Globalizing the intifada apparently begins in New York City.
In one of the most stunning upsets for the progressive wing of the Democratic Party since Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s unseating of Joseph Crowley in a 2018 primary battle, state Rep. Zohran Mamdani cruised to an apparent victory in the New York City mayoral primary, handily beating former governor and the presumptive favorite in the race, Andrew Cuomo.
While New York City uses ranked-choice voting and the results won’t be official until next week, Cuomo has already conceded the race with Mamdani ahead by a 43.5 percent to 36.4 percent margin. Given that most polls that had Mamdani winning still had Cuomo ahead in the first round, this means the former governor has no reasonable path forward in the primary, although the ranked-choice balloting will still go forward until a candidate has 50 percent.
“Tonight was not our night,” Cuomo said to supporters. “Tonight was Assemblyman Mamdani’s night.”
“Tonight was not our night,” Andrew Cuomo said. “Tonight was Assemblyman Mamdani’s night.” pic.twitter.com/cDatLJSjDb
— philip lewis (@Phil_Lewis_) June 25, 2025
“Tonight, we made history,” Mamdani said at the outset of his victory speech. “In the words of Nelson Mandela, ‘It always seems impossible until it is done.’ My friends, we have done it.”
The speech was also full of references to “rejecting Donald Trump’s fascism” by standing up to Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents doing their job, which is de rigueur for candidates of the left — although the radicalism of it was definitely turned up a notch.
The Democratic nomination doesn’t guarantee one the mayoralty. While there’s no practical challenge from the Republicans — who are running radio host and Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa yet again — Cuomo can run again if he chooses to under his own party’s banner, and current Mayor Eric Adams is running as an independent.
Will Mamdani win the NYC mayoral race?
However, the crushing nature of Cuomo’s underperformance cannot be overstated, and running in the fall risks only damaging his brand further, to the extent that it can still be damaged. As for Adams, a vote for him isn’t so much a vote for Eric Adams as it is a vote against Mamdani — easily the most poisonous politician the Democrats have put forward with a chance of winning major office — which is a strategy that didn’t work for the former governor and is unlikely to work for Adams.
While there’s a certain joy in watching the most loath-able politician of the COVID era give his “you won’t have Andy Cuomo to kick around anymore” speeches, this still leaves us with the fact that, 24 years after 9/11, one of America’s most Jewish big cities is about to elect a communist Muslim who hates Israel.
The Democratic Socialists of America-endorsed candidate not only wants to raise the minimum wage to $30-an-hour and create city-owned grocery stores, but he’s promised to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on an International Criminal Court warrant. Not only does the ICC have no jurisdiction in America, which is not a part of the bogus globalist institution, but that’s a neat trick if you want to divert law enforcement funds to a “Department of Community Safety” — Zohran’s version of “defund the police,” only given a different name.
Although he still uses that name, mind you:
Queer liberation means defund the police. https://t.co/cuuwBI9dsv
— Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@ZohranKMamdani) November 6, 2020
The 33-year-old Mamdani also hasn’t been shy about using the phrase “globalize the intifada,” which he insisted didn’t mean what it said he did. He also condemned Israel after the Oct. 7, attacks, saying that “just and lasting peace can only begin by ending the occupation and dismantling apartheid.”
My statement on the last 36 hours across Israel and Palestine: pic.twitter.com/ulF8D4UHOV
— Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@ZohranKMamdani) October 8, 2023
One thinks he ought to study Nelson Mandela a bit harder to figure out what actual apartheid is.
And given the chance to backpedal a little bit on the whole “globalize the intifada” bit — specifically on a podcast hosted by Tim Miller of NeverTrumper conservative outlet The Bulwark — he decided to double down.
“To me, ultimately, what I hear in so many is a desperate desire for equality and equal rights in standing up for Palestinian human rights,” Mamdani said, according to Politico. “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.”
