I see Generation Intifada has a new hero. Those rich white kids who never leave the house without their keffiyeh and who love to annoy their parents by saying ‘Globalise the intifada!’ are falling at the feet of this political idol. At last, they cry, a man who ‘gets it’ and who might even prise open the eyes of the dim and uneducated to the terrible injustices of our cruel world.
Why use a word that you know will trigger in Jews the most hellish memories of persecution and death?
It’s Zohran Mamdani. Of course it is. The meteoric rise of this 33-year-old ‘democratic socialist’, who last night became the Dems’ candidate for New York City mayor, has induced rapture among the digital left. He’s being hailed as the youthful, smiley saviour of a left battered and bruised by the populist turn. Some are calling his win a ‘revolution’, but others are using a different word. This is nothing short of an ‘intifada’, they say.
Yes, not content with culturally appropriating Palestinian headwear, now the faux-virtuous brats of the Ivy League co-opt Palestinian terminology. ‘Intifada: globalised’, they’re tweeting in response to Mamdani’s win. Mohammed el-Kurd, the Palestinian poet beloved of the overeducated of the West, got them even hotter under the collar with his response to Mamdani’s win. ‘Consider the intifada globalised’, he posted.
It seems insensitive – to put it mildly – to so gleefully bandy about a word that hits Jews where it hurts. It was under the banner of ‘intifada’ that Hamas detonated so many suicide bombs in Israel and launched its fascistic pogrom of 7 October 2023. Why use a word that you know will trigger in Israelis and Jews the most hellish memories of persecution and death? And in New York of all places, the city with the largest population of Jews outside of Israel.
Here’s the awful thing: it’s partly down to Mamdani himself that the crowing of this gross word has become all the rage among some of his supporters. He infamously refused to condemn the slogan ‘Globalise the intifada’. Asked about this menacing cry that took off among the West’s keffiyeh classes in the wake of Hamas’s pogrom, he said it’s just a call for equality. The people who use it are expressing their ‘desperate desire’ for ‘Palestinian human rights’, he said.
Really, Zohran? You’re chilled about the widespread use of a word which, right now, in this moment, primarily refers to the killing of Israelis by an army of anti-Semites called Hamas? To some of us, it was suspect indeed that the activist classes of New York and London noisily sang the praises of ‘intifada’ in the aftermath of an ‘intifada’ that involved the largest mass murder of Jews since the Nazis. It felt like a cruel taunting of Jews masquerading as a cry of solidarity.
Everywhere you went you’d hear the unsettling wail. It fell from the mouths of every keffiyeh-covered student radical. It was scrawled on placards in London. What did these people want, exactly?
The two most recent ‘intifadas’ entailed untold horrors for Jews. During the Second Intifada of 2000 to 2005, hundreds of Israeli civilians were massacred. They were blown up on buses, burnt alive in nightclubs and mercilessly slain in pizza restaurants. In the Al-Aqsa Flood ‘intifada’ – or the 7 October pogrom, as decent people call it – Jews were raped, kidnapped and murdered in their hundreds. Globalise that?
To cry ‘Globalise the intifada!’ after 7 October was akin to crying ‘Globalise the lynchings!’ following a particularly gruesome murder spree by the KKK in the American South. It was cluelessly insensitive at best, intentionally threatening at worst. Indeed, anti-Semitic violence has sky-rocketed in tandem with this deathly slogan. Two Israeli Embassy staffers shot dead in Washington DC, Jews set on fire in Colorado, synagogues desecrated in the US and Europe – there’s your globalised intifada, folks.
One marvels, yet again, at the hypocrisy of the left. These are the kind of people who think it’s ‘hate speech’ if someone says you can’t have a penis and be a lesbian. They’ll blub about ‘erasure’ if you misgender their mate. And yet they think it’s fine to yell ‘Globalise the intifada’ after an ‘intifada’ that was positively Nazi-esque in its ferocity and bigotry. One rule for me, another for Jews.
For all his socialist strutting, much of Mamdani’s support comes from New York’s wealthy voters. He performs well among white, university-educated liberals, and less so among the black working class. If his rise is an ‘intifada’, it’s a Hipster Intifada: an uprising by the privileged with their luxury beliefs and mandatory keffiyehs. That so many on that rarefied plane seem cavalier about the word ‘intifada’ is worrying. That the potential next mayor of a city to which Jews contribute so much thinks it’s okay to holler ‘Globalise the intifada!’ is even more so. Pray for New York.
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