There was a video going around of Zohran Mamdani, who is running for Mayor of N.Y.C., sitting with a bunch of chasideshe men in the sukkah wearing a kippa. Besides the obvious, that he is a communist who believes that everything can be free, he is also a vile anti-Semite.

Mind you, there were still Jewish hostages being held by Hamas, being starved and tortured, while all of this was going on. Never mind the fact that every single Jew right now understands how important it is to stick together against the very real threat of anti-Semitism, ahem, two dead Jews in the U.K.

While all anti-Semitism is bad, it definitely falls into different categories. I was listening to a lecture from the Israeli historian Dan Shuftan, and he said something along the lines of, “90 percent of the world is from Chelm, and the other 10 percent is Sodom.” (I tried finding the exact quote but alas.) He was speaking about the response from the West to Oct. 7 and was making a distinction between the useful idiots and the 10 percent of people who are actually evil and are calculated in their anti-Semitism.

The kids on college campuses are just naïve about how the real world works, especially once they leave the safety of U.S. borders, and are part of the 90 percent. Mamdani, however, falls under the 10 percent.

He is the kind of person who knows exactly what he is doing while at the same time using the West’s naïveté and freedom of speech to hate Jews.

Then he plays this weird game where he clarifies all his racist statements to be merely symbolic and not actually indicative of what he believes. He then pretends that YOU are the idiot for not understanding that when he says “Globalize the Intifada,” he does not mean blowing Jews up at a bus stop. What he really means is some sort of symbolic religious struggle. 

Here is the truth: he hates you. No amount of kissing up to him will save you, he’ll eat you too, he’ll just eat you last, once he’s squeezed everything out of you. I promise you, as he was sitting in that sukkah, he was thinking to himself about how stupid these people are for thinking that he isn’t going to use them up and leave them to rot.

There is an argument to be made that, we need to get along with politicians and that just because we have our differences, you still don’t want to alienate yourself because then you won’t be able to do good for the community.

The reason why that argument is flawed is for the following reason:

Take a politician who is campaigning on legalizing gay marriage. As religious Jews, we obviously have a different opinion on this than the average secular person. However, we also realize that we live in a democracy, and as long as someone isn’t shoving LGBTQ down our throats in a way that we don’t appreciate, we need to all get along and compromise. Essentially, you can support this candidate and rub elbows with them in order to benefit the community even if you disagree with part of his platform. You do you, and I do me.

The difference here is that he doesn’t just have silly communist ideas, he hates Jews. Not “maybe,” or “just a little biased toward the other side.” He wants to see you dead, as a Jew, and he will rejoice the day you are no longer alive.

Here are a couple of quotes from Mamdani:

“Globalize the Intifada.”

When you hear the word Intifada as a Jew, you know exactly what it means, thousands of people killed and injured in suicide bombings. As a Muslim who hates Israel, he knows what this means too, and it is precisely why he uses it and then pretends to the communists that he just means blah blah blah, and they buy it because they also hate Jews. We are not naive Westerners.

“Israel is not a place, it is not a country, it’s an idea.”

There is not a single person who has uttered this sentence, or something along these lines that did not want Israel to be wiped off the map. It’s just code words so that he can tell his base that he hates Jews while hiding behind plausible deniability.

On top of that, he told his staff not to co-sponsor a bill for Holocaust Remembrance Day. It is something routine and symbolic and does not affect any legislation, but he could not be bothered.

The truth is, we are both going to be loaded onto the same cattle car. Except the look on your face is going to be disbelief that being a useful idiot isn’t going to save you.