Emotions are riding high in the wake of Zohran Mamdani’s win in the Democratic primary for mayor of New York. The three-term state assemblyman’s shock upset against former New York governor Andrew Cuomo this past Tuesday has inspired no small amount of celebration and euphoria — but also an unusual amount of alarm, fear, and outrage.

On Thursday, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand had what was for an elected official an unusually animated response to a caller’s question on New York City public radio’s The Brian Lehrer Show about the Muslim American Mamdani’s win and the supposed “threats facing the Jewish community” that have come as a result. Asked several times by the show’s host to correct the record and point out that Mamdani has never advocated for violence nor supported terrorist organizations, Gillibrand declined.

New Yorkers were “alarmed” by his recent win, she said, pointing to alleged “past positions,” of Mamdani’s, “particularly references to global jihad” — references that are wholly nonexistent. “This is a very serious issue, because people that glorify the slaughter of Jews create fear in our communities,” she said, suggesting Mamdani was one of these people.

When Lehrer pointed out that Mamdani had never used the phrase “globalize the intifada” but had simply said he wouldn’t condemn it because the word “intifada” is a broad one that encompasses nonviolent resistance, Gillibrand got heated.

“It doesn’t matter what word you have in your brain,” she said. “It is not how the word is received.” Pointing to the fear that some members of New York’s Jewish community have expressed since Israel began its now two-year-long war in Gaza, Gillibrand stressed that someone trying to lead a diverse city like New York “should denounce it. And that’s it. Period.”

“If you want to be a leader, you have to recognize how these things are felt and received,” she said, her voice cracking. “Because as a leader, you have to protect, you have to protect everyone. Period.”

Gillibrand later walked back some of the statements, but only partially. A spokesperson told Rolling Stone she “misspoke” about Mamdani endorsing “global jihad” but did not walk back the rest of her comments.

What is curious about Gillibrand’s point here is how little it matches up with her own rhetoric on the subject. New York City is indeed a diverse place, home for not just a Jewish population of nearly one million, the largest of any city outside Israel, but more than 700,000 Muslims who make up roughly 9 percent of its population, as well as 160,000 Arabs and the country’s largest Palestinian population.

Yet Gillibrand’s public statements about the war in Gaza — which has so far killed more than 56,000 Palestinians, a third of them children, numbers that are considered a severe undercount of a real total that is likely in the hundreds of thousands — have rarely if ever taken into account the way this segment of New Yorkers has “felt and received” the war, its impact on their families, or her fellow elected officials’ racist and often violent rhetoric aimed against them. If you only read Gillibrand’s paltry comments about the Gaza war, you would hardly have an idea of the scale of Palestinian suffering — and that it was being deliberately inflicted by Israel.

Gillibrand’s statement on the brief January 2025 cease-fire in Gaza is a case in point. Except for one offhand reference to “the wellbeing of both Gazans and Israelis” in its second paragraph, Palestinians were completely absent from it. Instead, it was all about Israel: with the war’s pause, “families in Israel can now begin the painful process of healing and rebuilding what Hamas so brutally took from them on October 7th, 2023,” and it “affords Israel and our regional allies a chance at rebuilding Gaza in a way that promotes Israeli security.”

At that point, the official, undercounted Gaza death toll was roughly thirty-nine times the size of the number of Israelis killed on October 7.

This is the only statement Gillibrand has ever made about a cease-fire. The senator had resisted calls to back one, even as Israel’s policy of starvation and indiscriminate bombing endangered and killed the family members of her own constituents.

This is a pattern in Gillibrand’s statements on the war, which rarely mention Palestinians or the suffering they’ve been put through. When they do, her statements paint it as akin to a natural disaster, a crisis that is happening simply because of the “ongoing conflict” and “the fighting” — even as the leader of her own party admitted Israel was “indiscriminate[ly] bombing,” and Israeli officials boasted about cutting off food, electricity, and water to the territory. When she has assigned blame to someone in particular, it’s invariably been Hamas.

Instead, Gillibrand’s statements are almost exclusively focused on the suffering of Israelis: the sexual violence committed by Hamas on October 7 and the supposed “silence” around it, and the plight of Israeli hostages held by Hamas, sometimes American dual citizens, whose release Gillibrand has demanded, celebrated, and pledged she “will not rest” until she sees, and whose deaths she has mourned and eulogized with emotion (“I’m devastated and horrified”) and with sometimes rich detail.

By February 2024, Gillibrand had boasted of having given eleven speeches on the Senate floor highlighting the plight of Israeli hostages. If she has ever given a similar speech about the Palestinians in Gaza, she has not packaged it in a press release.

Jacobin cannot find a single statement of denunciation that Gillibrand has issued about the more than half a dozen US citizens that Israel has killed over the past twenty months, a number of them Palestinian Americans who are victims of the war — a war that Gillibrand says she proudly supports and boasted repeatedly about voting to facilitate with more weapons. Since then, Gillibrand was notoriously slow to weigh in on the kidnapping of her own constituent, the Palestinian-Syrian green card holder Mahmoud Khalil, by Donald Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Neither can Jacobin find any statement of denunciation Gillibrand has made of any of the long list of Israeli war crimes that have made headlines, crimes that include not just sexual violence toward Palestinian captives but sniper bullets discovered in Palestinian children’s heads and bodies, the burning alive of people in tents, the deliberate destruction of hospitals, and, most recently, now-daily reports of Israeli soldiers massacring starving Palestinians queuing up for aid.

Also missing is any statement of denunciation of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu — though on the occasion of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar’s death, she put out a statement that blamed him for the Palestinian deaths the Israeli prime minister had caused.

In fact, beyond denouncing actual acts of violence, Jacobin can’t find a single statement from Gillibrand even denouncing the widespread violent rhetoric by her fellow members of Congress toward Palestinians and Muslims, who have said things like “I think we should kill them all” and called babies “not innocent Palestinian civilians.” This should be easy, since most of them have been Republicans.

Jacobin has reached out to Sen. Gillibrand’s office to request examples of any denunciations that have been missed. We have so far received none.

“This double standard is old hat,” says James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute. “We are expected to cringe at what is presented to us as antisemitic content, while anti-Arab or anti-Muslim behavior or words are shrugged off and dismissed.”

“Senator Gillibrand should apologize for her inaccurate comments, particularly her derogatory remark about the word jihad, a sacred term for Muslims that actually means struggle,” a spokesperson for the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ New York branch told Jacobin.

Gillibrand’s lack of attention to the feelings of whole swaths of her constituents could prove politically perilous. New York is home to the largest Muslim population out of any state in the country. Meanwhile, Andrew Cuomo just badly lost a primary contest to lead a heavily Jewish populated city after spending the entire race bear-hugging Israel, with his pro-Palestine opponent, Mamdani, winning both heavily Muslim precincts as well as some Jewish areas. Israel is increasingly unpopular among Democratic voters, while a big part of the story of Kamala Harris’s 2024 loss was a revolt by Muslim and Arab Americans and others fed up with the party’s unequivocal support for Israel’s war.

Popular rage at what has been a US-backed extermination campaign against a majority–Muslim, Arab population has always been there, but it is now increasingly being felt in electoral politics.