That sounds like a joke.
The punchline is City Hall.
I used to think Woodstock represented the bottom of Western civilization: half a million people wallowing around a dairy farm in mud, drugs, garbage, and their own self-importance, convinced they had achieved world peace because nobody had showered since Thursday.
How innocent Woodstock looks now.
At least the hippies claimed to love peace. Their ideological grandchildren have moved on to something more fashionable: loving the people who hijack airplanes, slaughter concertgoers, kidnap children, rape women, and promise to exterminate Jews.
“Make love, not war” somehow became “Globalize the intifada.”
That is one hell of a moral collapse.
And standing proudly atop the rubble is Zohran Mamdani—the perfect mayor for a civilization that has replaced moral clarity with fashionable cowardice.
Mamdani Is Not an Accident
Mamdani did not wander into City Hall because nobody noticed his politics.
New York elected him because millions of people saw those politics and either supported them or decided they did not matter.
That is worse.
His Muslim faith is irrelevant to this criticism. There are millions of Muslims who despise terrorism, reject Islamism, want democracy, and understand that Hamas and Hezbollah are not liberation movements. Attacking Mamdani because he is Muslim would be both bigoted and intellectually lazy.
His religion is not the problem.
His politics are.
Mamdani co-founded a Students for Justice in Palestine chapter while at Bowdoin College. He has supported the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign against Israel throughout his adult political life. He has refused to affirm Israel’s right to exist specifically as a Jewish state, instead offering carefully engineered language about a state with “equal rights.”
That sounds lovely until one notices that the world contains dozens of countries built around national, religious, or cultural identities, yet the Jewish state is somehow the one national project Mamdani finds morally intolerable.
Britain may retain an established church. Islamic republics may write Islam directly into their constitutions. Arab states may define themselves as Arab. Palestinian nationalism may be treated as sacred and unquestionable.
But Jewish national self-determination? Suddenly Zohran discovers his passionate opposition to religious and national particularism.
What an extraordinary coincidence.
He has described support for the Palestinian cause as central to his identity. He has accused Israel of genocide. He once declared that when “the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF,” dragging Israel into American policing because apparently no progressive grievance is complete until a Jew is blamed for it.
He has supported applying boycott politics to the Cornell-Technion partnership in New York. He promised to have Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrested if he entered the city, despite a New York mayor having neither the constitutional authority nor the international jurisdiction to conduct his own little foreign-policy circus.
And then there was “Globalize the intifada.”
When repeatedly asked to condemn the slogan, Mamdani initially refused. He said the mayor’s job was not to police language. After the political backlash became impossible to ignore, he eventually said he would “discourage” it.
Discourage it.
As though globalizing the intifada were chewing gum on the subway.
The Second Intifada was not a vigorous disagreement at a Brooklyn book club. It was a campaign of suicide bombings, shootings, stabbings, and mass murder. Israelis remember buses ripped apart during the morning commute. We remember the Dolphinarium. We remember Sbarro. We remember the Park Hotel seder massacre, where a terrorist walked into a Passover meal and murdered thirty people.
Jews do not need Mamdani to explain what “intifada” really means. We buried its victims.
Yet when frightened Jewish New Yorkers asked for an unequivocal condemnation, Mamdani produced an academic seminar on language, context, and mayoral responsibility.
His refusal was not sophistication.
It was cowardice wearing glasses.
He Condemned Hamas—And Then Presented the Invoice
Mamdani’s defenders insist that he has condemned Hamas.
Yes, he has. Later, he called the October 7 massacre a “horrific war crime,” mourned the victims, and called for the hostages to be returned.
Congratulations. The mayor of New York eventually reached the daring conclusion that massacring families and kidnapping babies might be bad.
But his first response after October 7 mourned deaths “across Israel and Palestine” and immediately pivoted toward blaming occupation and apartheid.
