By: Fern Sidman

In a sharp escalation of political and moral confrontation within New York’s already heated mayoral race, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) accused Democratic Socialist candidate and Queens Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani of being a “jihadist” and a “raging antisemite,” citing his refusal — until recently — to explicitly denounce Hamas following the terror group’s October 7, 2023, massacre in Israel.

The comments, which drew widespread attention across political lines, mark one of the most searing rebukes to date from a senior Republican lawmaker against a major city candidate. Stefanik, the chair of the House Republican Conference, has increasingly positioned herself as one of Washington’s most outspoken defenders of Jewish Americans and of Israel since the Hamas atrocities, which left over 1,200 civilians dead, including New Yorkers murdered or kidnapped in the cross-border attack.

As VIN News reported on Friday, Stefanik’s language was unambiguous: she accused Mamdani of supporting Hamas terrorists “as recently as yesterday,” calling his views “a disgrace to New York and to America’s fight against antisemitism.”

“I call Zohran Mamdani a jihadist because he is,” Stefanik said in a statement carried by VIN News and several major outlets. “Zohran Mamdani is a raging antisemite. Mamdani is the definition of a jihadist as he supports Hamas terrorists — which he did as recently as yesterday, when he refused to call for Hamas terrorists to put down their arms — the same Hamas terrorist group that slaughtered civilians, including New Yorkers, on October 7, 2023.”

Stefanik’s remarks came just hours after Mamdani, pressed in a televised interview, hesitated to say whether Hamas should disarm and relinquish power in Gaza — a statement that critics immediately seized upon as evidence of sympathy for the Iran-backed terror organization.

In an interview earlier this week, Mamdani was asked directly whether Hamas, the group responsible for the October 7 massacre and ongoing rocket attacks against Israel, should surrender its weapons and step down from power in Gaza. His response — hedged, academic, and evasive — immediately sparked fury.

“I don’t really have opinions about the future of Hamas and Israel beyond the question of justice and safety, and the fact that anything has to abide by international law,” Mamdani replied.

To Stefanik and other critics, the answer was tantamount to moral abdication — especially from a candidate seeking to lead America’s largest Jewish city.

As the VIN News report noted, the Assemblyman from Astoria, a self-described Democratic Socialist of Ugandan and Indian descent, has long been associated with anti-Israel activism. He has openly called Israel an “apartheid state,” supported the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, and participated in rallies that accused the Jewish state of “genocide” — rhetoric that many Jewish leaders say veers into antisemitism.

It was not until Thursday night’s first general election debate, hosted at 30 Rockefeller Center, that Mamdani sought to clarify his remarks — under intense questioning from both moderators and opponents.

“Of course I believe that they should lay down their arms,” Mamdani said, a significant shift from his earlier comments.

Yet for many, the clarification came too late — and too reluctantly — to undo the damage.

As the VIN News report detailed, Mamdani’s waffling on Hamas dominated the early part of the two-hour debate, overshadowing questions about housing, policing, and taxes. His two chief rivals, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, running as an independent, and Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa, both attacked him for what they described as “extremist sympathies” and “moral cowardice.”

Cuomo accused Mamdani of cloaking radical views in progressive rhetoric. “The assemblyman’s entire platform is based on a myth,” Cuomo said, adding that Mamdani’s refusal to condemn Hamas outright proved he “doesn’t believe Israel has a right to exist.”

Sliwa, the founder of the Guardian Angels, was even blunter. “What’s happening here is that we have a candidate for mayor who refuses to denounce terrorism,” Sliwa told VIN News after the debate. “That’s not progressivism. That’s fanaticism. And it’s dangerous.”

The controversy did not remain confined to partisan lines. Hours after Stefanik’s broadside, Democratic Rep. Laura Gillen (D-N.Y.) joined in condemning Mamdani’s remarks, calling him “Pro-Hamas Zohran” and insisting he was “unfit to hold any office in the United States.”

“There’s no moral universe in which a public official hesitates to say that Hamas — a group that burns families alive — should lay down its weapons,” Gillen said, according to the report at VIN News. “This is not about foreign policy. This is about decency.”

