How Antizionism and Ideological Ignorance Put the Free World at Risk

By Natasha H. Pein

The recent inauguration of Mamdani, an openly communist and Islamist-aligned candidate, as mayor of New York City is more than a political event. It is a cultural symptom that exposes a profound educational and historical amnesia in a society that has forgotten the brutal realities of ideologies now returning under new names and softer branding.

My mother, a refugee from Soviet communism in Dagestan who also understands Islamist fundamentalism firsthand, still cannot comprehend how Mamdani could win in America, let alone in the most capitalist city in the world, New York City. Each time she sees the news, she says in Russian that the people who voted for Mamdani are “mental.” Her words may sound harsh, but they reflect a truth history has repeatedly confirmed. Whenever a society flirts with totalitarian ideas in the name of justice or equality, it ends in oppression, fear, and decay.

The Red–Green Alliance: An Old Ideology in New Clothes

Mamdani represents what scholars have called the Red Green alliance, a convergence of Marxist and Islamist ideologies. Communism provides the language of economic justice, while Islamism supplies the moral and religious veneer. Together, they create an illusion of liberation that appeals to the disillusioned and the historically uneducated.

This hybrid ideology cloaks authoritarian goals behind slogans such as equity, decolonization, and resistance. Its danger lies in its ability to disguise control as compassion. Censorship is marketed as inclusivity, redistribution as justice, and ideological conformity as diversity.

The pattern is familiar to anyone who has lived under Marxist rule. When truth becomes subjective and morality becomes political, tyranny inevitably follows.

Woke Ideology

Mamdani did not come to power incidentally. He was supported by the loudest factions of woke ideology, by Islamist networks, and by token Jews who provide moral permission for the movement’s framing.

Large segments of the progressive left have become detached from reality by submitting themselves to Marxist ideology while refusing to examine its historical record. Woke ideology has functioned as the useful idiots of the Red Green alliance. Many do not fully comprehend the danger they are enabling, or the danger they themselves face.

Islamists would never have been able to penetrate Western institutions at this scale without a cultural climate already primed for self erasure. For Islamists, a woke West is not incidental. It is a prerequisite. If Western societies retained strong historical literacy and moral clarity, Islamist penetration would encounter far stronger resistance. This helps explain why Islamic regimes and donors have invested so heavily in the academic and cultural pipelines that shape Western moral imagination.

Islamic countries have become major funders of Western universities and colleges. As documented in Arab Funding of American Universities: Donors, Recipients and Impact Report (May 2023) by Mitchell G. Bard, Ph.D., regimes such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar have played a significant role in funding institutions that increasingly produce the very moral narratives now weaponized against Jews and against the West.

As Islamic antizionism evolved in the 1980s, while Iran’s Axis of Resistance emerged as a new ideological hub, the rise of Islamist networks such as Hezbollah and Hamas, followed by the global spread of the colonizer libel through NGOs, universities, and media, was not accidental. It was strategic. It created a delivery mechanism for Islamic antizionism.

In the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Primakov Doctrine enabled the survival and mutation of Soviet antizionism into Islamic antizionism. Leadership shifted from the Soviets to Islamic Iran, alongside the rise of Iranian proxies such as Hezbollah and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. At the same time, Saudi networks spread religious antizionism through Wahhabi mosques and university systems, fuelling Arab student activism and NGO influence.

In the 2000s, a new antizionist leadership structure emerged through the Iran Qatar alignment. Qatar amplified the narrative through Al Jazeera and expanded its influence by funding Western universities and institutions.

Since then, particularly in the 2010s and the 2020s as I described in my article Antizionism Is a Stage Four Cancer, Islamic and Arab investment in progressive discourse and DEI has correlated with public opinion shifts that increasingly treat antizionism as acceptable, even admirable.

As Dr. Naya Lekht warns, the most dangerous development today is not only violence against Jews, but the growing acceptance, especially among young and influential elites, of the idea that Israel itself is fundamentally illegitimate. This marks a “never again” moment that now ominously predicts the “again.”

This shift suggests that what we are facing is not only stage four, but in some places trending toward stage five. Mamdani’s rise is likely to accelerate this trajectory. New York City may soon experience one of the fastest cultural and ideological radicalizations in the modern Western world.

The “Golden Calf” Jews

The slow self erosion of Western civilization did not begin recently. It has been developing since the Cold War through the embedding of new ideological language and the recycling of old libels and conspiracy theories in postcolonial form. Sustained demonization of a people inevitably leads to exclusion and violence. Once normalized, even extermination can become acceptable because ideology saturates society so completely that existential danger is no longer recognized as danger. It is reframed as justice.

The attacks unfolding across the Western world are not random. They are the predictable outcome of more than fifty years of Marxist ideological conditioning that casts Jews, and those who defend democratic values, as moral villains and prepares societies to accept their destruction. Throughout history, the repeated circulation of libels and conspiracy theories has always led to violence. A critical mechanism in spreading these narratives has been the participation of token Jews and the useful idiots of the dominant ideology, today found across both the woke left and the woke far right.

