let's not eat ourselves

mamdani and the vastness of enemies

in an interview with stephen colbert, zohran mamdani was asked whether he believes israel has a right to exist. mamdani answered:

Yes, like all nations I believe it has a right to exist and a responsibility to uphold international law.

colbert continued his line of questioning:

There are many people in New York, even people who would support your candidacy otherwise who don't want to support you because of the Jewish community's fear of the true and rising anti-semitism, not only around the world but in this country and shamefully in New York… What do you say to those New Yorkers are afraid that you wouldn’t be their mayor?

mamdani used this opportunity to first recall an anecdote:

After the horrific war crime of October 7th, a friend of mine told me about how he went to his synagogue for Shabbat services and he heard the door open behind him and a tremor went up his spine as he turned around not knowing who was there and what they meant for him.

before moving onto proposed policy:

That's why at the heart of my proposal for a department of community safety is a commitment to increase funding for anti-hate crime programming by 800% because, to your point, anti-semitism is not simply something that we should talk about, it's something that we have to tackle. We have to make clear there's no room for it in this city, in this country, in this world.

in a NYC democratic town hall debate where everyone was asked where they’d visit first as a mayor—every candidate creepily reeled off some variation of “i would visit israel”. i’m sure if anyone in the audience cupped their ears, they might’ve heard the ka-ching of aipac funds landing in the candidate’s bank accounts.

rather than entertain the delusion that he must show fealty to a place 5,000 miles away from the city he’s running for mayor of¹, mamdani responded with an answer that left him relatively unscathed:

I would stay in New York City. My plans are to address New Yorkers across the five boroughs.

it was clear the whole line of questioning was meant to bait mamdani into the same zionist quicksand that trapped jeremy corbyn. the british left watched in agony as the best prime ministerial candidate in decades was smeared by ruport murdoch’s cthulian media empire with allegations of anti-semitism so relentless that it cost him a general election against boris fucking johnson.

there are leftists who’d condemn zohran mamdani’s approach to israel and who are distrustful of mamdani’s campaign in general.

i understand where that comes from. a once pro-palestinian obama ran his presidency on platitudes and rose to the highest office of the land to be remembered mostly as an imperial palette cleanser. bernie was snuffed out twice. aoc’s politics have thinned into a disappointing gruel. these are the entities that’ve attempted to co-operate with the system. they either switched up once they got past the bouncers or were refused entry on the door.

it is sensible to be cautious of anyone trying to enter the establishment but it is impractical to deny their necessity.

this is about more than the legislative branches of government or mayoral candidates. everyday, we are invisibly influenced by tech companies, energy corporations, media, government bodies, a perpetual war machine, pharmaceutical companies and many more. we need to be honest about how the vastness of this system and what it will take to push against it.

i like zohran mamdani and it’s not because he is personable or for his public performances (e.g expressing dislike for capitalism on cnn). i like mamdani because he’s a politician. he’s slick under pressure and he reframes narratives in real-time. he understands well what to say and what not to say and the presentation of his policies into public discourse via somewhere as internationally recognised as new york is tactically crucial. scepticism is healthy, encouraged even, but scepticism has a tendency to fall into a nihilism stagnating us in an infuriating state of lethargy.

hope is a crucial currency in the public consciousness. it is one of the most ancient accelerants for action in living existence. that mamdani has ignited it in so many makes him a rare and necessary talent. it is as unwise to see him only as a deceiver as it is unwise to snuff out hope without replacing the absence it leaves. despair fills the void. my advice is: hope with caution. you should anticipate mamdani will be subsumed by the vastness of the enemy once he arrives. you should plan for it, even. we should recognise it as a monstrosity of the system.

there is a need for people like mamdani to be inside and, as a publicly debated question, “does israel have a right to exist?” is an open booby-trap—the political equivalent of a creepy guy following a woman home on a dark night to hound her for her number. there’s no right way to respond to someone so spooky but, even if she’s single, she knows it’s less stressful and far safer to respond “sorry, i have a boyfriend” than “ew… no.”

