Zohran Mamdani says mayors shouldn't 'police speech' when asked to condemn 'globalize the intifada' slogan
Zohran Mamdani, the presumptive Democratic nominee in New York City's mayoral race, on Sunday again sidestepped an opportunity to condemn the phrase "globalize the intifada," saying that mayors shouldn't "police speech."
"That's not language that I use," Mamdani said when asked if he condemns the phrase, which is widely viewed by Jewish groups as offensive and anti-semitic, on NBC News' "Meet the Press." "The language that I use and the language that I will continue to use to lead the city is that which speaks clearly to my intent, which is an intent grounded in a belief in universal human rights."
Mamdani added, "Ultimately, that's what is the foundation of so much of my politics, the belief that freedom and justice and safety are things that have meaning, have to be applied to all people, and that includes Israelis and Palestinians."
In response to a second direct question from "Meet the Press" moderator Kristen Welker about whether he condemns the phrase, Mamdani said that he's hear from many Jewish New Yorkers who have shared their concerns about the phrase.
"I've heard those fears, and I've had those conversations, and ultimately, they are part and parcel of why in my campaign, I've put forward a commitment to increase funding for anti-hate crime programming by 800%," Mamdani answered, once again demurring on the direct question about condemning the phrase.
"I don't believe that the role of the mayor is to police speech," he added.
Asked why it wouldn't be easier to just condemn the phrase, which many Jewish organizations have condemned and labeled anti-semitic, Mamdani told Welker, "My concern is, to start to walk down the line of language and making clear what language I believe is permissible or impermissible takes me into a place similar to that of the president."
Mamdani pointed to several students, like Rumeysa Öztürk and Mahmoud Khalil, who were detained by the Trump administration earlier this year after they wrote or protested against Israel and in favor of those living in Gaza.
"Ultimately, it's not language that I use, it's language I understand there are concerns about, and what I will do is showcase my vision for the city through my words and my actions," Mamdani added.
Mamdani's refusal to condemn the phrase made headlines in the final days leading up to the Democratic mayoral primary. In an interview with The Bulwark posted on June 17, Mamdani was asked whether the phrase "globalize the intifada" made him uncomfortable.
He responded, saying that it reflects, "a desperate desire for equality and equal rights in standing up for Palestinian human rights."
In the same interview, he called the recent rise in anti-semitism 'a real issue in our city' that the next mayor should focus on "tackling."
Jewish organizations and officials quickly spoke out against the phrase, with Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, writing in a post on X, "Globalize the Intifada is an explicit call for violence. Globalize the Intifada celebrates and glorifies savagery and terror. Globalize the Intifada dishonors the memory of 1,000s slaughtered, tens of 1,000s maimed, and millions traumatized who were targeted simply because of their identities. Globalize the Intifada is not just dangerous. It's an explicit incitement to violence."
In a statement at the time, Rep. Dan Goldman, D-N.Y., who represents parts of New York City, blasted Mamdani, saying, "If Mr. Mamdani is unwilling to heed the request of major Jewish organizations to condemn this unquestionably antisemitic phrase, then he is unfit to lead a city with 1.3 million Jews — the largest Jewish population outside of Israel.'
On Saturday, Goldman said in a subsequent statement that he had since met with Mamdani. "I explained why Jewish New Yorkers feel unsafe in the City and that, as he continues this campaign, he must not only condemn anti-Jewish hate and calls for violence, but make clear that as Mayor he would take proactive steps to protect all New Yorkers and make us secure," he said.
'I appreciate Zohran's willingness to reach out to me, to engage, and to listen, and I look forward to continuing the dialogue about our mutual desire to move this City in a positive direction," Goldman added.
Mandani on Sunday also addressed President Donald Trump's comments this week, which included Trump calling the presumptive Democratic mayoral nominee a "communist."
"I can't believe that's happening. That's a terrible thing for our country, by the way. He's a communist," Trump told reporters at the White House on Friday. "We're going to go to a communistic- so that's so bad for New York, but the rest of the country is revolting against it."
On Sunday, Mamdani clarified that "I am not" a communist.
" I have already had to start to get used to, get used to the fact that the president will talk about how I look, how I sound, where I'm from, who I am, ultimately, because he wants to distract from what I'm fighting for, and I'm fighting for the very working people that he ran a campaign to empower, that he has since then betrayed," Mamdani added.
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The Independent
an hour ago
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Mamdani says we shouldn't have billionaires after Trump branded him ‘communist lunatic'
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New Statesman
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What's wrong with Sarah Vine?