Yeah, not so much. From The Atlantic’s Jonathan Chait on Tuesday:
As Miller presented a litany of concerns about Mamdani’s plans to freeze stabilized-housing rent, establish city-run groceries, and other offenses against Econ 101, the candidate expressed a willingness to hinge his policies on outcomes and abandon his plans if they failed.
But when Miller asked Mamdani about the pro-Palestine slogan “Globalize the intifada,” the candidate’s pragmatism and intellectual humility evaporated. “To me, ultimately, what I hear in so many is a desperate desire for equality and equal rights in standing up for Palestinian human rights,” he said.
Mamdani may sincerely believe this, as do some of his supporters. But he then delved into the semantics of intifada, citing the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s use of the word as the translation of “uprising” in an Arabic version of an article the museum published about the Warsaw Ghetto. This comparison, to a Jewish armed rebellion against the Nazis, hardly dispels concern about the incendiary implications of the slogan. If the intifada is akin to the ghetto uprising, then it is a call for violence. If its theater of operations is global, then it is necessarily directed against civilians. Days before the Democratic primary, when Mamdani appeared to be gaining momentum, the controversy about his comments on Miller’s show dragged the race’s focus back to the Middle East, a subject that Mamdani has not emphasized in his campaign. Yet this debate has largely missed the significance. What makes the slogan so disturbing in an American context is not the intifada bit. It’s the globalize part.
I’d argue that it’s both, but there’s a reason why I don’t generally read the Atlantic or Chait, and his point has some meaning: When you use the phrase, you necessarily mean violence outside of the Middle East. Even if you don’t commit it, you’re basically encouraging it. It’s one thing if you’re a state assemblyman — still bad, but an odious take of a different order — than if you’re aiming to become the mayor of one of the centers of the Jewish diaspora.
“When someone spends years relentlessly targeting the world’s only Jewish state through legislation, boycotts and protests — while remaining silent on the abuses of regimes like Iran, China or Russia — it’s not principled criticism, it’s anti-Semitism, plain and simple,” Sam Berger, a Democratic Jewish state lawmaker from Queens, said in a statement last week, per Politico.
“His rhetoric, accusing Israel of ‘genocide’ and ‘apartheid,’ is not only inflammatory and false, it’s part of a broader campaign to delegitimize Jewish self-determination.”
He seemed to realize this on Tuesday — along with the fact that his voting bloc was mainly made out of white, college-educated progressives, who went for him strongly in a primary audience that he’s unlikely to draw in a general election:
Mamdani in orange, Cuomo in blue.
Roughly… Mamdani winning the white precincts, Cuomo winning the black and Hispanic precincts. pic.twitter.com/W0b4Uf2MXo
— Steve Krakauer (@SteveKrak) June 25, 2025
“I will be the mayor for every people,” he said to a packed audience in sweltering Manhattan shortly past midnight. Then, without specifically mentioning the “globalize the intifada” context: “There are millions of New Yorkers who have strong feelings about what happens overseas. I am one of them. While I will not abandon my beliefs or my commitments, grounded in a demand for equality, for humanity, for all those who walk this earth, you have my word to reach further, to understand the perspectives of those with whom I disagree, and to wrestle deeply with those disagreements”
Will this be enough? It’s already more slack than he gave in order to win a historic victory in the Democratic primary, that’s for sure. What is certain is that, 24 years after “some people did something” — to use the inimitable description of 9/11 once given by Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar — that killed almost 3,000 innocent people in the Big Apple, the city has voted to nominate a man who promises to “globalize the intifada” and arrest Bibi Netanyahu if given the opportunity. They’ve wed themselves to Israel-hatred and love of terrorism, with only the thinnest of patina of respectability painted over it.
Even Omar never had the audacity for that — and it’s not even touching upon Mamdani’s crypto-communism, which is even more odious.
Pray for New York City, because divine intervention is the only thing they have left in this election, which signals the passing of the torch in NYC to the new radicals — the AOCs, Omars, Jasmine Crocketts, David Hoggs, and now Zohran Mamdanis. There’s enough sanity left in the world that the NYCers will regret what they’ve done, but it’s’ going to be a painful path to that realization.
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