New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) sparked a fierce debate over the weekend after he called AIPAC “monsters” during a Brooklyn rally late last week for his slate of candidates in New York’s primary night on Tuesday.

Mamdani was joined by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) at the rally, which promoted candidates mostly affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America, a party known for its vehement anti-Israel posture. The rally included two House candidates in former city comptroller Brad Lander and Darializa Avila Chevalier, who helped organize the controversial protest encampment at Columbia University.

“And we need that because, as Gramsci once wrote, ‘The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters,’” Mamdani said during his speech, quoting the Marxist philosopher Antonio Francesco Gramsci.

“These monsters take many forms today: in those who fund television ads that blanket the airwaves with misleading and bad-faith attacks about Claire, Brad, and Dari; those who would rather spend far more on political contributions than they would ever be made to pay in taxes; in AIPAC, for whom the only thing more frightening than democracy being allowed to run its course is an end to the genocide in Netanyahu’s wars,” he continued, adding:

They move millions in dark money to accomplish a single goal: to preserve their power, so that they can turn us against one another instead of turning our leaders toward the moral change we all know to be necessary. In a politics that for too long has asked working people to lower their expectations, to settle for less, to become satisfied with small victories while our wages grow even smaller and our costs grow even larger; to resign ourselves to resignation, to accept the unacceptable. In the wealthiest city, in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, we need not live in fear of monsters any longer.

Mamdani’s remarks quickly went viral online and sparked fierce criticism from the right and within his own party.

Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) shared the clip and added, “‘Monsters.’ ‘Dark money.’ A hidden hand ‘turning us against one another.’ Swap ‘AIPAC’ for ‘Jews’ and it’s the oldest antisemitic conspiracy theory in the books. That’s not criticizing a lobby.”

He added:

That’s laundering antisemitism from your podium as Mayor of a city with more than a million Jews. This bullshit is dangerous.

If you want to talk about real monsters let’s start with the North Koreans, Russians, Sudanese, the Iranian regime, and their proxies — Hamas, Hezbollah, PIJ — and other terrorist groups who’ve killed scores of Americans.

Georgia state Rep. Esther Panitch (D) added, “Mamdani is an antisemite b/c he believes that Israel has no right to exist as the Jewish state and no right to defend herself from attacks. He is dangerous to Jews and his followers who parrot these anti AIPAC (aka Jews) messages are dangerous to Jews.”

Mamdani also found defenders on the progressive left. CNN commentator and influencer Adam Mockler added, “This is what true leadership looks like.”

Below are some more reactions:

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