Mayor Mamdani’s ‘Monsters’

Talk about scaremongering. Mayor Zohran Mamdani is refusing to back down on calling a pro-Israel advocacy group “monsters.” The vitriol arose during a rally when Hizzoner quoted a line attributed to the Marxist intellectual Antonio Gramsci. “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born,” Mr. Mamdani intoned. “Now is the time of monsters.” Among these “monsters,” per Mr. Mamdani, is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.At a time of rising antisemitic sentiment on the left, this kind of talk hardly befits a mayor purporting to represent all New Yorkers. It’s hard to disagree with the appraisal of the senior rabbi at the Kehilath Jeshurun synagogue, Chaim Steinmetz, who called Mr. Mamdani’s words “pure incitement.” The mayor, unbowed, claims “I used the term to describe all those who are preventing the birth of a new world, not solely AIPAC, but frankly super PACs at large.”Yet Mr. Mamdani’s own words underscore his animus for the pro-Israel group. The “monsters” purportedly mooted by Gramsci, the mayor says, “take many forms today.” Mr. Mamdani’s list of demons includes “those who fund television ads” criticizing his endorsed candidates in the New York primary, along with “those who would rather spend far more on political contributions than they would ever be made to pay in taxes.”The mayor, though, seems to reserve special scorn for the venerable pro-Israel lobbying outfit. For “AIPAC,” he avers, “the only thing more frightening than democracy being allowed to run its course is an end to the genocide in Netanyahu’s wars.” The mayor went on to ruminate on the underhanded doings of his so-called “monsters,” who “move millions in dark money to accomplish a single goal: to preserve their power, so that they can turn us against one another.”Such maneuvering, Mr. Mamdani insists, distracts from the goal of “turning our leaders toward the moral change we all know to be necessary.” In short, as Rabbi Steinmetz puts it, Mr. Mamdani “is accusing AIPAC of being a monster that subverts democracy, supports genocide and wants to divide Americans.” A reporter today asked the mayor about the alarm raised by his use of “phrases that invoke old antisemitic tropes and conspiracy theories.”Mr. Mamdani missed an opportunity to deny that it was his intention to foment this stripe of hatred. Instead he railed against “a status quo where children are being killed on a daily basis” by “the Israeli military.” The mayor added that “when I am speaking about AIPAC, I’m speaking about an organization that has been supportive of the status quo” and “has fought any attempt to actually deliver safety to people.”Mr. Mamdani today lamented, too, that the pro-Israel group was wielding “dark money,” filtered through “shell organizations” to influence politics. “It is a status quo of immorality,” Mr. Mamdani asserted. “It is one that I will not accept.” This tracks with his earlier comment that “in the wealthiest city, in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, we need not live in fear of monsters any longer.”Mr. Mamdani’s quoting the Italian Marxist is of a piece with his efforts to burnish his retrograde rhetoric with an intellectual sheen — yet often failing to make his intended point. Gramsci himself, after all, didn’t write of “monsters.” * Gramsci instead warned of “a great variety of morbid phenomena” that arise at a time of political ferment. Among these phenomena, one could say, is the idea of a demagogic politician sowing fear via antisemitic rhetoric.________* “Il vecchio muore e il nuovo non può nascere: in questo interregno si verificano i fenomeni morbosi più svariati,” is how Gramsci put it in his “Prison Notebooks.”

Mayor Mamdani’s ‘Monsters’

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