Mayor Zohran Mamdani doubled down on branding a pro-Israel super PAC as “monsters” — even as Jewish New Yorkers warned the word choice could incite violence.
Hizzoner took aim at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee [AIPAC] last week during a campaign rally with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), saying “these monsters take many forms today.”
Mamdani on Monday stood by the characterization as he was pressed repeatedly on if he regretted the word choice.
“I used the term to describe all those who are preventing the birth of a new world, not solely a PAC, but frankly, super PACs at large, who are spending millions of dollars in deceptive and misleading ads that are blanketing airwaves,” he told reporters in City Hall Rotunda Monday morning at an unrelated presser.
The democratic socialist mayor, a staunch critic of Israel, had sparked controversy last week after citing one-time leader of the Italian socialist party, Antonio Gramsci, railing against “dark money” funding ads on TV, in print and online.
“In AIPAC, for whom the only thing more frightening than democracy being allowed to run its course is an end to genocide and Netanyahu’s wars,” the mayor continued at the Kings Theatre in Brooklyn.
“They move millions in dark money to accomplish a single goal, to preserve their power so that they can turn us against one another.”
In the days since, vocal Jewish New Yorkers called the rhetoric dangerous and worried it would incite violence.
Chaim Steinmetz, a senior rabbi of the Kehilath Jeshurun synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, railed online, “This is pure incitement.”
“Mamdani is accusing AIPAC of being a monster that subverts democracy, supports genocide and wants to divide Americans,” he continued.