What's the matter with Sarah Vine? Almost everything if How Not To Be A Political Wife, her puzzling account of 20 years 'inside the rooms of government, a sanctioned eavesdropper on the rise – and fall – of the Cameroon style of Conservatism' is to be believed. Coming to the end of Vine's self-gouging rampage-memoir, a straightforwardly insane mash-up of Cinderella, old footage of a rejected X Factor contestant weeping about their family and the nasty Freudian bits from the Patrick Melrose novels, the reader finds themselves hoping that those 'rooms of government' have been stripped, hosed, and given a thorough wipe down since she left. Vine, formerly Michael Gove's wife and currently one of those columnists on the Daily Mail who writes at least 6,000 words a week about Princess Eugenie's Instagram account, lists the ailments herself. Like demons in hell, they are legion. To begin with Vine was born overdue, two weeks late, with 'remarkably large feet'. 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The Conservatives, once Cameron secured power, would become associated with nice things like climate change, academy schools and gay people. Had the Conservative Party changed? They were still mostly rich posh people like Sarah Vine, or even richer posher people like the Camerons and Osbornes. Vine swoons over their 'innate confidence', 'effortless self-assurance', 'expansive kitchen suppers', 'enviable grace' and 'flamboyantly furnished' homes. The Goves spend one soggy weekend away at Samantha Cameron's mother Annabel and step-father William Astor's 19,000-acre estate on Jura, a world, Vine writes ecstatically, of 'faithful, elderly retainers and wise old ghillies, of deer stalking and fishing, early morning swims in the freezing sea'. To be invited into this world was to achieve the 'secure social position' she desired: she always had money, now she had class. Caught up in her clichéd reverie, she forgets to mention that the estate is not technically owned by the Astors but by a company registered in the tax haven of the British Virgin Islands. The one small glimpse of actually existing Britain in How Not To Be A Political Wife comes when Vine has to move from West London to Surrey Heath, where Gove has his safe seat. Ordinary life in Britain horrifies her: 'a somewhat soulless tangle of grey roundabouts, shopping centres and cul-de-sacs'. Vine had 'never even heard of Surrey Heath, much less been there'. The people she meets – Tory voters who don't register companies in tax havens – are 'for the most part' nice. Then she compares them to Hyacinth Bucket and calls their towns 'strangely nondescript'. Some of the towns, admittedly, are 'nice' but 'boy did they [all those Hyacinth Buckets] know it'. She forces Gove back to London, a move she compares to 'surfacing from a deep nightmare'. When the expenses scandal breaks and Gove comes under pressure after the Daily Telegraph reveals he bought a pair of 'elephant lamps' worth £134.50 from Oka, an upmarket interior design firm set up by Annabel Astor, Vine writes pathetically: 'It couldn't have come at a worse time for me.' Quite why public money was needed to buy 'elephant lamps' from her mate's mother-in-law becomes secondary to yet another hospital checklist of Vine illnesses brought on by the scandal: 'I caught swine flu, then tonsillitis, double pneumonia and even a quinsy.' Miraculously, she lives. By 2014, Vine was firmly established at the Daily Mail and in her own opinion 'one of the top political wives in the country'. She was happily familiar with grace and favour weekends at Chequers and Dorneywood, chauffeur-driven cars and meeting Royalty: 'a sanctioned eavesdropper'. Gove had become a hate figure for the political left after a controversial series of education reforms that would eventually improve test scores while making it increasingly difficult for schools to attract and retain teaching staff. The Goves had by now developed a reputation for scheming and leaking that Vine blames here on Dominic Cummings, then Gove's special advisor, who she also claims smelled so bad that his colleagues lit scented candles around him. Gove, the entertaining clown who ate his breakfast in cabinet meetings and was so hungover at a meeting with Pope Benedict in 2010 that he nearly vomited, was becoming an object of suspicion among the other Cameroons as the EU referendum loomed into view. Vine claims that she and her husband didn't really talk about politics – a suggestion contradicted by page after page of How Not To Be A Political Wife. Cameron's chief of staff Kate Fall wrote in her 2020 memoir The Gatekeeper that Gove took orders from his wife, who 'is used to proactively managing her brilliant but not very down-to-earth husband'. In that book Fall compared the 'clever, funny, powerful' Vine to a 'python'. That sinuous picture that makes more sense than Vine's limp self-portrait. Vine says she was not Lady Macbeth, but then again, that's exactly what Lady Macbeth would say. After the referendum, Gove twice tried and failed to become Prime Minister. All the puffs of Blenheim Bouquet were for naught. Vine's personal life, which was simultaneously a ware she flogged on Fleet Street for a salary, began to come apart. Vine blames amorphous forces such as 'politics' and 'Brexit' for ruining her marriage to Gove, which ended in July 2021 and was confirmed by Vine with an 'in-depth' Tatler interview the following January. In the book Vine laments an 'abyss of class' for separating the Goves from the Camerons, a cross-family friendship that ended after Brexit. They may simply have been annoyed by Vine's constant titillations in the Daily Mail and the small matter of Gove blowing up Cameron's government. Invoking the language of class to explain why a government minister and his newspaper columnist wife fell out with the prime minister and his wife, the step-daughter of a Viscount, is probably not what Marx and Engels invented such terminology for. Over the weekend, Samantha Cameron appeared in the Mail on Sunday, pictured at Glastonbury wearing a '£340 green v-neck dress from her label Cefinn' a few pages away from Vine's column, which included fulminations against Lime Bikes and a new sandwich launched by M&S. 'My favourite sandwich is Marmite,' added Vine bathetically. If you adopt the zero-sum lens through which Vine looks at the world, it is not difficult to see who won the battle between the families. How Not To Be A Political Wife terminates with a generalised call for kindness and an odd diversion in which Vine suspects that the 1986 Chernobyl reactor meltdown may have given her 'mild radon poisoning'. Readers will have to make their own minds up about kindness. They will have to walk around their streets and their towns and wonder what they would be like if people as shallow as Vine had never had any influence over our country. They will have to wonder if they ought to feel sorry for people who feel very sorry for themselves already. In one of the only political insights that illuminate this book's dense fog of self-pity and thwarted ambition, George Osborne warns Michael Gove in early 2016: 'If you go for Leave you will confer respectability on the mob.' It's taken a while for this warning's snobbery to fade and its prescience to become clear but we are presently hurtling towards a near future where Lee Anderson is the Home Secretary. The mob is coming, and in her own small way, Sarah Vine helped lead it to the gates of power. In the end, it's not just self-exposure that has inexorable consequences. [See also: Has Caitlin Moran ever met a man?] Related
The National
an hour ago
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Keir Starmer urged to open visa scheme for Gaza citizens
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