New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani stood in Union Square on October 7 at a candlelight vigil marking the anniversary of Hamas’s attack on Israel, facing a crowd that had turned on him — and a Daily Wire columnist argues the scene has been widely misread as a rupture between the mayor and the protest movement that once cheered him.
Writing for The Daily Wire, columnist Stephen Kent describes Mamdani staring blankly into a throng that booed and taunted him at a memorial service for the roughly 1,200 people killed in the October 7, 2023 attack. According to Kent’s account, the chants included “700,000 dead. Mamdani, your hands are red!”, “Zohran, what do you say? How many kids did you kill today?”, “long live Hamas,” and profanity directed at Brad Lander, the former city comptroller standing alongside the mayor.
Kent’s central argument is that Mamdani did not experience the moment as a betrayal. “He doesn’t feel beset upon; he’s not annoyed or besieged,” Kent writes. “He wants to be behind the bullhorn again with his masked friends, and he’s just trying to play the role of American politician who does candlelight vigils for terror victims until he can go home.”
The column notes that Greg Price, posting on X, framed the scene as “tfw the monster you created turns on you.” Kent rejects that reading outright: in his view, Mamdani “sees no monsters,” because the mayor shares the crowd’s underlying premise that the mayor’s office must be contested until Israel ceases to exist.
From bullhorn to receiving end
Kent draws a direct line between the mayor’s current position and his earlier activism, pointing to October 20, 2023 — a week after the Hamas attack — when Mamdani led demonstrators with a megaphone to accuse Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) of complicity in Palestinian “genocide.” At that point, Kent notes, Israel had not yet launched its offensive in Gaza.
The column also revisits a past remark by Mamdani — “When the boots of the NYPD are on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF” — to argue that the mayor’s political instincts were forged in a movement that treats the police department as an instrument of a foreign power.
Kent attributes Mamdani’s decision to attend the vigil in part to political pressure. He notes that New York City is home to roughly 20 percent of American Jews, the largest Jewish population in the country, and writes that the mayor’s financial backers and allies wanted him standing beside Lander the week after his office announced a task force to combat antisemitism.
The task force and its funding
According to the column, that antisemitism task force routes $6.4 million to Partners Against the Hate (PATH), an organization Kent describes as having ties to the Arab American Association of New York (AAANY) and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). Kent argues those groups’ anti-Israel posture is functionally indistinguishable from the passions driving the protesters who disrupted the vigil.
As for why Lander drew the crowd’s ire, Kent’s answer is blunt: “Nothing new. He’s just very Jewish.” He contends that separating the labels “Zionist” and “Jew” is a messaging tactic rather than a meaningful distinction.
Kent closes his account of October 7 by noting that the mayor ended the evening dining at Ayat Hinds Hall, a Palestinian restaurant near Columbia University — a spot that, in Kent’s telling, has been canonized in anti-Israel circles by a Macklemore song of the same name. He reads the choice as a deliberate signal to the crowd that heckled him hours earlier that the mayor remains on their side.
The column leans on an extended pop-culture comparison Kent says he first made in the Washington Examiner, likening Mamdani to Scar from Disney’s “The Lion King”: a figure who enjoys the benefits of American wealth and an immigration system Kent describes as accommodating, yet remains “in league with the hyenas” who want to tear the existing order down.
Reaction from across the political spectrum
Kent’s piece quotes a social media post from former Governor Andrew Cuomo, who wrote on the October 7 anniversary that the day is meant to remember lives taken by “Hamas butchers,” hostages held for months, and the deadliest attack on Jewish people since the Holocaust — then criticized the mayor directly.
“Yet even today, @NYCMayor cannot put aside his ideological obsession with Israel long enough to simply let Jews mourn,” Cuomo wrote. He added that “at a time of rising antisemitism, words matter, and rhetoric has real-world consequences,” and urged observers to set politics aside for the day: “There are 364 other days for politics. Today, remember the victims. Condemn Hamas. Stand with the Jewish community.”
Kent concludes by placing the vigil within a broader tradition of American politicians performing public grief on dates like September 11 and October 7. In his reading, Mamdani’s expression that night was not the pain of betrayal but “the look of extreme patience” — and what the mayor is waiting for, Kent writes, “we’ll soon find out.”
The column reflects an ongoing argument among the mayor’s critics about whether his occasional appearances at Jewish communal events represent genuine outreach or political cover, and among his supporters about whether such criticism conflates legitimate opposition to Israeli policy with antisemitism. Kent’s essay comes down firmly on the first side of that debate, framing the mayor as a man whose public duties and private allegiances remain fundamentally at odds.
Source: www.dailywire.com — https://www.dailywire.com/news/zohran-mamdani-isnt-at-odds-with-the-hamasniks