Jewish community organizations across the tristate area echoed that sentiment. The Simon Wiesenthal Center’s New York office called Mamdani’s comments “unacceptable from any elected official, let alone one who aspires to lead the most Jewish city outside Israel.”

The Jewish Community Relations Council of New York (JCRC-NY) likewise demanded that Mamdani “publicly and unequivocally condemn Hamas,” noting that “ambiguity on terrorism is complicity.”

For Elise Stefanik, the attack on Mamdani fits into a broader campaign she has waged against antisemitic rhetoric and pro-Hamas sentiment in American politics and academia since October 7.

Her grilling of Ivy League presidents last December over their failure to condemn antisemitic chants on campus went viral, cementing her national profile as the Republican Party’s leading voice on the issue. VIN News has frequently highlighted Stefanik’s efforts to pressure universities, nonprofits, and government agencies to address what she calls a “moral epidemic of antisemitism disguised as activism.”

In her latest statement, Stefanik argued that Mamdani’s candidacy represented the “mainstreaming of radicalism” within Democratic politics in New York.

“When a self-declared socialist who refuses to condemn terrorists can become the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City, we have crossed a red line,” Stefanik told VIN News. “The Democratic Party has to decide: are they the party of Israel and the Jewish people, or are they the party of Hamas apologists?”

This is not the first time Mamdani’s remarks on Israel have drawn national scrutiny. As VIN News previously reported, the assemblyman faced condemnation last year for co-sponsoring a resolution to abolish the IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) definition of antisemitism, a move widely viewed by Jewish leaders as an attempt to erode legal and educational safeguards against hate speech.

At the time, Mamdani argued that the IHRA definition was being “weaponized” to suppress criticism of Israel. Critics said the effort effectively legitimized antisemitic narratives.

In 2023, Mamdani also participated in a rally where demonstrators chanted “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” a slogan that calls for the eradication of Israel.

His refusal to condemn those chants — until pressed by moderators during the current mayoral debate — has reinforced perceptions that his ideological sympathies lie closer to Hamas’s political doctrine than to the bipartisan American consensus on Israel’s right to exist.

The political fallout from the episode could be devastating for Mamdani’s campaign, particularly among New York City’s nearly 1.5 million Jewish residents, who represent one of the most politically active and influential voting blocs in the city.

According to the report at VIN News, early polling indicates that Jewish voters — including many traditional Democrats — are now shifting their support toward Andrew Cuomo, seeing him as the only candidate capable of defeating Mamdani in a three-way race.

Community leaders have organized emergency town halls and ad campaigns warning that Mamdani’s rise reflects an “existential threat to Jewish life in New York.”

“This is not just about politics,” one Brooklyn rabbi told VIN News. “It’s about the moral soul of the city.”

In the aftermath of Stefanik’s comments, the clash between the congresswoman and Mamdani has come to symbolize a deeper divide in American political culture — between those demanding moral clarity in the face of terrorism and those who frame the Israeli-Palestinian conflict primarily through the lens of social justice theory.

For Stefanik, the question is simple: if a candidate cannot bring himself to condemn the murder of civilians, he has no place in public office.

For Mamdani’s defenders, his reluctance reflects a commitment to “nuance” and “international law” — though critics say that intellectual posture crumbles under the weight of Hamas’s brutality.

As the VIN News report observed, the controversy reveals not only a widening rift within New York’s Democratic Party but also a broader struggle over the boundaries of acceptable discourse in an age when antisemitism increasingly hides behind the rhetoric of activism.

In the words of one parent of an Israeli hostage still missing in Gaza, who spoke to VIN News on Friday:  “If Zohran Mamdani cannot call Hamas evil, then he does not understand evil. And that disqualifies him — morally and politically — from leading any city, let alone ours.”

In a city built on diversity but now fractured by fear and ideology, the debate over Mamdani’s remarks has become more than an election issue. It is, as VIN News put it, “a referendum on whether New York still recognizes the difference between justice — and jihad.”