Sigh In A Storm

Fantaisie Physiologique, František Kupka's illustration for his book Tvoření v umění výtvarném (Creation in the Plastic Arts), 1923

The word genocide stays in your daily vocabulary but you didn't apply it to el-Fasher. As the aid community has begged for help for years, years,and now today has sent an open letter pleading with the United Nations for international intervention to prevent a repeat of el-Fasher in el-Obeid which is under threat of imminent RSF siege, you probably don't even know what country I'm talking about.

You're just another social media poisoned brat getting cheap validation by pissing the "right people".

Dolphins doing cartwheels with an aquarium guest.

God:  Where’s the Sheepkeeper?

Cain:

Nothing to do with him being Mayor of one of the largest Jewish communities of the world.

Nothing to do with him agreeing with anti-Jew protestors

Nothing to do with antisemitism being so high

Nothing to do with being scared for our loved ones

Nothing to do with not trusting someone who uses not just dogwhistles but full on rhetoric from the 30s.

And nevermind all the commentary and protest that people like Platner get. It isn't happening. Every Jewish person embraced Platner and doesn't speak against his ilk.

Its because of his religion that most of the posts never mention, if the posters even know about it in the first place.

This person is a racist. They are engaging in the bigotry of low expectations for a rich, worldly hipster because he's sufficiently fuckable. And they want to throw the racism back at the Jews Mamdani and friends are targeting. No. They're a bigot.

The hipster son of a Columbia prof daddy and filmmaker mommy just can't help himself you see: "Mamdani repeats antisemetic stuff and overlooks it because he doesn't know any better. He internalized fucked up shit. Why dont you call out the REAL problems with white democrat christians?" Fuck ooooooooooooooooooffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff. His father is Muslim, his mom is hindu, not that it really matters but hey I guess these people want to obscure the 'mixed' origins of their fandom blorbo too.

His hatred of Jews is a hipster-academic hatred, possibly overlaying or compensating for a lack of sincere muslim religious commitment. He's more of a Hasan Piker or a Medhi Hasan. A smirking ideologue with more money than morals. To him, everything is south africa and EVERYTHING is Israel (and the Jews' fault) but 'socialistically/academically' of course. He does know better. His parents know better, his wife knows better, his surrogates and allies know better. They do not act better To cite/find a 'Muslim politician who hates Jews' you'd want someone Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Abdul El-Sayed. Or in the press/activism, someone like Medhi Hasan, Cenk Uygr, Linda Sarsour, etc etc. Like another New York Nepobaby he's pictured with, is using his charisma, money, and social media machine to target vulnerable minorities at the behest of a populist movement.

He was raised by a Qatari-funded filmmaker mom and a dad who is a professor at columbia and waxes poetic about suicide bombers. This is hipster third worldism funneled into Jew hatred, not a sincere commitment to "Shakira Law" or whatever. Again. this is western hipsterism. He decided very early on to make his entire identity about Israel specifically, in all of his politics, despite having zero skin in the game (Father is Indian Muslim, mother is Punjabi Hindu) and as Jews are inextricably obsessed over in their circles they passed it onto their kid.

He's a child of INCREDIBLE privilege and was raised specifically by wealthy academic parents with an obsession with 'Postcolonialism' Which means an obsession with Jews and Israel. Which is borne out by his 'activism'

This is the shit a rich hipster douchebag does. Him being half Muslim doesn't enter into Jewish objections to what he says and does. His actions, allies, and words do. But of course we can't expect better from people who insist that we pay attention to coded speech, dogwhistles and calls for murder for everyone else except when they're hurled at Jews. Then it's the Jews' fault for objecting because

Zohran Kwame Mamdani was born on October 18, 1991, in Kampala, Uganda, the only child of postcolonialist academic Mahmood Mamdani and filmmaker Mira Nair.[12][13] He was given his middle name, Kwame, by his father in honor of Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana.[14][15] Both his parents are of Indian descent.[16] His father is a Gujarati Muslim who was born in Mumbai and raised in Uganda.[17] His mother is a Punjabi Hindu[18][19][20] who was born in Rourkela and raised in Bhubaneswar.[21] His paternal grandparents were born in present-day Tanzania, and his father's family was part of the Indian diaspora in Southeast Africa.[17] His maternal grandfather, Amrit Lal Nair, was a former Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer,[22] and his maternal grandmother, Praveen Nair, was a social worker and founder of the Salaam Baalak Trust in India.[23] Mamdani lived in Kampala until the age of five, when his family moved to Cape Town, South Africa,[12] after his father was appointed head of African studies at the University of Cape Town.[24] He attended St. George's Grammar School in Mowbray from 1996 to 1998,[15][25] during the early post-apartheid years. He later said that the experience of living in Cape Town "taught me what inequality looks like up close ... [and] that justice has to be more than an idea; it has to be material".[26] The family moved to the United States and settled in New York City when Mamdani was seven,[27] and he was raised in Manhattan's Morningside Heights neighborhood.[28] He has called his upbringing "privileged", saying, "I never had to want for something, and yet I knew that was not in any way the reality for most New Yorkers."[29] As a child, he was often present on his mother's film sets, where he was loved by members of the film crews, who variously called him "Z", "Zoru", "Fadoose", and "Nonstop Mamdani".[24] He's the flipside of a bunch of the JVP flavor antizionists, and has a lot in common with Greta Thunberg in being someone who was really shaped by parents who did an absolute number on him. He hates Jews, and the US/West for more academic, 'western' reasons even if he's hiding his power level better than the Chevaliers he endorses and boosts or the Susan Abulhawas his wife artistically collaborates with.

Oh and

Like let's talk about this!

Khan has some views that I disagree with, although none that I've found that are genuinely terrible. He views what (has/is) happen(ed/ing) in Gaza as a genocide, and he thinks "from the river to the sea" isn't antisemitic. Notably, he did so in September of 2025, after the UN report saying it was a genocide (a very dubious report, of course), and referenced that

He signed onto a pledge against antisemitism in 2016. He backed arrests for "globalize the intifada" chants -- which IMO are a bit repressive on free speech, but are very much not "well I can't really condemn this". In his mayoral run, Khan consistently discussed things with the Jewish papers (in contrast to my current representative of the Jewish neighborhood of Pittsburgh, who usually is represented in the local Jewish paper with a "declined to comment" or similar -- fuck you Summer Lee). The first event as mayor he attended was a Yom HaShoah ceremony. He's talked about antisemitism recently with a Jewish newspaper, making some very fair points ("whenever there's tension in the Middle East, antisemitism goes up"). He's regularly engaged with London's Jews.

Two days after October 7, he said he was "proud the colours of the Israeli flag lit up City Hall".

And that's a lot better than Mamdani! So Jews don't call out Khan nearly as much, if at all, despite NYC and London being roughly the same in terms of population (albeit not Jewish population; NYC has ~2,100,000 million Jews, making it ~11 percent Jewish; the UK has ~230,000, making it ~2.5 percent Jewish.)

And maybe Islamophobia factors into it for some people? But we've also been talking about Graham Platner, who's a) white and b) running in Maine, which doesn't have that large of a Jewish population. There's been talk about Maureen Galindo. I don't think she's Muslim -- if she is, it hasn't come up.

Of course, it is still incorrect, so how about I fix the error!

"There's a gimmick blog right behind me…"

Should be:

All day, every day, it's, "AIPAC money" this and "Israel lobby" that. Yet Qatar bought a plane for a sitting US president, poured billions into elite US institutions (notice that it ain't community colleges or HBCUs), and no one thought, "Maybe we should see if they're involved with anything else and what they get out of their investment."