Zohran Mamdani. Photo: Ron Adar / SOPA Images via Reuters Connect

Pro-Palestinian advocates confronted New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani this week over his recent affirmation of Israel’s right to exist, repudiating the left-wing politician over his “hypocritical” stance on the Jewish state.

While speaking on Tuesday at the launch party for Acacia Magazine, a new pro-Palestinian publication, an irate attendee donning a keffiyeh — a traditional Arab headdress that has been repurposed after the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel to symbolize support for the Palestinian cause— screamed at Mamdani for voicing support for Israel’s existence while simultaneously presenting himself as an advocate for the Palestinian cause.

“What do you say about politicians who constantly affirm Israel’s right to exist? Because people like me are constantly attacked by politicians for standing up for Palestine, and you are constantly defending the right for Israel to exist,” the man screamed at Mamdani, according to video of the incident posted to social media.

“My family is in Palestine right now, constantly under attack, and I’m hearing you say, ‘Free Palestine’ but also ‘Israel has a right to exist,’” the man continued.

The enraged attendee urged Mamdani not to “be hypocritical” by positioning himself as a pro-Palestinian advocate while continuing to support Israel’s existence. 

“[Israel] does not have the right to exist! It does not have the right to exist! It’s not your land, to say it has the right to exist!” the man continued as audience members cheered around him. 

Mamdani grinned and nodded along as the anonymous individual continued his diatribe against Israel’s existence. 

Politicians like @ZohranKMamdani who seek our votes must be held accountable. Recently, he’s made the media rounds, repeatedly reaffirming “Israel’s right to exist” — a phrase long used to justify the ongoing genocide, ethnic cleansing, and dehumanization of Palestinians. No… pic.twitter.com/l2f52yVtsj

— Anas Saleh انس صالح (@AnasSaleh_NYC) May 21, 2025

Anas Saleh, a pro-Palestinian activist, posted the video on X/Twitter with a caption questioning Mamdani’s commitment to the pro-Palestinian cause.

“No candidate, progressive or otherwise, gets a pass when they echo Zionist talking points that attempt [to] erase our suffering and deny our right to return, resist, and live in freedom,” Saleh wrote. 

The confrontation came after Mamdani last Friday said, “I do support [Israel’s] right to exist as a state,” in response to a question.

NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, this morning, following story that he declined to sign onto Assembly resolutions recognizing Israel’s independence and condemning the Holocaust:

“I do support [Israel’s] right to exist as a state.” pic.twitter.com/OAmARZpyVX

— Jacob N. Kornbluh (@jacobkornbluh) May 16, 2025

Mamdani, a representative within the New York State Assembly and candidate for New York City mayor, has made anti-Israel activism a cornerstone of his political career. A self-described democratic socialist, he has both advanced state legislation seeking to punish Israel and has labeled the Jewish state’s defensive military operations in Gaza a “genocide.”

In 2021, Mamdani issued public support for the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement —an initiative which seeks to economically and diplomatically isolate Israel in the first step to its eventual destruction. In May 2023, Mamdani advanced the “Not on our dime!: Ending New York Funding of Israeli Settler Violence Act,” legislation which would ban charities from using tax-deductible donations to aid organizations that work in the West Bank. 

On Oct. 8, 2023, 24 hours following the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust, Mamdani published a statement condemning Israel Prime Minister Benjamin “Netanyahu’s declaration of war” and suggesting that Israel would use the terror attacks to justify committing a second “nakba.”

Many Palestinians and anti-Israel activists use the term “nakba,” or “catastrophe,” to refer to the establishment of the modern state of Israel in 1948.

The post NYC Mayoral Candidate Zohran Mamdani Confronted by Pro-Palestinian Activists for Saying Israel Has ‘Right to Exist’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

A Torah scroll. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

A major part of the double Torah portion we read this week (which ends the Book of Vayikra) is what is called the Tochecha, which translates as “the rebuke.”

Here are some selections from Chapter 26.

If you follow My laws and faithfully observe My commandments, I will grant your rains in their season, so that the earth shall yield its produce …you shall eat your fill of bread … I will grant peace in the land … You shall give chase to your enemies … I will be ever present in your midst. I will be your God, and you shall be My people.

But if you disobey Me and remain hostile to Me, I will send misery and diseases … and discipline you sevenfold for your sins. You shall eat the flesh of your sons and your daughters … I will lay your cities in ruin and make your sanctuaries desolate, I will make the land desolate, so that your enemies will settle in it … And I will scatter you among the nations, and Your land shall become a desolation and your cities a ruin.

In some synagogues, the custom is to read it very quickly in a soft tone — as if to tiptoe through the painful stuff, as quickly as possible.

On the one hand, it seems so out of touch with the way we think today. Life rarely works out so simply — and we are often not rewarded or penalized in the name of true justice. And yet, it is surprising how accurate it has been in describing the rise and the fall of the Jewish people.

One way of looking at this is to say that thanks to archaeology and the large amount of information that we have accumulated over the years about the culture, language, and literature of Mesopotamia, we can see how this sort of blessing and curse — promise and threat — was universal.

Whenever monarchs came to power, they would open their reign with a demand for loyalty. In exchange, they would promise protection, wealth, health, happiness, safe borders, and all good things that the monarch was committed to providing. At the same time, they would warn the people that if they betrayed the monarch, they would suffer from invasion, death, slavery, sickness, and oppression. Sometimes it worked, and sometimes it didn’t. But it was a way of keeping the people in line.

This part of the Torah is another example of how external culture and attitudes provide a background to the Torah. Everybody at that time would have expected promises from rulers, while as we now know, politicians often do not keep them.

