Zohran Mamdani Misinformation, Debunked: Antisemitism, Immigrant Status

It’s now official: New York State Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani is the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City, having toppled disgraced former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, the establishment pick, in a wild primary that has already had seismic effects throughout the party. A 33-year-old Democratic Socialist, he will go up against the Republican nominee, Curtis Silwa, a scandal-ridden Mayor Eric Adams, and, potentially, Cuomo again in November, looking to become the first Muslim, first Indian-American, and first millennial leader of the Big Apple.

Mamdani’s momentous campaign has provided a promising template for progressive candidates focused on kitchen-table issues. Initially an underdog with little name recognition, he built a powerful ground game of grassroots volunteers who knocked on over a million doors — and was a near-constant presence in the streets of the city himself as he walked the five boroughs meeting voters. The enthusiasm for his messaging on making New York more affordable for all by freezing rent hikes, building affordable housing, strengthening social services, eliminating bus fares, and creating city-owned grocery stores helped drive a surge in voter registration, while his team’s social media savvy ensured that these policies made a big splash across the internet.

Naturally, Mamdani’s success has been met with bruising attacks, some from the centrist segment of his own party, others from right-wingers who paint him as a dangerous far-left radical. Once he had eclipsed Cuomo, it was inevitable that Donald Trump would go after him, and the president spared no time smearing and threatening the upstart candidate. By now, the waters have been thoroughly muddied with misinformation about Mamdani, much of it characterized by Islamophobic hate. Below, we debunk some of the most viral and persistent lies so far.

Mamdani is not in the country illegally

This is among the more flagrantly false claims about Mamdani, floated on Tuesday by the president himself. “A lot of people are saying he’s here illegally,” Trump said at a press conference with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, adding, “You know, we’re going to look at everything.” The comments seemed to echo a call last week from Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) to denaturalize and deport Mamdani, whom he gave the racist nickname “little Muhammad” in a post on X.

Mamdani was born in Uganda to Indian parents and lived for a short time in South Africa before his family moved to New York in 1998, when he was seven years old. He was naturalized as a U.S. citizen in 2018. While it’s true that Trump’s Justice Department is moving aggressively to strip citizenship from naturalized immigrants — there are some 25 million living in the country — and the administration even wants to block the constitutional right of birthright citizenship, Mamdani is a legal resident, plain and simple.  

“The president of the United States just threatened to have me arrested, stripped of my citizenship, put in a detention camp and deported,” Mamdani said in a statement on Tuesday. “Not because I have broken any law but because I will refuse to let ICE terrorize our city.” He called Trump’s comments “an attack on democracy” that menaced New Yorkers, adding, “We will not accept this intimidation.”

He does not have any connection to 9/11 or jihadist terrorism

The MAGA right responded to Mamdani’s primary victory with a blitz of Islamaphobic fury that had nothing to do with anything he has ever said or done, as a politician or otherwise. Donald Trump Jr. shared an X post that suggested New Yorkers were “voting for” another 9/11. Rep. Nancy Mace posted a photo of Mamdani attending an Eid service at the Parkchester Islamic Center in the Bronx with the caption: “After 9/11 we said ‘Never Forget.’ I think we sadly have forgotten.” Commentators Charlie Kirk and Benny Johnson also invoked the specter of the 9/11 attacks — which occurred when Mamdani was nine years old and living in New York himself. He has no connection to the terror plot and has never expressed support for it or the extremist group Al-Qaeda.

Likewise, there is no basis to claims from Trump zealots, including Laura Loomer, that Mamdani is a “jihadist Muslim” or has ties to Iran or the Muslim Brotherhood and can be arrested on terrorism charges. Insinuations that he would impose Sharia law on New York — as from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who posted an AI-generated image of the Statue of Liberty wearing a black burka — also lack any grounding in reality. All in all, these are just a rehash of the xenophobic outbursts that dominated cable news in the aftermath of 9/11 itself and eventually mutated into birther and “secret Muslim” conspiracy theories about Barack Hussein Obama. Which, not incidentally, launched Trump’s political career.    

Mamdani has meanwhile faced criticism for certain lyrics from his years as a rapper in the 2010s. On “Salaam,” a track he released as his MC persona Mr. Cardamom, he shouted out his support for the so-called “Holy Land Five,” Palestinian-American organizers for what was at one point the largest Muslim charity in the U.S. The group was convicted in 2008 of providing material support to the militant group Hamas, designated as a terrorist organization. The advocacy group Human Rights Watch has argued that the defendants in the landmark War on Terror case “were never accused of directly funding terrorist organizations or terrorist attacks, nor were the Palestinian charities they funded accused of doing so,” and other civil rights attorneys have found significant fault with how the charges were prosecuted.

