New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani (D.) has quietly filled his administration with a network of hard-left, anti-Israel activists whose records range from cheering the destruction of hostage posters to advocating police abolition and branding Israel a genocidal apartheid state.
According to the Washington Free Beacon, one of Mamdanis earliest and most influential appointments was Alvaro Lopez, the former electoral coordinator for the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, whom the mayor installed as his Brooklyn borough director shortly after taking office. Lopez, who served on Mamdanis inaugural committee, had already drawn scrutiny for a since-deleted post on X in which he hailed individuals tearing down flyers of Israeli hostages as heroes, a remark that signaled the ideological direction of the new administration.
Lopezs online rhetoric was not an isolated outburst but part of a broader ideological project he has openly articulated. In an October 2024 memo, he laid out what he described as a socialist strategy for Palestinian solidarity, a blueprint aimed at converting what he called increasing radicalization due to ongoing genocide into a mass movement by arguing that U.S. military aid to Israel is directly responsible for declining living standards.
Working with our socialist electeds will be key in advancing the Palestinian cause and giving our movement voices in the halls where power resides, the memo declares, explicitly tying far-left electoral power to anti-Israel agitation. A socialist strategy for Palestinian solidarity also lowers the bar of entry into our movement and takes seriously our work with broader coalitions, which will be crucial in convincing millions that arming Israel has a direct correlation to our declining living standards. It also creates a political program that emphasizes a diversity of tactics to pursue an arms embargo, divestment, and an anti-Zionist future.
Lopez is not alone in bringing radical anti-Israel activism into City Hall. Also on Mamdanis staff is Drashti Brahmbhatt, who serves as an adviser to the mayor for 100 Day Planning and Implementation and has been a member of the Democratic Socialists of America since at least 2021, with a documented history of vilifying Israel dating back to her college years.
While a student at Brown University, Brahmbhatt emerged as a leading voice in campus campaigns demanding that the university divest from companies doing business in the Jewish state, aligning herself with the broader Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. In a since-deleted X post from May 2021, she declared, Palestine is one of the greatest moral issues of our time, and asserted that Israel is an apartheid state, language that mirrors the talking points of the global anti-Israel left.
Her admiration for Mamdani is explicitly rooted in his own anti-Israel posture. On the same thread, she wrote that she supported Mamdani as a state assemblyman for centering Palestine in his organizing and as an elected official, underscoring that hostility to Israel is not a side issue but a core political litmus test for this circle of activists.
Brahmbhatt has also targeted fellow Democrats whom she deems insufficiently hostile to Israel, attacking them from the left for even modest gestures of support for the Jewish state or for regional peace initiatives. In 2022, when then-congressman Jamaal Bowman (D., N.Y.) withdrew his sponsorship of a resolution backing the Abraham Accordsa landmark set of normalization agreements between Israel and several Arab statesBrahmbhatt dismissed the reversal as the bare minimum, insisting that symbolic gestures were not enough.
She instead demanded that Bowman vote against military assistance, protect the right to boycott, sponsor legislation that advances Palestinian human rights & refuse campaign $ from groups that normalize apartheid, and derided the resolution itself as a ploy to entrench apartheid. Her rhetoric places her firmly in the camp that opposes not only Israels security but also bipartisan diplomatic efforts that have reduced conflict and expanded economic cooperation in the Middle East.
Her extremism extends well beyond foreign policy and into domestic public safety. In another since-deleted 2021 post on X, Brahmbhatt wrote that she believes anyone who does not support abolishing the police is ok with murder, a statement that encapsulates the defund-the-police ideology that has coincided with rising crime and disorder in major American cities.
Brahmbhatt has also trafficked in racially charged commentary, posting about how terrible white women are while recounting an incident in which a woman allegedly glared at her for taking a meeting on a train. Such rhetoric, now commonplace in certain progressive circles, sits uneasily with the citys stated commitments to inclusion and equal treatment under the law.
The revelation that lower-level staffers in Mamdanis orbit hold such extreme views, particularly on Israel, comes amid a broader pattern of anti-Israel radicalism seeping into the upper reaches of his administration. On Tuesday, a newly formed Global Oppression Working Group within the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene convened for the first time, using official city resources to accuse Israel of genocide and to promote a boycott of companies that do business in Israel, while conspicuously omitting any mention of Hamass Oct. 7, 2023, massacre of Israeli civilians.
The following day, Mamdani replaced the executive director of the Mayors Office to Combat Antisemitism with a left-wing activist who has publicly attacked Israel, a move that alarmed Jewish leaders already concerned about rising antisemitic incidents. Rabbi Moshe Davis, the ousted former head of the office, told the Free Beacon that he believed his dismissal came because he is a proud Jew who supports Israel, a stark allegation given the offices mandate to protect Jewish New Yorkers.
Another recent hire, Manvir Singh, now serves as a senior policy analyst in Mamdanis administration and has similarly attempted to scrub his digital footprint. Like many of Mamdanis appointees, Singh deleted his X account after past posts surfaced, including one endorsing efforts to defund the police, a policy that has proven deeply unpopular with residents who prioritize law and order.
A review of his old X activity by the Free Beacon uncovered additional extremist content, including a post accusing Israel of committing terrorism through its operations against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Singh also retweeted a post from leftist streamer Hasan Pikerwho infamously said the United States deserved 9/11calling Israel a genocidal apartheid state, as well as another post supporting Siraj Wahhaj, an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing case and an ally of Mamdani.
The pattern extends even into relatively obscure corners of city bureaucracy. Anti-Israel radicals now populate low-level areas of government, including the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, where, according to an insider, Achmat Akkad works as a Community Engagement Training Specialist despite a record of open support for Hamas-aligned agitation.
Akkad was arrested in May 2024 for participating in pro-Hamas demonstrations in New York, underscoring the degree to which street-level extremism and official city employment have begun to overlap. In a June 2025 post on X, he wrote that Israel is a modern-day Nazi Germany, and in a May 2025 post he declared that Zionism is fascism, rhetoric that trivializes the Holocaust while demonizing Jewish self-determination.
His response to Hamass Oct. 7 atrocities was equally revealing. The day after the massacre, Akkad took to the streets of New York City to celebrate the slaughter and told the Daily Mail that he had no sympathy for the Israeli civilians Hamas killed, a statement that would once have been disqualifying for public service but now appears tolerated within Mamdanis orbit.
Despite the mounting evidence of extremist ideology among his appointees, Mamdanis office has offered no public explanation or defense of these hiring decisions. A representative for Mamdani declined to comment, and none of the staffers named responded to requests for comment, leaving New Yorkers to weigh for themselves what it means when a major American citys leadership embraces activists who denounce Israel, seek to dismantle policing, and align with figures hostile to the United States and its allies.
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