Mamdani toady Brad Lander learns that ‘anti-Zionists’ hate him for being Jewish

Brad Lander was always going to learn the hard way.

The ex-NYC comptroller defeated incumbent Rep. Dan Goldman in a high-profile Democratic primary earlier this year that sent shockwaves through their party.

Both are progressive Jews and outspoken critics of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.

“The current crisis in Gaza shocks the conscience. The international community — especially Israel and the United States — must immediately put an end to this humanitarian catastrophe,” declared Goldman last August.

But that wasn’t nearly enough for the new, virulently “anti-Zionist” Democratic base in the Big Apple.

Lander endorsed Zohran Mamdani during the 2025 mayoral primary, while Goldman opted to withhold his support through even the general election.

Lander characterized the war in Gaza as a “genocide” and campaigned on ending all military aid to Israel; Goldman did not.

In Mamdani’s New York, the latter never stood a chance — Lander prevailed by more than 30 points.

But at what cost?

At a rally outside Madison Square Garden on Saturday, the soon-to-be congressman was the subject of unrelenting antisemitic abuse.

His fellow protesters, ostensibly there to register their disdain for a Hindu nationalist event taking place at the Garden, grew irate at the mere sight of a Jew.

“You look like a wicked balls—k! You look like a scrotum, you filthy balls—k!” screamed one unhinged harasser.

“F–k you, balls—k Zionist!”

Another peach — this one seemingly in the throes of a mental break — beat on a drum and as he got up in Lander’s face.

“Get the f–k out! Get the f–k out! Get the f–k out!”

Still another hateful man-child gave the game away, as if it hadn’t been already, by asserting, “There’s no such thing as a good Zionist!”

“The only good Zionist is a dead Zionist!” he added in a charming postscript.

Did it not cross this toady’s mind, as he endured his ritual punishment for being born a Jew, that maybe he had aligned himself not with the righteous social justice cause du jour, but with modern society’s irredeemable dregs?

Of course it did; in fact, Lander grappled with the blurred line between anti-Zionism (opposition to the Jewish right to self-determination) and Jew hatred just last month during a sit-down with The New York Times Magazine.

“I feel queasy talking about it, given the antisemitic tropes at play here about Jews and money and power,” he acknowledged during a discussion about the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, “But I have to.”

Have to?

Had he been coerced into endorsing Mamdani, whose first statement about the Oct. 7 pogrom was a condemnation of the victims?

Was he forced at gunpoint to make anti-Israel animus the centerpiece of his congressional campaign?

Or was it just politically convenient to lock arms with the hate-mongering Third Worldists openly agitating for a second Holocaust?

Anti-Israel American Jewish leaders like Lander and California’s Scott Wiener, who faced down a similarly grotesque mob in the Golden State earlier this summer, understood the basic premise of their bargain when they struck it.

They would pretend not to notice that “anti-Zionism” is a thinly disguised excuse for spit-flying antisemitism, and in exchange they would be allowed, for a time, to decorate an office in Washington.

If they waved the Palestinian flag vigorously, denounced Netanyahu forcefully and looked the other way dutifully enough, they thought they might be spared.

Lander and Wiener, for two, welcomed their noxious new overlords.

Only now do they understand the true terms of their deal with the devil.

They aren’t powerbrokers, harbingers of anything to come or the synthesizers of a fresh liberal consensus about the American-Israeli relationship.

They’re wannabe ladder-climbers too stupid to realize that they’re the rungs being stepped on by the far more cunning and sinister forces they count as their allies.

They thought they were choosing between irrelevance and dishonor, chose dishonor, rendered themselves irrelevant in the process and truly earned the contempt of everyone — from the Jews they betrayed to the radicals they appeased — in the process.