Mamdani hasn’t actually said or done anything antisemitic

As the primary race tightened, Cuomo appealed to New York’s significant Jewish population by telegraphing strong support for Israel and arguing that antisemitism was a defining issue of this election cycle — as if to suggest his leading opponent harbored some innate loathing for Jews. After Mamdani won, prominent Democrats offered baffling remarks in the same vein. Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) appeared on CNN to declare, “I don’t associate myself with what he has said about the Jewish people,” though he failed to specify anything offensive Mamdani had supposedly said. In an even more outrageous incident, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) responded positively to caller during a radio interview who ranted about fictional “threats facing the Jewish community from Zohran Mamdani,” with the senator going as far as to imply that Mamdani had supported “global jihad.” (Her office later said she “misspoke,” and Gillibrand apologized to Mamdani during a phone call Monday night.) On social media, Elisha Wiesel, the son of Holocaust survivor and author Elie Wiesel, shared a video in which he urged New Yorkers not to vote for Mamdani, after showing footage of Adolf Hitler and Nazi concentration camps.

The claims of antisemitism seem focused around his stance on Israel: Mamdani cofounded a chapter of the activist group Students for Justice for Palestine at his college, and has advocated for equal rights for Israelis and Palestinians in Israel, as well as an end to the war in Gaza. When confronted with questions about why he had not co-sponsored an annual New York state Holocaust Remembrance Day resolution, he answered that he had voted for the symbolic measure every year, and backed the allocation of more funds to survivors. He said his office had a blanket policy of not signing resolutions emailed to his office. Since taking office in 2021, he has also made public statements commemorating Holocaust Remembrance Day each year.

Many Jewish New Yorkers supported Mamdani’s run, organized on his behalf, and endorsed him, including the city’s highest-ranking Jewish politician, Comptroller Brad Lander, who condemned Cuomo for the “weaponization of antisemitism.” Mamdani, meanwhile, used his candidacy to speak about the threat posed by rising antisemitism and his plans to increase city funding to combat hate crimes.

He did not call to ‘globalize the intifada’

In the ongoing attempts to portray Mamdani as an Islamist extremist, one phrase has become a sticking point. During a June appearance on The Bulwark podcast FYPod a week before the primary election, Mamdani was asked if he was “uncomfortable” with the slogan “globalize the intifada,” usually interpreted as a call to make Palestinian liberation a worldwide movement through a mass uprising against Israeli oppression. The word “intifada,” which in a more literal translation means “to shake off,” or “struggle,” has also been used to describe violent rebellion.

“To me, what I hear in so many is a desperate desire for equality and equal rights,” Mamdani said, remarking that it would be Trumpian to try to police such language. “As a Muslim man who grew up post-9/11, I’m all too familiar in the way in which Arabic words can be twisted, can be distorted, can be used to justify any kind of meaning,” he added.

Across social media, this exchange was indeed twisted by right-wing media to push the falsehood that Mamdani had personally called to “globalize the intifada.” Then, on a Meet the Press appearance Sunday, he repeatedly declined to condemn the phrase in an interview when host Kristen Welker brought it up. “That’s not language that I used,” Mamdani said, truthfully. “The language that I used and the language that I will continue to use to lead the city is that which speaks clearly to my intent, which is an intent grounded in a belief in universal human rights.” Nonetheless, that same day, Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries appeared to indicate that he incorrectly believed Mamdani had used the phrase, saying, “He’s going to have to clarify his position on that as he moves forward.” Jeffries, whose congressional district encompasses several Brooklyn neighborhoods, has yet to endorse a mayoral candidate.

He’s not a communist

It hardly matters what your actual politics are if you run as a Democrat and Trump has his sights on you: He’s going to call you a communist. If a lifelong centrist like Joe Biden couldn’t escape the label, what hope does a young progressive have? Sure enough, Trump trashed Mamdani as a “100% Communist Lunatic” on Truth Social as soon as it became clear that he had run away with the primary. “We’ve had Radical Lefties before, but this is getting a little ridiculous,” the president fumed. Other conservatives followed suit, denouncing Mamdani as a would-be authoritarian far to the left of Sen. Bernie Sanders.

As a cheap scare tactic, the Communist Boogeyman line is far older than Trump himself, and Mamdani’s promises to expand childcare and fight for a $30 minimum wage don’t exactly sound like a vision for some Stalinist dystopia. He is not aiming for government takeovers of private industry and property, and his proposed taxes on the top one percent are meant to subsidize social programs in a way that resembles socialism as it exists in various European countries. His criticism of wealth inequality — he has said “I don’t think we should have billionaires” — does not define him as a communist.

“No, I am not,” Mamdani said in his Sunday interview on Meet the Press, in response to Trump calling him a communist. “I have already had to start to get used to the fact that the president will talk about how I look, how I sound, where I’m from, who I am, ultimately because he wants to distract from what I’m fighting for. I’m fighting for the very working people that he ran a campaign to empower, that he has since then betrayed.”