When a pattern emerges – pay attention….
By Melanie Nathan, October 08, 2025
New York City deserves a mayor who speaks with one voice—publicly and privately—on human dignity. With Zohran Mamdani, the pattern now visible across headlines and timelines is not an isolated gaffe; it’s a through-line. On the second anniversary of the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attacks, Mamdani issued a statement that mentioned victims, yet branded “Israel’s war” a “genocidal” campaign and indicted U.S. “complicity,” deflecting the statement away from the horror of October 07. That formulation drew swift rebukes from Israeli officials and a wide range of New Yorkers, who saw incendiary asymmetry on a day of remembrance. CBS didn’t mince words, the New York Post blasted the quote, and even the mainstream press piled on to the backlash.
This wasn’t a one-off communications mishap. It sits alongside a sustained refusal to condemn the slogan “Globalize the Intifada,” a phrase many Jews experience as a call to violence. Members of Congress publicly pressed him on that refusal, calling it “indefensible.” Whatever one’s interpretation of the chant, a would-be mayor’s job is to lower the temperature, not launder phrases that others credibly experience as threatening. And now this statement!
Then there’s the Uganda problem. Photos from his post-primary trip show Mamdani warmly engaging Rebecca Kadaga, Uganda’s longtime political driver of the country’s anti-LGBTQ laws and a face of the “Kill the Gays” project. His campaign has tried to frame it as a happenstance encounter around a private wedding, but the optics aren’t the core issue; the silence is. Kadaga has been a principal champion of legislation that imposes extreme penalties, including life in prison and death for so-called “aggravated homosexuality.” Meeting her without any public condemnation of the law isn’t allyship, it looks like alignment. That’s why coverage from my human-rights reporting, to mass-market outlets (CBS, AOL/Yahoo syndications, and the New York Post), to significant social media outrage, have treated the photo as probative of character, not mere optics.
Pattern, not coincidence. Put these episodes together and you see the same arc:
- Rhetoric around Oct. 7 calibrated to polarize rather than console a scarred city.
- A studied unwillingness to clearly repudiate a slogan widely heard as menacing by Jewish New Yorkers.
- A smiling public moment with a top architect of lethal anti-LGBT policy—without a parallel, unequivocal stand for LGBT safety and rights in Uganda.
For LGBT New Yorkers, that last point matters in lived ways: Uganda’s law has fueled extreme violence vigilantism, arrests, and expulsions, leading to force displacement, and mass flight including to New York City. The politician who will fight for queer safety here should have no trouble saying so there. For Jewish New Yorkers, leadership means refusing frames and slogans that many experience as green lights for harassment or worse. On both fronts, Mamdani’s choices communicate a consistent message: moral clarity yields to political calculus.
Surely Character is policy: A mayor confronts real-world pain, surging hate crimes, frayed neighborhoods, overlapping diasporas carrying trauma. The job is to protect, de-escalate, and draw bright lines around human dignity. When a candidate repeatedly chooses words and associations that inflame or abandon those lines, and declines straightforward condemnations asked by the very communities he seeks to represent, New Yorkers should believe the pattern. It’s not about a single statement or a single photo. It’s about a theory of politics that smiles in one place, hedges in another, and asks a plural city to live with the contradiction.
The salt in the wound, the choice timing, insensitive at best, divisive at worst….. and revealing of what is to come.
If you support both LGBT safety and Jewish safety, if you want a mayor who can hold complexity without courting harm, the evidence to date points in one direction: this isn’t a communications problem; it’s a convictions problem. New York cannot afford a leader who treats our communities as constituencies to be managed rather than people to be protected.
In the interests of New York City and beyond, I am calling on the Democrats who have endorsed Mamdani to retract those endorsements.
Melanie Nathan,
Country Conditions Expert Witness for
LGBTQI+ Asylum Seekers from African Countries
Human Rights Advocate
Former VP, San Franciso Pride Board
Former Marin County Human rights Commissioner
Co-Founder: private FB Group, Jewish Women for Kamala Harris
Jewish Women ORI (Our rights and Ideas)
Commissionermnathan@gmail.com
More Articles:
The Photo That Betrays the Platform: Zohran Mamdani, Rebecca Kadaga, Align Amidst Deadly Homophobia
The Photo That Betrays the Platform: Zohran Mamdani, Rebecca Kadaga, Align Amidst Deadly Homophobia
Zohran Mamdani’s alleged Ugandan Extravaganza Adds to Political and Ethical Questions
The Socialist Mirage: Cuomo’s Clarity vs. Mamdani’s Dangerous Evasions
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