Zohran Mamdani says mayors shouldn't 'police speech' when asked to condemn 'globalize the intifada' slogan

[fujiyamasan]

81. This is a good point, the translation isn't particularly relevant

People are not expected to be Arabic or Islamic scholars. All most people hear with the word intifada, is an ominous foreign sounding word. Now, that ignorance may even come across xenophobic, but that’s the political reality. It’s just a reminder that it’s probably best not to use the word in any context.

More educated people would associate it the the events in the occupied territories in the 80s and 2000, the latter ending up with multiple terrorist attacks killing Israeli civilians (and of course retaliatory attacks killing Palestinian civilians). They are not something to be romanticized.

I still don’t know if Mamdani actually used the word (I see no quote of him saying it), but he strikes me as playing coy about not ‘policing’ it. I agree, a mayor should not play thought police, but it’s easy enough to condemn the use of it, and move on. It’s the same case with a few other slogan like “from the river to the sea…”. Some may not explicitly use it as a call for genocide toward israel, but most understand that it implies no Jewish state.