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New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani condemned the horrific Hanukkah attack that took place in Australia on Sunday as a “vile act of antisemitic terror,” but has not said if he’s changing his stance regarding his past reluctance to denounce the phrase “globalize the intifada.”
Fox News reached out to the mayor-elect’s team on Monday but did not receive a response at the time this report was posted.
The mass shooting at Sydney’s Bondi Beach left at least 15 people dead and dozens wounded. Australian authorities have described the attack as an act of terrorism targeting the Jewish community. Police said the suspected attackers were a father and his adult son. The father was killed at the scene, while the son was shot by police and taken to a hospital in critical condition.
Mamdani, who made history last month as the first Muslim elected mayor of the nation’s most populous city and who has had strained relations with many in New York City’s Jewish community, said he would “discourage” the use of the phrase, which has been seen as a call to violence against Jews, following his double-digit June victory in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary.
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His stance — and the phrase itself — is once again drawing scrutiny.
An opinion piece by New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, published Monday, argued that the Bondi Beach shooting is the ultimate manifestation of what “globalize the intifada” actually means.
“Though we’ll probably learn more in the weeks ahead about the mind-set of Sunday’s killers, it’s reasonable to surmise that what they thought they were doing was ‘globalizing the intifada,'” Stephens wrote. “That is, they were taking to heart slogans like ‘resistance is justified’ and ‘by any means necessary,’ which have become ubiquitous at anti-Israel rallies the world over. For many of those who chant those lines, they may seem like abstractions and metaphors, a political attitude in favor of Palestinian freedom rather than a call to kill their presumptive oppressors.”
He went on to add, “But there are always literalists — and it’s the literalists who usually believe their ideas should have real-world consequences. On Sunday, those consequences were written in Jewish blood. History tells us that it won’t be the last time.”
In a statement, Mamdani said of the attack, “Another Jewish community plunged into mourning and loss, a holiday of light so painfully reduced to a day of darkness. This attack is merely the latest, most horrifying iteration in a growing pattern of violence targeted at Jewish people across the world.”
Mamdani pledged, “When I am Mayor, I will work every day to keep Jewish New Yorkers safe—on our streets, our subways, at shul, in every moment of every day. Let this be a purpose shared by every New Yorker, and let us banish this horrific violence to the past.”
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The incoming mayor, who will take office next month, noted that one of the victims was Rabbi Eli Schlanger, “who held deep ties to Crown Heights,” which is a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Brooklyn that has long been home to a large population of Hasidic Jews.
Schlanger had recently penned a letter to Australia’s prime minister urging him to be more supportive of Israel.
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Mamdani’s statement, which he posted on social media, had received over 4 million views on X as of early Monday afternoon.
Fox News Digital’s Alexander Hall contributed to this report.
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