Alarm bells go off in New York.
Anti-Zionism is turning the Democratic Party into a mortal enemy of America.
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Extreme socialism is now on the march in America, with the demonisation of Israel as the principal weapon in its arsenal.
Claire Valdez, Brad Lander and Darializa Avila Chevalier, three extremists backed by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, emerged victorious this week from their Democratic primaries in New York City’s 7th, 10th and 17th congressional districts.
Valdez and Chevalier are affiliated with the ultra-left, anti-American Democratic Socialists of America.
On social media, Chevalier has boasted of having “wiped my hand on the American flag”.
Chevalier, a convert to Islam, has called for the abolition of police, prisons and the country’s borders. She also co-founded Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a Muslim Brotherhood front group whose goals are the “full eradication of Western civilisation” and the cultivation of “unrest and violence in America”.
If elections to New York’s legislature are included, seven out of eight DSA-affiliated candidates won victory this week.
The support of Mamdani, who actively campaigned for these candidates, was critical to this alarming advance for extremism.
Yet the commentator and “Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough declared that the person most responsible for this march of extremism in New York City wasn’t Mamdani but the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
What was shaping views now, he said, were images that Israel had brutalised children and women in Gaza “with bombing that looks indiscriminate on TV day in and day out for years” and would be “able to level half of Lebanon”.
Scarborough did not draw the reasonable conclusion that these images had persuaded millions of people to believe libellous falsehoods that had been propagated to delegitimise the State of Israel as a prelude to its destruction.
Instead, he suggested that these lies were true, and so he was holding Netanyahu responsible for the anti-Zionism which had powered those election campaigns.
A moment’s thought shows how ludicrous this is. Hatred of the Jewish homeland not only long predated Netanyahu’s first period as prime minister but predated the establishment of the State of Israel itself.
It’s true, however, that anti-Zionism was a driving force in these elections. All three House candidates ran campaigns that focused on ending US support for Israel.
All three of them used the “genocide” libel against the Jewish state. Chevalier doubled down on the support she had voiced for Hamas the day after the terrorist group led the attack against Israel on October 7, 2023.
A hijab-wearing Palestinian Arab, Aber Kawas, who won the primary for the New York State Senate, has written extensively on her blog about her support for “imprisoned heroes,” including the “Holy Land Five” (convicted of terrorism financing) and Ahmed Ferhani, an Algerian man who pleaded guilty in 2012 to planning a mass shooting at a Manhattan synagogue.
For his part, Mamdani referred last week to the pro-Israel lobby group AIPAC and its supporters as “monsters,” channelling the key antisemitic conspiracy theory that accuses the Jews of controlling America in the pursuit of diabolical goals.
The true monsters are surely the Iranian regime, Hamas, Hezbollah — and Mamdani himself, who works for Israel’s destruction and hugely increases the physical danger to Jews in New York.
These New York election results have demonstrated that anti-Zionism has become the principal driver of Democratic Party politics, just as it has of progressive culture in general.
The elections demonstrated the menacing alliance between Islamism and ultra-leftism — embodied by Mamdani — that has the whole of America in its sights.
Islamists and leftists are united in the two things that drive them: their desire to end America and the West, and their deranged loathing of Israel and the Jewish people.
This loathing isn’t just the glue binding these two otherwise opposing groups together. It’s the Islamists’ key weapon against America itself.
The “Jewish question” is now turning into the driver of Democratic Party politics. Hatred of Israel is a Trojan horse for the agenda of Islamisation, the process of conquering America and the West for Islam.
Tragically, however, many American Jews whose support for the Democrats is tribal and unshakeable continue to back Mamdani even now.
Brad Lander, a former New York City comptroller who is Jewish and who defeated Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) in the primary for New York’s 10th Congressional District, is a close ally of the mayor. He declared that he would be “one of the Jewish members of Congress most willing to stand up for Palestinian human rights,” and that he would “stand firmly against bigotry aimed at Jews”.
This was humbug.
Last month, Lander went to the al Khoei Foundation, an Islamic centre in Queens, NY, identified by American security agencies as allied to the Iranian regime.
There, he accused Israel of a “desecration” of Judaism by committing genocide in Gaza and potentially also in Lebanon. He said he hoped to partner with Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) — two members of the Israel-hating “Squad” in the US House of Representatives —just as he had with Mamdani.
He even recited in Arabic a verse from the Quran that said: “He is Allah who is one, Allah the eternal refuge … nor is there to him any equivalent.” Following his remarks, the Imam at the mosque prayed to the Mahdi — the Shia Muslim messiah — to kill infidels with his sword.
The anti-Israel group IfNotNow celebrated Lander’s win as “a blueprint for the future for both the Jewish community and the Democratic Party”.
“He ran a bold, unapologetically Jewish campaign that rejected pro-war lobbies like AIPAC and the endless flow of U.S. weapons to Israel,” stated the group’s executive director, Morriah Kaplan.
But Lander is actively running interference for Islamists determined to kill Jews, exterminate Israel and conquer the West.
Defaming and delegitimising Israel and Zionism is not only deeply unjust. It’s a direct onslaught on Judaism and leads inexorably to attacks on Jews.
After Lander’s opponent, Goldman, visited a coffee shop in Brooklyn, NY, with his seven year-old daughter, the cafe subsequently posted the message: “We don’t serve racists fascists homophobes genocide enablers or anyone in between. Too bad we didn’t recognise you right away, or we would have turned you away.”
A journalist on Fox & Friends had reported that people in line for a food bank in New York City had been talking to her, too, about AIPAC. As a studio presenter said, “They believe that the United States is taking the money that could go to them and is donating it to Israel.”
Many wonder why the interests of so many Americans have become identified with events taking place thousands of miles away. Back in 2023, a Harvard-Harris poll found that two-thirds of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 agreed that “Jews as a class are oppressors and should be treated as oppressors.”
Most New York voters, who may assume that all the libels they are fed about Israel are true, nevertheless almost certainly don’t put Israel at the top of their concerns above the cost of living.
But Israel now stands proxy for something else: a nation state that’s supposedly grinding the faces of the poor and disadvantaged. So a vote for those who hate “oppressor” Israel is a vote for the “oppressed” everywhere.
Tragically, many liberal American Jews sign up to this warped, perverse and hateful mindset because this is now the dominant thinking in the Democratic Party.
Anti-Zionism, which shockingly has now framed the demonisation of Israel as conscience itself, has driven liberals off their moral compass. As a result, they are pawns in a far bigger game being played: to conquer America and the West for Islam.
The Democrats are turning into an extremist party posing an increasingly acute danger to America. And Jews who still support it are debauching Judaism, betraying the Jewish people and aiding the mortal enemies of the West.
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Michael Deacon writes the satirical “Way of the World” column twice a week (published at 6am every Tuesday and Saturday), plus a weekly Features column. See more Published 27 June 2026 6:00am BST