Mayor Mamdani,
I am writing to you as a New Yorker and as a Jew who feels increasingly abandoned by leaders who claim to stand for human rights while applying those principles selectively. What makes this especially painful is your willingness to distort or dismiss Israel’s reality and even the right to exist in service of your political ideology.
You frame opposition to Zionism as principled criticism, but you’re denying the Jewish people’s right to exist as well as their self-determination. When Israel alone is denied the rights afforded to every other nation, such denial ceases to be legitimate policy disagreement and becomes discrimination.
Anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism!
By any reasonable standard, the world, horrifyingly, is not suffering from a shortage of human-rights crises. From authoritarian repression to a host of unimaginable atrocities, countless populations endure violence that rarely captures international attention. In modern political discourse, some causes dominate headlines and activism while others remain largely invisible. Your double standard isn’t subtle, it’s evident in your relentless and unjustifiable demonization of Israel.
Just recently, vile protesters gathered outside Park East Synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side waving Hezbollah flags, chanting “Death to the IDF,” rejecting any two-state solution, and openly calling for the destruction of Israel. They tried to push through police barricades, and threatened Jews simply for attending a synagogue event.
And yet, instead of unequivocally condemning the intimidation, hatred, and glorification of terrorism outside the synagogue, you chose to condemn the event taking place inside it. This is a profound moral failure.
When mobs wave terrorist flags, harass Jews in the streets, and celebrate violence, the issue is no longer politics or policy disagreement: it is anti-Semitic intimidation. No community should be expected to tolerate threats, incitement, or support for terrorist organizations outside its houses of worship or anywhere.
Opposition to Israeli policy is a defining feature of your political and personal identity. Supporters view your advocacy for Palestinian rights as principled and morally urgent. Your rhetoric, however, reduces a deeply complex conflict into simplistic false accusations aimed exclusively at the world’s only Jewish state. Why is your activism intensely focused on Israel while no attention is paid to the severe abuses around the globe, including in Uganda, the country of your birth?
You identify as Ugandan, you were born in Kampala, Uganda, and you have said that you’re proud to be Ugandan. You retain dual nationality, having been born in Uganda and naturalized as a U.S. citizen. You started a chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine in 2010 during your first year at Bowdoin College, while unspeakable horrors were unfolding in Uganda.
Your double standard isn’t subtle, it’s evident in your relentless and unjustifiable demonization of Israel.
That contrast raises a broader and more deeply troubling question.
In Uganda, as in many countries, credible and long-standing human rights concerns have been repeatedly documented by journalists and international organizations. These include allegations of political repression, unlawful detention, torture in unofficial detention facilities, and systematic intimidation of opposition figures. Reports have also described the harassment of journalists, restrictions on political dissent, and escalating violence and discrimination against vulnerable communities, including LGBTQ+ Ugandans following the passage of the Anti-Homosexuality Act of 2023.
Mr. Mayor, you continue to direct false narratives and propaganda at Israel, repeating accusations as fact while social media amplifies distortion, selective reporting, and outright fabrication.
Israel is facing relentless threats from terrorist organizations that openly target civilians and glorify violence. Israelis are people who love life and want to live in peace. They raise families, build communities, and defend themselves in an environment where terror groups and their enablers spread misinformation as part of a deliberate strategy.
Yet you and others continue to ignore that reality while giving credibility to manipulated narratives designed to inflame hatred and erase context.
Propaganda has become a weapon. Terrorist organizations and their supporters have elevated deception into a strategy, using emotional imagery, fabricated stories, and misinformation to manipulate public opinion and justify violence.
Spreading libel is not activism, it is propaganda.
Meanwhile, genuine atrocities and abuses committed in other parts of the world receive far less outrage or attention, Uganda, for example. Horrific crimes against civilians are tragically real and well documented, yet your outrage, and much of the global outrage, remains selective and inconsistent.
For many Jews, your rhetoric echoes some of the oldest and most dangerous anti-Semitic tropes in history, including accusations that demonize Jews collectively and portray Jewish self-defense as inherently criminal. You, along with Hamas and its supporters, have long relied on a cynical strategy: to accuse Israel of the very brutality, extremism, and disregard for civilian life that these terrorist organizations themselves openly embrace. When you repeat or legitimize those narratives, you do not advance peace or human rights. You deepen division, inflame hostility, and further endanger Jews around the world.
By spreading false claims of occupation, apartheid, and genocide, you are endangering Jewish communities everywhere, especially New York Jews , whom you are supposed to protect.
Israel is the indigenous and ancestral homeland of the Jewish people, a nation rooted in the land for over 3,000 years. Israel was born in 1021 B.C.E. Through exile, persecution, massacres, and centuries of displacement, the Jewish people never abandoned their connection to their homeland. In 1948, after generations of struggle and the horrors of the Holocaust, Israel was reborn as a sovereign Jewish state.
New York City is home to the largest Jewish population outside Israel. You, as mayor, have a responsibility to protect Jewish New Yorkers, not to amplify rhetoric and legitimize hostility, leaving Jewish residents feeling isolated, targeted, and unsafe. We deserve leaders who apply the language of human rights fairly and universally, not selectively.
Criticism of governments is legitimate in any democracy, including Israel’s. But, when that criticism becomes obsessive, one-sided, and untethered from historical context or moral consistency, it ceases to be principled activism and instead fuels hostility toward Jews as Jews far beyond the Middle East.
While the crimes of dictatorships, terrorist movements, and brutal governments are minimized, excused, or quickly forgotten by the likes of you, Israel alone is subjected to constant scrutiny, demonization, and demands to justify its very right to exist. No other country is forced to defend its existence so persistently in the court of global opinion.
Human rights are not credible when applied selectively. Moral consistency matters.
But the larger issue extends beyond any one politician or conflict.
Jewish New Yorkers do not ask for special treatment. We demand the same moral clarity, protection, and solidarity afforded to every other community. Human rights lose all credibility when they are applied selectively, and anti-Semitism becomes especially dangerous when it is rationalized, excused, or repackaged as political virtue.
Mr. Mamdani, you do not get to inflame hostility toward Jews, excuse intimidation, and legitimize extremist rhetoric and then deny responsibility for the consequences. History has shown repeatedly that when hatred toward Jews is justified in the service of a political cause, it does not remain rhetorical for long. It escalates into intimidation, harassment, threats, and violence.
Jewish New Yorkers are now watching mobs glorify terrorism outside synagogues, wave Hezbollah flags in our streets, and openly target Jews while you respond with excuses instead of moral clarity. Your rhetoric has helped create an environment in which extremists feel increasingly emboldened and Jewish New Yorkers feel increasingly isolated, vulnerable, and abandoned.
New York cannot claim to oppose bigotry while treating anti-Semitism as uniquely negotiable. We demand equal standards, equal protection, and equal condemnation of hatred.
When anti-Jewish intimidation is excused or downplayed by public figures, the consequences are real, and history has already shown where that road leads.
