Zohran Mamdani didn’t win the Democratic primary and has not become the leader in the polls by selling New Yorkers on an economic plan. He won by selling a moral costume. The pitch sounds familiar: free groceries, cheap rent, tax the rich, cradle-to-grave security. But the product underneath isn’t democratic socialism in the Western tradition. It’s a coalition machine that makes anti-Zionism the keystone, launders illiberal ideology through the language of “justice,” and treats Jews as acceptable collateral.

Call it what it is: a Trojan Horse. Socialism is the paint job; anti-Zionism (and the larger illiberal project it enables) is the payload.

Mamdani insists he opposes all theocracies. Yet the only state whose existence he relentlessly delegitimizes is the world’s lone Jewish one. He finds his courage not for Tehran, Riyadh, Doha, or Kabul – but for Jerusalem. That asymmetry is the tell.

It is a bait and switch. His movement talks rent freezes and food insecurity, then slips in litmus tests on Israel that have nothing to do with sanitation routes, school safety, or pension math. It organizes around “oppression” as a single organizing myth. It collapses unrelated causes into a hierarchy where the Jewish state is cast as a totemic oppressor, thereby justifying any rhetoric against it, and any humiliation of Jews who won’t self-flagellate on command.

The trick isn’t new. Decades of campus training taught activists to rebrand hard illiberal ideas as civil rights work —an intersectional shield, of sorts. They learned to speak fluently about equity while excusing, ignoring, or minimizing reactionary agendas everywhere else. That’s how you get “Queers for Palestine” placards in a city where actual queer........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)