Hamas terrorists were still roaming Israeli communities. Families were still hiding in safe rooms. Bodies were still being collected from burned homes. Parents did not know whether their missing children were dead or dragged into Gaza.
Mamdani was already preparing the invoice for Israel.
That is the pattern: acknowledge Jewish suffering just long enough to establish moral credentials, then hurry toward the real objective—putting the Jewish state on trial.
His condemnations of antisemitism operate like a smoke detector with the batteries removed. Technically present. Reassuring when inspected. Completely useless when the house is burning.
Mamdani will condemn antisemitism in the abstract. He will say Jewish New Yorkers deserve safety. He will pose with rabbis, attend meetings, and recite the appropriate language.
But ask him to affirm the legitimacy of Jewish sovereignty, reject BDS, or condemn the slogan that evokes the murder of Israeli civilians, and suddenly everything becomes terribly complicated.
That is not solidarity.
That is political choreography.
New York Has Heard Islamist Terror Before
New York City should be the last place on Earth requiring a refresher course on Islamist extremism.
On September 11, 2001, nineteen al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four passenger aircraft and murdered 2,977 people from ninety countries. Two planes struck the World Trade Center. Another hit the Pentagon. The passengers of Flight 93 fought back, forcing the final aircraft into a Pennsylvania field.
New Yorkers breathed pulverized concrete, jet fuel, office paper, and human remains.
Firefighters climbed the towers while thousands fled downward. Families covered walls with missing-person posters even as they understood that the missing were never coming home.
For a brief moment, the West remembered that evil existed.
Then the professional idiots arrived.
They explained that identifying Islamist extremism was insensitive. They transformed perpetrators into victims of Western foreign policy. They buried religious totalitarianism beneath a mountain of academic vocabulary. Every terrorist acquired “grievances.” Every murderer came with “context.” Every victim was expected to apologize for surviving.
A quarter-century after Islamist terrorists murdered nearly three thousand people in New York, the city elected a mayor who could not immediately condemn a call to globalize the movement associated with suicide bombings against Jews.
No, Mamdani is not Adolf Eichmann. Only a historical illiterate would equate an elected politician with one of the principal organizers of the Holocaust.
But the civilizational absurdity is still staggering.
Imagine postwar Berlin elevating a politician who treated the slogans of genocidal movements as unfortunate misunderstandings. Imagine survivors being told that they had interpreted the slogans too emotionally. Imagine the intellectual classes praising the politician’s nuance.
That is the comparison: not identical men, but a society so drunk on self-hatred that it launders the language of those who want its people dead.
October 7 Exposed the Fraud
On October 7, 2023, Hamas and its accomplices invaded southern Israel and murdered approximately 1,200 people. They kidnapped 251. They attacked homes, kibbutzim, roads, military bases, and the Nova music festival.
They murdered children. They burned families alive. They dragged hostages into Gaza while crowds celebrated. Investigators found substantial grounds to conclude that rape and gang rape occurred during the attack and that hostages suffered sexual violence in captivity.
And before Israel had identified all the bodies, Western activists marched—not against Hamas, but against Israel.
The blood was still wet, and the signs were already printed.
That told us everything.
These people were never primarily motivated by civilian suffering. If they were, October 7 would have horrified them into silence. Instead, many treated the massacre as an exhilarating revolutionary spectacle.
They tore down hostage posters.
They celebrated “resistance.”
They harassed Jewish students.
They demanded a ceasefire before Israel had even finished counting its dead.
The same activists who insist that using the wrong pronoun constitutes violence developed endless patience for terrorists who filmed themselves murdering Jews.
A Hamas gunman can record his own atrocities, and some professor will still demand additional context.
A Jewish student raises his voice, and suddenly campus security must be called.
When Jews are dead, we receive candles.
When Jews defend themselves, we receive indictments.
And Mamdani’s political rise emerged from that exact moral swamp. He did not create the movement, but he understood it, rode it, and gave it a handsome, smiling, social-media-friendly face.