I use the term “Golden Calf Jews” deliberately. Their identity becomes detached from Judaism because they worship the golden calf of the era, whether status, money, ideological belonging, or social acceptance, rather than Jewish values and communal responsibility.

For Golden Calf Jews, acceptance by society takes precedence over Jewish peoplehood. They are willing to compromise Jewish values and Jewish solidarity if it earns approval from dominant cultural forces. They often view themselves as morally enlightened and portray the broader Jewish community as rigid or outdated precisely because Jews refuse to surrender their core identity.

Golden Calf Jews have existed since the biblical era. In every period, similar figures attempted assimilation by legitimizing the prevailing form of Jew hatred, as seen among Hellenistic Jews, until that same hatred eventually turned against them.

These dynamics were visible again in New York. Many Jews who supported Mamdani appear to believe he will accept them, or that his leadership will somehow be good for them. But believing radicals will accept Jews once Jews abandon their identity is no different from believing Stalin or Hitler would have accepted Jews if they were ideologically compliant enough.

History proves otherwise. During the Holocaust, Jews were murdered regardless of whether they were progressive or religious. In the Soviet Union, Jews were purged and sent to gulags regardless of their loyalty to communism. Trotsky helped lead the Russian Revolution, yet his ideological commitment did not save him. Stalin dispatched agents across the world to eliminate him.

It does not matter how much Jews surrender to satisfy the ideology of the era. Such concessions may delay persecution, but they do not prevent it.

The Soviet Lesson: Equality Without Freedom Is Slavery

I remember the Soviet years vividly. Endless queues for bread, eggs, even toilet paper. Shelves were bare. The air itself felt censored. Every song, film, newspaper, and classroom echoed the same party slogans. Dissent was not merely punished; it was erased.

This was communism in practice. A society where the promise of equality destroyed freedom, and the absence of freedom destroyed the human spirit.

Socialism and communism collapse for the same reason. They eliminate incentive, creativity, and individual dignity. They promise paradise but deliver poverty and despair. When hard work is punished and dependency is rewarded, the human drive to excel withers.

Mamdani has not hidden his intentions. He has openly stated that he intends to transform New York toward socialism, and likely toward something far closer to communism in practice. As a Soviet refugee, it is deeply unsettling to watch Western societies fail to recognize what communism looks like when it arrives. History has already shown us how this story ends.

One of the most disturbing realities is that the erosion of critical thinking is not accidental. DEI based ideological conditioning has too often replaced education with moral choreography. When critical thinking disappears, history is rewritten. A new generation loses the ability to distinguish moral performance from reality.

This is how totalitarianism advances, particularly under the fusion of woke ideology and Islamist influence. Even some conservative circles have been affected. As Melanie Phillips has observed, conservatism itself has at times lost its bearings, inadvertently assisting the left in a broader project of cultural self destruction.

Boiling the Frog: How Ideological Capture Works

Totalitarian systems rarely announce themselves openly. They advance gradually, normalizing control one seemingly progressive step at a time. This is the danger New York now faces.

Mamdani is unlikely to impose radical change overnight. Instead, transformation will occur through incremental policies promoted under banners such as free education, climate justice, and equitable housing. Each proposal will appear noble in isolation, but together they will steadily erode civic independence and economic vitality.

As this process unfolds, the city’s wealth creators will leave. Innovation will decline, mediocrity will spread, and history suggests that the vacuum created by economic and cultural decay will be filled not by reformers, but by those who seek power rather than freedom.

This pattern is not new. Hitler did not strip Jews of their rights in a single act. The process unfolded in stages through demonization, exclusion, and systematic removal from public life. Once Jews were isolated from society, the next phase became possible.

This historical progression explains why the Red Green project must be understood as a threat not only to Jews, but to Western civilization itself. It fuses economic grievance, moral absolutism, and ideological conformity into a system capable of justifying exclusion and repression while presenting itself as humanitarian.

Antizionism Is Not a “Jewish Problem.” It Is a Civilizational Problem.

Communist engineered antizionism, and its modern Islamic mutation, is not only a Jewish problem. It is a civilizational problem.

Antizionism erodes democratic values, suppresses free speech, destabilizes human rights frameworks, and threatens the free world. As Dr. Naya Lekht observes, we are living through a civilizational crisis. I agree. We are watching societies surrender freedom and speech with astonishing speed, often without resistance.

How do people give up liberty so willingly? It appears as if a psychological takeover has occurred, where moral reasoning has been replaced by ideological reflex. This is why I describe antizionism as a cancer. It infiltrates institutions, rewires moral language, and makes resistance itself feel immoral.

