Candidate Zohran Mamdani speaks during a Democratic New York City mayoral primary debate, June 4, 2025, in New York, US. Photo: Yuki Iwamura/Pool via REUTERS

When politicians speak out about Israel, antisemitism, or the Holocaust, what they omit can matter as much as what they say. In the digital arena, where nuance collapses within seconds, ambiguity often becomes ammunition.

The case of New York politician Zohran Mamdani, a progressive rising star who will likely become the mayor of New York City, illustrates this dynamic vividly. His statements about Israel, antisemitism, and the war in Gaza have sparked heated debate — not only for their content, but for the way strategic ambiguity allows them to be interpreted in starkly different ways.

Our research analyzed Mamdani’s rhetoric across multiple platforms — from television interviews to TikTok and YouTube — and traced how his words were reframed by influencers and audiences online.

The findings reveal how ambiguous political language can fuel polarization, distort Holocaust memory, and invite antisemitic readings that the speaker may never have intended.

The Power — and Peril — of Ambiguity

Ambiguity functions as a rhetorical strategy: it allows politicians to gesture in several directions at once, offering different audiences the interpretations they prefer. This flexibility provides plausible deniability, yet also creates an opening for distortion and hate.

Mamdani’s communication style is a textbook case. His remarks on Israel and antisemitism frequently hover between empathy and insinuation, critique and deflection — giving the impression of moral seriousness while avoiding clear commitments.

The effect is twofold: admirers see courage and compassion; critics see evasion and coded hostility. But the real consequences emerge online, where ambiguous statements are picked up by content creators, reframed through ideological lenses, and amplified to millions — often in ways that intensify division and resentment.

Omissions That Speak Volumes

Following Hamas’ October 7, 2023 massacre, in which terrorists murdered 1,200 Israelis and abducted more than 250, Mamdani issued a statement that conspicuously omitted any mention of Hamas or its victims.

Instead, he accused the Israeli government of preparing a “second Nakba.”

Such omissions are not neutral. In political communication, what is left unsaid shapes interpretation just as powerfully as explicit statements. By focusing solely on Israel’s alleged actions, Mamdani’s message erased the context of terrorism and Jewish suffering — effectively reframing a massacre as an act of “resistance.”

This pattern continued in later comments. Mamdani publicly repeated claims — later shown by independent investigations to be caused by a misfired Palestinian rocket — that Israel had bombed the Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza and that pro-Israel students at New York protests had used “chemical weapons.” Both claims spread rapidly online before being debunked. Yet even after corrections, the emotional narrative — Israel as aggressor, Jews as oppressors — remained intact.

When asked about these inaccuracies, Mamdani rarely corrected himself. Instead, he shifted attention to alleged efforts to silence him. In one speech, he attacked the lobbying group AIPAC as “undermining American democracy.” In the version later posted to his social media, that line was quietly edited out — an omission that further invited speculation and conspiratorial readings.

The pattern is consistent: statements are made, outrage follows, then a revised version appears — leaving both supporters and detractors to project their own meanings onto the ambiguity.

Reframing and Decontextualization

Much of Mamdani’s rhetorical power lies in reframing contentious slogans. During debates and interviews, he defended the chant “From the River to the Sea” as an expression of “universal human emancipation,” detaching it from its historic associations with the destruction of Israel. Likewise, when confronted about the slogan “Globalize the Intifada,” he called it “a call for justice,” likening it to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

In the Bulwark podcast, he cited the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s translation of “intifada” as “uprising” — implying moral equivalence between Jewish resistance during the Holocaust and Palestinian militancy today. Such analogies, presented as scholarly nuance, flatten historical distinctions and convert Holocaust memory into a tool of political comparison.

This decontextualization serves two purposes: it universalizes Jewish suffering (suggesting it belongs equally to all oppressed peoples) and downplays antisemitic violence within the Palestinian movement.

The result is a moral narrative where Jewish trauma becomes a universal metaphor, detached from Jewish history — a rhetorical move with deep emotional resonance and troubling implications.

“Right to Exist” — With Conditions

Mamdani’s statements about Israel’s right to exist are similarly ambivalent. On The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, he affirmed support for Israel “as long as it abides by international law” — a condition that effectively renders recognition provisional. In a later debate, he reiterated that Israel has “a right to exist” but declined to say “as a Jewish state,” instead describing a hypothetical state “with equal rights.”

These formulations sound reasonable, but they subtly shift the premise: from defending Israel’s right to exist as the world’s only Jewish homeland — a right enshrined after the Holocaust — to questioning the legitimacy of Jewish self-determination altogether.

Such framing enables both deniability (“I said they have a right to exist”) and accusation (“but they are violating it”).

How Digital Amplification Works

Our team analyzed hundreds of YouTube and TikTok videos discussing Mamdani’s remarks, focusing on content creators with large followings such as Hasan Piker, Kyle Kulinski, Sam Seder, Guy Christensen, and Vaush.

Across these channels, we coded the creators’ framing of Mamdani’s rhetoric and examined the first 200 comments per video.

