Mamdani's Comment on 'Intifada' Motto Fuels Tension in Mayor's Race
Simmering Democratic disagreements over the war in Gaza burst to the forefront of New York’s mayoral primary this week, rattling the final days of an already chaotic contest.
Former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, the race’s front-runner, and Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, his chief rival, have long differed over U.S. support for the war. But as voting approaches, they have traded increasingly pointed accusations that touch on antisemitism and Islamophobia.
The tension escalated on Tuesday, after Mr. Mamdani, a critic of Israel, was asked during a podcast interview if the phrase “globalize the intifada” made him uncomfortable, and he declined to condemn it. Palestinians and their supporters have called the phrase a rallying cry for liberation, but many Jews consider it a call to violence invoking resistance movements of the 1980s and 2000s.
In the interview with The Bulwark, Mr. Mamdani said he believed the phrase spoke to “a desperate desire for equality and equal rights in standing up for Palestinian human rights.” He said the U.S. Holocaust Museum used a similar Arabic term for “uprising” to describe the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising against the Nazis, and stressed his own commitment to nonviolence and fighting antisemitism.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/19/nyregion/mamdani-globalize-intifada.html
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