Mamdani Incites Jew-Hatred With Recent Defamation of Netanyahu, and he Failed to Properly Respond to Ensuing Antisemitic Stabbing by Bigot Shouting “Allahu Akbar”
Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) National President Morton A. Klein released the following statement:
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani gets worse and worse as he promotes his overt Islamist, anti-American, pro-Hamas, Jew-hating agenda. ZOA strongly condemns bigot Mamdani’s latest antisemitic/discriminatory actions this week, including his excluding Jews from a judicial appointments panel; inciting Jew-hatred with his recent defamation of Netanyahu; and failing to promptly and properly respond to the ensuing antisemitic stabbing by an evil, violent bigot shouting “Allahu Akbar.”
This week, Mamdani, mayor of a city with the largest Jewish population in America, appointed 18 members – none of whom are Jewish – to the Mayor’s Advisory Committee on the Judiciary, which selects judges for the NYC criminal courts that try hate crimes. Jews are by far the largest number of victims of hate crimes. Further, one of the new committee members signed a statement affirming support for the antisemitic hate group Students for Justice in Palestine. These appointments are clearly a deliberate attempt to censor and discriminate against Jews, by excluding Jews on both the selection panel and its resulting judicial appointments. Censoring and excluding Jews is particularly dangerous in this Mamdani era when NYC anti-Jewish hate crimes are skyrocketing. Mamdani does not have a mandate for such actions: he became mayor with 50.1% of the small number of people who voted. Mamdani’s most recent anti-Jewish actions, moreover, followed Mamdani excluding Italian, Irish and other European neighborhoods from his map of NYC neighborhoods.
NYC has a very large percentage of Jewish lawyers and law professors. One recent article states that 50% of NYC lawyers are Jewish. ZOA Coalition member Professor Rabbi Mark Goldfeder, Esq. stated: “If you were to pull 18 [lawyers] at random, you would expect there to be several Jewish members. When they [Mamdani’s Muslim chief counsel, Ramzi Kassem] call it [the committee] ‘TRULY REPRESENTATIVE’ that’s ridiculous.”
The committee’s biased composition is unfortunately not surprising. The supervisor of the Advisory Committee on the Judiciary is lawyer-to-terrorist Ramzi Kassem. When Mamdani appointed Kassem as NYC Chief Counsel, ZOA warned that “the NYC Chief Counsel wields immense power and influence over city policy, legislation, ethics, and legal direction, and has oversight of city agencies. Radical Muslim Kassem’s record makes him the wrong person for this role, and a danger to New Yorkers.”
ZOA described Kassem’s representation of murderous Al Qaeda terrorists; and Kassem’s work to prevent the FBI from questioning Muslims and from obtaining Muslim informants; derogation of law enforcement as the “real danger”; false accusations that law enforcement was “demonizing” Muslims at a “new fever pitch”; and consistent treatment of Islamic terror as an imaginary excuse for law enforcement’s efforts to uncover terror activities. See “ZOA Condemns Mamdani’s Ending Exec. Orders Protecting Jews & Appt. of Israel-Bashing, Lawyer-for-Muslim Terrorists, Ramzi Kassem, as NYC Chief Counsel, Endangering Jews and America,” Jan. 2, 2026; and “Terrorist Lawyer Who Condemned Israel, Defended 9/11, Now Sets Biden Immigration Policy,” by Daniel Greenfield, Front Page Mag., July 7, 2023.
We are now seeing the dangerous, frightening results of Mamdani’s disastrous appointment. We are painfully forced to think of the Nazis’ “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service,” promulgated on April 7, 1933, which removed Jewish judges from the bench and removed Jewish lawyers from practice. Mamdani’s and Ramzi Kassem’s recent biased/bigoted appointment excluding Jews appears to be aimed at ending justice for Jews who are attacked in New York.
We urge all Jewish, Christian, and Muslim leaders, and political, academic, business and other leaders to speak against this and Mamdani’s other discriminatory actions. This bigotry must stop now!
Further, Mamdani’s appointments to damage the judiciary occurred the same week that Mamdani outrageously, recklessly incited anti-Jewish violence by falsely defaming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as murdering innocent people and other horrific crimes. The next day, on Tisha B’Av, a man screaming “Allahu Akbar” stabbed a Jewish man and an Asian man. Mamdani took many hours to even mention the attacks, and still hasn’t retracted his incitement against the Jewish people and Jewish state.
Hypocritically, Mamdani wrote on X the next day that “This kind of despicable violence is not who we are as a city. Every New Yorker deserves to be safe, regardless of their religion or race. Our administration will always stand against bigotry and do everything in our power to root out antisemitism, racism, and hateful acts of all kinds.” Unfortunately, Mamdani’s biased judicial appointments committee and defamation of Israel and its leader will instead further embolden Islamist attackers of innocent Jews and others.