there comes a time where we gotta consider whether it is strategically expedient to whip off our shirts, reveal the white, black, green and red painted on our naked bodies and yell, “free, free palestine!” sometimes you gotta realise that you’re in handcuffs and smile with a hairpin behind your teeth.

there is a revolutionary purism i see online, often without visible action. we are fighting a war that needs to be won on many fronts. we have been losing for too long. i’m a supporter of saying whatever the fuck you gotta say to achieve your goal—especially in the vi. the overton window is positioned in a way where any politician sympathetic to the palestinian struggle will only be able to express it through dog-whistles. if mamdani’s democratic victory reveals anything, it’s that its time; time to understand the environment beyond theory, maneouvre in ways to further our aims, engage with people beyond digital audience and discern when a fight needs to be won by thumbs in the coliseum and when the fight just needs to be fucking won.

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in an interview on the breakfast club, mamdani was asked about the nypd budget. ideologically, i’m an abolitionist. my instinct in any conversation about police is to get rid of them altogether and re-direct all the funding into more robust social services and community-led safety initiatives.

“Liberals co-opt leftist ideas and language and misapply them so that conservatives then get to point out the gaping holes in the liberalized versions of them to discredit the original concepts”

despite this, i’ve seen how debates about “defunding the police” appeared in public discourse after the calls for abolition were warped into a more toothless, liberal shape.² it is clear that abolition is an unpopular opinion generally and one that would require mass co-operation in order to fully realise. it’s a topic easily shouted down by right-wing opponents and liberals alike and thus too volatile to present in public discourse without being bastardised.

with that in mind, mamdani responds:

I want to be very clear: we are not defunding the police. What we are talking about is sustaining the number of police that we have within the police department. When I talk to those police officers themselves they tell me they signed up to join the police force to tackle serious crimes and yet what they're being asked to do today is serve as mental health professionals and social workers… What we've seen elsewhere in the country is you can actually move mental health calls out of the police department. That can reduce the calls police have to deal with by 20% and in doing so, you can increase police response time to those major categories of crime.

the most recent study shows the nypd has a 67% approval rating among new yorkers. i do not fault mamdani for finding a diplomatic way to put an electorate that nut-guzzle the police at ease whilst essentially talking about moving a chunk of resources towards mental health.

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zohran mamdani ticks enough boxes ideologically where anyone remotely leftist should be able to recognise that he is someone to get behind and/or learn from. it is not overly naive to consider his verbal capitulations to israel are largely ceremonial. in the past, he’s still used his position to introduce bills against the funding of illegal israeli settlements in palestine).

his democratic socialist approach to policies are necessary. support for social initiatives are barren in the aftermath of the red scare. mamdani is likely not going to align with the everyone on everything and the idea that he is, is the sort of magical thinking that stagnates political action in the relative comfort of theoretical fantasy.

i get it. you’re scared of being duped. scared that mamdani is insincere about his positions or worse, scared that if he assumes office he will be bureaucratically restrained from enacting any sort of meaningful change. you will only guarantee that lack of change by considering him as adversarial rather than a cog in a bigger machine that desperately needs to get its engine running. whether you believe yourself more radical than mamdani or align with him perfectly, he is assuming an instrumental role.

wake up.

its time to start winning in realms beyond the gotcha.

we have been marvelling at palestinian resilience, outsourcing liberation to the people of gaza whilst not facilitating our own. there are many ways to skin a cat. there is a political candidate ticking a large portion of boxes, fighting and winning. this should radicalise you—wherever you are align on the spectrum. at a certain point, it is necessary to relinquish moral purism and pyrrhic victories to focus on securing material wins.

the point is now.

1. i guess they had to ask, seeing as the nypd has a branch in israel.

2. plugging a rare, non-substack essay if you’re interested: https://blackyouthproject.com/the-price-of-radical-concession