On Mamdani’s first day in office, he acted immediately by revoking the IHRA definition of antisemitism in New York City. This was not a minor administrative decision. It was a signal. It indicated which moral framework would govern the city, which communities would be protected, and which would be delegitimized. If New York is among the most influential cities in the world culturally and financially, its ideological capture has consequences far beyond municipal politics.

As Dr. Naya Lekht argues, Mamdani’s hostility toward Zionists is inseparable from a broader anti American worldview. In declaring a new era in which rugged individualism will be replaced by the warmth of collectivism, he echoes a familiar historical pattern. Collectivist regimes do not deliver warmth. They deliver coercion.

Lekht further explains that antizionism and anti Americanism are sustained by the same ideological framework, one that demonizes the West for the supposed sins of colonialism and oppression. Antizionism was deliberately engineered by the Soviet Union after the Second World War as a tool to malign the United States and destabilize democratic societies from within by recoding Israel, and by extension its allies, as racist and imperialist.

Mamdani’s rise to power should therefore not be read as a rupture, but as an alarming continuation of a sub-current in America that has rapidly become a dominant force.

Mamdani is not only a threat to the Jewish people. He is a threat to New Yorkers and to the American public more broadly. A leader who openly rejects the foundational values of the country he governs represents a national security concern. If New Yorkers are unable to recognize this, it suggests that society is moving toward what I describe as stage five cancer, a deeply delusional phase. This pattern aligns with the dynamics analyzed in Delusion and Mass Delusion by Joost Meerloo.

Mamdani represents a modern version of authoritarianism that arrives through democratic processes, openly declaring its intentions while relying on institutional complacency. The selective blindness of major media institutions, which minimize or ignore extremist signals while amplifying others, reveals how deeply ideological capture has already taken root. The bias itself is evidence of institutional decay.

The West is failing to confront the Red Green alliance not because the threat is weak, but because colonial guilt has been weaponized into paralysis.

Why Education Matters

The tragedy is not merely political. It is pedagogical. A society that fails to teach history is condemned to repeat it.

The failure of Western education to convey the true cost of communism, the mechanics of Islamist radicalism, and the warning signs of ideological extremism has created fertile ground for manipulation. When citizens do not understand what communism, Stalinism, Maoism, or the Iranian Revolution did to human beings, they can be persuaded that socialism or Islamic justice will be different this time. It never is.

Education must do more than teach dates and slogans. It must teach cause and consequence. Only historical literacy can inoculate societies against ideological infection.

Schools and academic institutions must restore history and critical thinking as core competencies. Works such as Delusion and Mass Delusion by Joost Meerloo help explain how mass psychology is shaped and how entire societies can be indoctrinated. This kind of material should be taught in high schools, colleges, and universities so students learn to recognize ideological capture before it becomes irreversible.

This is also why institutional behavior matters. When extremists signal what they are, and major institutions minimize or ignore it, that is not neutrality. It is evidence of conditioning. If Mamdani performed a Nazi salute on his first day and media institutions chose not to highlight it while moving quickly to amplify accusations against others, the asymmetry itself becomes part of the story. It shows how deeply selective attention and ideological bias have taken root across institutions that are supposed to inform the public.

Teaching societies the real consequences of ideologies is essential to preventing historical catastrophes from repeating themselves under new language and new branding.

Memory as Resistance

For those of us who fled regimes that fused faith and totalitarianism, Mamdani’s victory is chilling. It is not simply a political win. It is the return of a worldview we believed we had left behind.

Canada has already experienced rapid radicalization since the Trudeau Liberals came to power. New York City may now face a similar process, perhaps even faster, because New York is not merely a city. It is a global exporter of culture, ideas, and norms.

New York, the city that never sleeps, is now sleepwalking into the same illusions that once imprisoned half the world. Mamdani has begun a process that risks dismantling freedom under the language of compassion and moral progress.

There is a profound lesson in the weekly Torah portion that speaks directly to this moment. Before his death, Jacob chose to bless the next generation first, underscoring that the future is shaped by how values are transmitted to children and grandchildren. In blessing Ephraim and Manasseh, he placed his right hand on the younger son, Ephraim, whose name signifies fruitfulness and prosperity, while Manasseh represents the ability to move forward without being consumed by suffering. Raised in Egypt, a morally hollow and spiritually corrupt society, they nevertheless remained faithful to the values passed down through Joseph from Jacob. Their strength lay not in isolation from corruption, but in their ability to live with integrity within it. Jewish history has followed this same pattern of suffering and renewal, remembering how we fell while refusing to lose identity or moral clarity.

The only antidote is truth, taught, remembered, and courageously spoken.

Just as Jacob blessed a generation capable of remembering without being trapped by suffering and prospering without abandoning truth, the Free World now faces the same choice. It can educate the next generation to swim against the tide of ideological decay, or it can allow historical amnesia to carry it downstream.

History’s verdict is unambiguous. Communism and Islamism alike promise utopia and deliver servitude. Forgetting that lesson is not merely ignorance. It becomes complicity.