But there’s another way of looking at this — perhaps more psychologically. Perhaps we should read these Biblical formal declarations as words of promise and rebuke intertwined. Designed to give us a feeling that there is some power we can feel that cares about us — who wants to help us, but also wants to prevent us from going off track and making the wrong decisions. And it’s this push and pull that we needed in ancient times — and today.

The author is a writer and rabbi, currently based in New York. 

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Joe Rogan, host of The Joe Rogan Experience podcast on Spotify. Photo: Screenshot.

If you listened to the March 5 episode of the top-rated podcast on Spotify in the US, you would hear, in the first 30 minutes, that:

• Richard Nixon was framed;
• Time travel is possible;
• Charles Manson was a CIA asset;
• The 1960s anti-war movement was a CIA operation; and
• Sirhan Sirhan (the convicted assassin of Senator Robert Kennedy) had been subjected to mind control.

Then, after just a few more minutes, you would hear the guest, Ian Carroll, tell the host, Joe Rogan, “I sound crazy to someone that doesn’t do their own research.”

You don’t say.

If anyone were brave or gullible enough to keep listening after Carroll’s assertion that he “sounds crazy” only to “someone that doesn’t do their own research” (or if you were forced to keep listening because it was your job), you would hear Carroll wonder if the Egyptian pyramids were built by telepathic aliens and hear him, along with Rogan, claim that we don’t really know what happened at 7 World Trade Center.

The destruction of 7 World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, was litigated in multiple cases, with multiple parties fighting over hundreds of millions of dollars. One litigation lasted over 10 years, and an army of lawyers was involved. I briefly worked on one of the cases myself. And I can promise you, we know what happened at 7 World Trade Center.

I suppose I can’t prove that the pyramids weren’t built by telepathic aliens. But should anyone really have to?

This is the sort of exasperation that prompted Douglas Murray, on the April 10 episode of Rogan’s show, to exclaim in frustration, “you don’t need to consume endless versions of a revisionist history!”

It takes about five minutes to look up and then spout off a conspiracy theory, but exponentially longer to debunk one. The sheer number of bizarre claims made on this program, thrown out rapidly one after another for over two and a half hours, could send an actual, serious researcher on a months’ long, or longer, full-time quest to conclusively debunk each one.

No normal person has that kind of time — and that’s part of the conceit here. Carroll, a former Uber Eats driver turned “independent researcher,” wants his audience to feel that if they believe such claims, they are the ones who are in-the-know, in possession of a secret knowledge that powerful people are trying to keep hidden.

And unfortunately someone who believes, or is even willing to entertain, Carroll’s ridiculous claims might also believe him when he claims that Jeffrey Epstein was working for the Mossad to gather intelligence on American officials, or that a group of Jewish philanthropists investing in Jewish causes was conducting espionage (“it is unclear if we have proof that they were conducting espionage,” Carroll says. Do your own research!). Or that “Israel has so much control over our government right now. And I’m not saying that all Jews are in on something. Clearly, Internet. Thank you.”

Such a listener might also have believed comic Dave Smith when he claimed on a solo appearance on Rogan’s show, prior to his “debate” with Douglas Murray, that the US is bombing Yemen “on behalf of Israel,” or when he said of Palestinians in the West Bank, “under Israeli control they have zero rights, zero rights whatsoever,” or when he said that Israel has “gotten us into like seven wars.” (April 3, 2025.)

Those same listeners might also have believed Darryl Cooper’s Holocaust revisionism on March 13, 2025. But these are just the same old tired conspiracy theories, now recycled into a new media environment that has no guardrails. (In fact, most antisemitism — at its root — is just a conspiracy theory.)

It’s good to know, of course, that Carroll doesn’t believe in David Icke’s theories about reptiles (calling them a “grift”), or that the earth is flat (purposeful misinformation meant to “obfuscate the narrative,” he says), but is that really our new baseline? One would hope not.

Rogan ended the episode, after play-acting for the supposed censors, “I can’t believe what you said … I am so upset that I even platformed you, you’re outrageous!” by more seriously telling Carroll that he was “very, very reasonable” and performing a “valuable service.”

Nor was Ian Carroll the first obvious kook that Rogan had on his show – he has previously hosted Terrence Howard, Roger Waters, and Abby Martin.

And just this week, Rogan was once again suggesting that aliens may have built the pyramids in Egypt. (May 14, 2025.) Notably, Rogan pushed back much harder on the former Egyptian Minister of Antiquities, Dr. Zahi Hawass, who opposes such bonkers theories, than he ever pushed back on Carroll. But it took Carroll just a couple of minutes to promote the claim that the pyramids could have been built by telepathic aliens, and it took an actual archeologist with decades of experience two hours to rebut it.

No one knows better than CAMERA that the credentialed experts don’t always get things right. But that’s not an excuse to promote baseless conspiracy theories pedaled by someone with no credibility whatsoever.

Rogan is entertaining, and many people enjoy the super-long format that has at other times allowed him to get much more in-depth into issues than television news, even magazine formats like 20/20 or 60 Minutes, can allow. But if a listener can learn one thing from Carroll, Cooper, and Smith’s interviews on this podcast, it’s that Joe Rogan, who boasts, “I was arguing with people about the moon landing on the radio before [expletive] there was any podcasts,” doesn’t vet his guests for any type of intellectual rigor whatsoever.

It’s also clear that Rogan often lacks the desire or knowledge to push back on some of his guests’ crazier claims. And he’s happy to use his show to promote wild conspiracy theories — including, but certainly not limited to, those about Jews and Israel. After all, it creates controversy and makes for a great podcast — and lots of profit for Rogan.

Karen Bekker is the Assistant Director in the Media Response Team at CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis.

The post Why Joe Rogan’s Assault on Facts Is So Dangerous first appeared on Algemeiner.com.