Yesterday, Zohran Mamdani released a strategy to combat rising antisemitism in New York City. As the Mayor noted in an accompanying video, despite making up only 12% of New York City’s population, Jews make up 57% of hate-crime victims.

The report is riddled with problems. Despite an alarming rise in anti-Jewish violence, the administration grants only $1 million to security services while giving over $7 million to PATH, New York City’s anti-bias and restorative justice program. No new meaningful security initiatives are proposed, and the NYPD section is a single page with a few already-in-place bullet points tucked away at the end. That will do little to help the synagogues that already spend hundreds of thousands of dollars per institution just to make sure people can pray safely.

What’s most surprising, though, is how this report might alienate some of Mamdani’s most fervent supporters. Despite barely mentioning the October 7 attacks and completely ignoring Zionism, the report did not escape criticism from committed anti-Zionists.

Controversial online influencer Guy Christensen — who was expelled from Ohio State University after defending the murder of two Israeli embassy officials in Washington DC — once enthusiastically endorsed Mamdani based on the Mayor’s Palestine stance. However, after yesterday’s release, Christensen wrote that “Zohran has exposed his Zionism in full the past week.” He strung together an incoherent list of wrongs that proved Mamdani’s guilt: not arresting Benjamin Netanyahu, meeting with Alex Soros, and “launch[ing] ‘the first municipal effort to combat antisemitism’ that relies on 50% Zionist pro-Israel sources”.

The Canadian journalist Aaron Maté said that “launching a ‘Strategy to Combat Antisemitism’ in a time of the Gaza genocide is akin to a ‘Strategy to Combat Anti-Whiteness’ at the height of South African apartheid”. He added: “Israel and its apologists do infinitely more to both fabricate and encourage anti-Semitism.” Another viral post described Mamdani’s initiative as a “con”.

For these activists, if Jews in New York are attacked over a war occurring 6,000 miles away, it is either fabricated or their own fault. To place responsibility on the assailants is against their inverted moral framework of the oppressors and the oppressed.

It’s doubtful that any of them would be so permissive of New Yorkers attacking Muslims after 9/11. And yet they hold Jews collectively responsible for attacks against them, even those who don’t support Netanyahu or the way in which the Gaza war has been conducted. It doesn’t matter that Alex Soros is a prominent progressive figure — he is Jewish and therefore must be barred. That logic is why progressive politicians such as Scott Wiener and Brad Lander will never be accepted by the decolonial mob, regardless of how much they kowtow to anti-Israel protesters.

Blaming all this on the Jews, of course, rehashes some of the worst antisemitic tropes throughout history. But worse than that, it is part of a larger trend on the Left that dismisses moral objectivity and celebrates what should be universally condemned. This is the same logic that turned killer Luigi Mangione into a folk hero. As comedian Bill Burr remarked after the fatal shooting of Brian Thompson: “I love that fucking CEOs are fucking afraid right now.”

When the Left struggles to acknowledge that an entire group of people should not be attacked on the streets of their own city, it points to something deeper than antisemitism: a troubling erosion of basic moral norms.