s economic populism runs on the same rails as his hostility toward the Jewish state, the two are not unrelated. They draw from the same well. This is why the assault is not merely on Jews or Israel. It is on the very fabric of the U.S. — on the idea that a free society is built through commerce, contract, and pluralism rather than resentment, expropriation and the search for an enemy within.

A man was knifed outside a synagogue on the saddest day of the Jewish year in a city whose mayor spends his energy accusing the Jewish state of genocide. We must say clearly what connects the rhetoric to the risk, refuse the normalization of hatred dressed up as social justice, and insist that words that prepare the ground for violence be named for what they are before the next knife is drawn.

Unrestrained by his theatrical and ineffectual call for Netanyahu’s arrest, Mamdani now calls for massive demonstrations when the Israeli leader visits the city for the U.N. General Assembly in September.

FILE – New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani previously said his administration was exploring whether the city has legal authority to arrest Netanyahu if he visits for the U.N. General Assembly. (Ronen Zvulun/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)

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“The mayor’s activist posturing puts police officers on the street in a terrible position,” New York City Police Benevolent Association President Patrick Hendry said. “Protests during the U.N. General Assembly are nothing new, but when the mayor of the city is actively calling for demonstrations, violent agitators will assume they have permission to cause as much havoc as possible.”

The stabbings in Manhattan are just the beginning of something far more dangerous. Mamdani, it appears, has sounded the call, content that the globalization of the intifada will erupt on the streets of the city he is sworn to serve.