The pattern was unmistakable: ambiguity in Mamdani’s statements invited radical amplification online. Influencers portrayed him as a victim of “smears,” “Islamophobia,” and “AIPAC propaganda.”

In turn, comment sections erupted into open antisemitic conspiracy theories.

1. Denial and Inversion

Creators like Piker dismissed accusations of antisemitism as “fake nonsense,” claiming they were “weapons” to silence pro-Palestinian voices. Commenters echoed this denial, insisting that “antisemitism is a made-up shield” and calling the Anti-Defamation League the “Apartheid Defense League.”

This rhetorical inversion — portraying those who identify antisemitism as aggressors — transforms legitimate concern into alleged oppression. It blurs the line between defending free speech and trivializing hate.

2. Competing Victimhood

Another recurring pattern was reversal of victimhood. Influencers framed criticism of Mamdani as evidence of Islamophobia, arguing that “Muslim politicians are automatically branded antisemitic.” In comment sections, this morphed into claims that Jewish concerns about antisemitism are “privileged” over Muslim experiences of discrimination.

This competitive framing pits minority groups against one another, eroding solidarity and obscuring the specific nature of antisemitism as a distinct, historically rooted form of hate.

3. Conspiracy and Servility Tropes

When Democratic leaders criticized Mamdani, content creators claimed they were “doing AIPAC’s bidding.” Commenters took this further: “The Zionists control every dimension of life,” one wrote. Others invoked classic antisemitic imagery — “Follow the $$$ … puppets of Israel” — or even violent fantasies, predicting Mamdani would be “JFK’d” if he continued defying “the lobby.”

These narratives recycle centuries-old myths of Jewish financial and political control, now reframed in the language of internet populism.

4. Normalizing Anti-Israel Rhetoric

Creators like Kulinski claimed Mamdani’s stance represented “mainstream Democratic opinion,” suggesting most Americans — even Jewish ones — share his criticisms of Israel. Commenters adopted this as fact, declaring that “the only thing Zionists fear is losing power.”

This normalization transforms hostility toward Israel into a marker of political authenticity. Within this logic, accusing someone of antisemitism becomes proof of their moral courage — a dynamic increasingly visible across progressive movements.

5. Holocaust Inversion and Dehumanization

The most alarming finding was the reversal of Holocaust imagery. Influencers compared Israel to Nazi Germany; commenters fused the terms into slurs like “Zionazi” or “Isra-heil.” Some even glorified violence, cloaking assassination fantasies in gaming metaphors: “Trump and Netanyahu in NY? Perfect 2-for-1 moment for the Mario Brothers.”

While such remarks may seem fringe, they accumulate into a broader culture of digital derision — a climate where violent and dehumanizing speech becomes normalized through humor, irony, or moral outrage.

From Ambiguity to Escalation

The progression across these layers — Mamdani’s original statements, influencers’ reinterpretations, and audience reactions — shows how strategic ambiguity can spiral into participatory hate.

1. Primary discourse: Mamdani’s words, open-ended and self-protective, avoid explicit antisemitism while enabling multiple readings.
2. Secondary discourse: Influencers reframe his critics as tools of oppression, inverting accusations and legitimizing resentment.
3. Tertiary discourse: Audiences collapse nuance entirely, producing overt antisemitic language and violent fantasies.

As meaning travels outward from the politician’s mouth to millions of screens, moral ambiguity collapses into moral abdication. This discursive spiral is not unique to Mamdani. It reflects a broader trend in digital politics, where rhetorical vagueness is weaponized by audiences seeking validation rather than understanding.

The Broader Challenge

Mamdani’s case highlights a growing dilemma for democracies: how to handle rhetoric that inflames division without crossing into illegal hate speech. Platforms and policymakers still struggle to address this “gray zone,” where statements remain technically permissible yet have corrosive downstream effects.

Democracy depends not only on freedom of speech but also on responsibility in speech. Politicians who wish to champion justice cannot outsource the meaning of their words to online mobs. Clarity is not censorship; it is accountability.

As the digital public sphere amplifies every utterance, the boundary between rhetoric and radicalization narrows. Mamdani’s example should serve as a warning: when ambiguity becomes a political habit, amplification becomes inevitable — and the cost is borne by those targeted in its echoes.

Dr. Matthias J. Becker is a researcher in discourse studies and is affiliated with New York University’s Center for the Study of Antisemitism (CSA) and the Woolf Institute in Cambridge. He leads the Decoding Antisemitism project, which analyzes how antisemitic discourse spreads in digital communication.”

Gabrielle D. Beacken is a doctoral candidate in the School of Journalism and Media at The University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on the intersection of technology, politics, and communication, with an emphasis on how emerging technologies are used to shape online discourse.

Liora Sabra is a PhD student in Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University. Her research explores antisemitism, Holocaust memory, and propaganda, focusing on definitional debates and their reflection in public discourse. She works at NYU’s Center for the Study of Antisemitism, contributing to research on prejudice and political communication.