Zohran Mamdani and the Weaponization of False Definitions

Don't be fooled by Zohran Mamdani's language games. Terms like "Globalize the Intifada" are calls for violence against Jews - and he knows it.

NOTE: While I am an American citizen, I have never lived in New York. I recognize that some might argue that as someone who is not directly affected by the mayoral election in that city, I have little right to voice an opinion about who should or should not be elected. Nevertheless, because New York is home to more Jews than any other city outside of Israel¹, and because Zohran Mamdani has very quickly become a rising star in the Democratic Party, I feel that it is incumbent upon us all to explain why we find his opinions objectionable, and to work against the normalization of his political views regarding Israel and antisemitism.

Words have meaning.

This should be obvious, but to many it is not.

Zohran Mamdani knows this, and he has used it to his advantage.

A good example took place when Mamdani was interviewed by Kristen Welker on NBC’s Meet the Press this week. Welker asked him whether he condemns the phrase, “Globalize the Intifada.” You can watch his response here:

While Mamdani claimed that the phrase is “not language that I use,” he also made it clear that he would not condemn its use because, “I don’t believe that the role of the mayor is to police speech.” In saying this, he framed the discussion as a matter of First Amendment rights.

Welker’s question, however, was not whether people should have the right to use this phrase, but whether he condemns this offensive and dangerous terminology. Mamdani pretended that condemning an offensive phrase would be a form of policing language - but in truth, rather than violating the First Amendment, condemning language that causes pain (and worse) is an essential element of free speech.

If someone were to say something offensive about a particular ethnic group, Mamdani would surely not hide behind his reluctance to police freedom of speech; instead he would rightly denounce it as wrongheaded, insulting, and objectionable. Doing so does not undermine the Constitution, but is of its very essence. The most effective way to combat offensive speech is by proposing an alternative - which is the opposite of “policing” free speech - yet Mamdani conflated the two, to minimal pushback².

Again: one can and should condemn dangerous ideas without necessarily opposing the right to say them. Father Charles Coughlin published his antisemitic screeds in his periodical Social Justice from 1936 until 1942, and blanketed the airwaves with antisemitic invective on his Golden Hour radio program. People of good will³ condemned Coughlin’s words without denying his right to publish and broadcast.⁴ Publicly rejecting his vile opinions was the American way of combatting these terrible ideas - but Mamdani’s logic would say that such condemnation is a form of policing speech. We all know that this position is absurd; but by carefully blurring the distinction between policing and condemning, he got away with dog whistling the anti-Israel crowd while pretending to hold the high ground as a free speech absolutist.

While he deftly altered the meaning of the word “condemn” on Meet the Press, he defended the expression “Globalize the Intifada” two weeks ago on The Bulwark podcast by being overly literal. Apart from his contention that the phrase “is a desperate desire for equality and equal rights in standing up for Palestinian human rights,” he also said that, “the very word [intifada] has been used by the Holocaust Museum when translating the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising into Arabic, because it’s a word that means struggle.”

Intifada does, indeed, mean “struggle” or “uprising” or “shaking off.” But the term The Intifada - as in “Globalize the Intifada” - refers not to generic struggle, but to the two specific violent struggles against Jewish people in Israel - the first from 1987-1993 and the second from 2000-2005 - in which over a thousand Israelis were killed, and over 10,000 injured, the vast majority of them civilians.

Pretending that the last word of “Globalize the Intifada” has no contextual meaning is no different than claiming that the word “holocaust” refers to a sacrifice, or that the term “Semite” refers to all people of Middle Eastern origin, or that Watergate refers to nothing but a hotel: all are true when devoid of context, and absolutely false when said in other circumstances. Zohran Mamdani, like anyone who has the ability to speak, knows this very well. His attempts to defend the use of a sinister word by pointing to its literal meaning only dupes credulous fools… or those who are happy to be duped.

Let us, unlike Zohran Mamdani, speak clearly and unequivocally: “Globalize the Intifada” is a call to act violently against Jews across the world. When someone says this awful phrase, they are advocating the murder of Jewish people - and no verbal equivocation can change that reality. Those who chant these words know what they mean, and so does Mamdani. Whether through verbal equivocation, misleading literalism, or semantic confusion, Mamdani’s explanations boil down to a tacit acceptance of the expression “Globalize the Intifada” - and accepting the expression means approving the philosophy behind it.

Zohran Mamdani’s adroit wordplay cannot hide his deeply-held beliefs. Those who defend his explanations are Mamdani’s useful idiots. Let the voters beware.

1. New York City has a larger Jewish population than Tel Aviv, but that is a technicality based on where Israeli municipal boundaries are drawn. Tel Aviv itself is part of a much larger metropolitan area called Gush Dan, which is home to more Jews than any other urban area in the world.

2. I think that Kristen Welker made a reasonable attempt to get him to answer her question, but she did not point out, as I believe that she should have, that his “I don’t believe that the role of the mayor is to police speech” is a way of avoiding the question altogether.

3. Of course, there were untold millions who agreed wholeheartedly with Coughlin’s opinions about Jews.

4. Coughlin’s radio show was eventually canceled by CBS, not by the government.