He is not the wild-eyed protester screaming outside the synagogue.
He is the polished politician who makes the protester’s worldview respectable.
That may be more dangerous.
Meet the Rats, Thugs, and Thieves
The thugs are easy to recognize.
They hijack airplanes. They fire rockets at civilians. They storm bedrooms. They seize hostages. They murder dissidents, persecute minorities, execute homosexuals, brutalize women, and then send English-speaking spokesmen onto Western television to discuss human rights.
The thieves steal the language of civilization.
They steal “resistance” to describe murder.
They steal “justice” to excuse antisemitism.
They steal “liberation” to advertise religious tyranny.
They steal “genocide” and hurl it at Israel while embracing movements that openly promise to destroy the Jewish state.
Then come the rats—not Muslims, immigrants, or any ethnic group, but the cowardly opportunists scurrying through Western institutions.
They saw October 7. They heard the testimony. They watched hostages dragged through Gaza.
But they also knew which opinion would earn applause, attract donations, protect careers, and secure political endorsements.
So they hid behind language.
“Violence erupted.”
“Tensions escalated.”
“Both sides traded accusations.”
Apparently terrorists simply materialize from the atmosphere, like humidity.
Mamdani is the political triumph of that cowardice. He packages anti-Zionism as equality, boycotts as nonviolence, intifada slogans as linguistic complexity, and hostility toward the world’s only Jewish state as enlightened universalism.
It is an impressive trick.
Bullshit, but impressive.
Civilization Requires the Courage to Judge
A civilization survives by distinguishing between democracy and tyranny, soldier and terrorist, citizen and hostage, imperfection and evil.
Israel is imperfect because it is a country populated by human beings. It has elections, opposition parties, protests, independent courts, argumentative journalists, and citizens who can insult their prime minister without disappearing into a torture chamber.
Hamas is not an imperfect democracy.
It is a terrorist organization.
Iran is not merely culturally different.
It is an authoritarian theocracy that imprisons dissidents, brutalizes women, sponsors terrorism, and openly seeks Israel’s destruction.
America is not morally equivalent to al-Qaeda. Israel is not morally equivalent to Hamas. Democracy is not morally equivalent to jihadist tyranny.
Mamdani’s politics depend upon blurring those distinctions until the terrorist becomes a resistance fighter, the democracy becomes an apartheid regime, and the Jew defending his family becomes the true obstacle to peace.
That is not progress.
It is moral brain damage.
I write from the hills of Judea, where history is not a graduate-school theory. Jewish life is carved into the stone, spoken in the language revived on these streets, and defended by young Israelis who know exactly what happens when Jews outsource their survival to the promises of fashionable politicians.
The Jewish people have heard every version of “Trust us.”
We know how that sentence ends.
But the Jews are no longer waiting helplessly behind locked doors. Israel exists. It fights, argues, builds, mourns, votes, and survives. It will not commit national suicide because Zohran Mamdani, a campus activist, or some keffiyeh-wrapped revolutionary with an iPhone finds Jewish sovereignty offensive.
New York may choose Mamdani.
It does not get to redefine the intifada for the Jews who buried its victims.
It does not get to boycott Jewish sovereignty and call itself inclusive.
It does not get to elect the smiling face of anti-Zionism and then lecture frightened Jews about tolerance.
Western civilization is not dead yet. But it is lying in the gutter, drunk on its own moral vanity, while rats pick through its inheritance, thugs test its gates, and thieves carry away the language of justice.
Its epitaph will not say that it was conquered.
It will say that it saw evil, consulted the polling, and elected the euphemism.
Civilizations do not collapse merely because barbarians arrive at the gates.
They collapse when arrogant fools open those gates—and call it progress.
Mamdammit's politics are left wing trash, but his ideology has spawned a murderous cult. NY voters are blind and stupid, yet their ignorance adversely affects many others.
I have read many stacks by you but this is the very best. Dagger after dagger to the heart of the matter.