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"The police department says..."

It always did; the West was just slow on the uptake.

That's what fascists do. Take terms that are commonly understood to mean something serious and use it against every person/group they don't like until it loses all meaning. Then when the fascists are inevitably found to be acting exactly like that term originally described, they can discredit whoever is accusing them because "everyone uses that word for everything, you just don't like us" despite being the cause of that problem in the first place.

I in hang out with people who Israel calls anti-semitic

NYC has the largest jewish commiunity outside israel, many of which anti-zionists, and it shows how people of different faiths can co-live peacefully, so you can see why isreal wants to influence our politics

New York City has 8.4m people in it; 15% (1.3m) of them are Jewish, making them a key cultural and political group. New York City also has an outsized (if dropping) cultural and political influence on the US.

There are 7.3m Jewish people in Israel, and NYC is the largest population of Jewish people outside Israel, meaning that NYC actions and opinions may have more of an influence within Israel than opinions from elsewhere.

NYC is also seen as a huge, vibrant, peaceful, multicultural city; the longtime headquartering of the United Nations there, the largest financial capital in the world, etc - all give it an emotional and cultural impact.

Here's the thing: when Americans look at Mamdani's election, we see a rejection of the current US political parties, a pushback against the oligarchs, late-stage capitalism, and the corruption and fascism of the right. For most of the people (at least on the US center and left) Mamdani's religion doesn't factor into much (if anything).

For a certain segment of Jewish Israelis who heavily lean into that identity, the election of a Muslim mayor is a threat, especially one as driven and charismatic as Mamdani. And there's a political class in Israel who is willing to promote and exploit that fear, in order to gain their own goals, whether that's increased political power, more money, or simply avoiding going to prison.

New York is just outside of greater Israel.

/s

Israel is an important and well-intergrated piece of the US empire so they get a say in how the empire is run. Working class new yorkers don't matter in the same way.

To translate into the lies of empire: israel's importance to foreign policy goals and deep cultural ties make it an interested commentator on domestic politics.

The thing about this that is really fucked up is that this watering down of the term is giving cover to actual anti-semites who really do hate jewish people no matter who and where they are.

"Only two groups benefit from the conflation of zionism and Judaism: zionists, to legitimize zionism; and anti-semites, to vilify Judaism."

You'll never convince zionists of that though

In fact, being pro Israel is antisemitic

These days it can just be being pro-humanity and anti-genocide.

A reminder that when Robert Maxwell died, the directors of every Israeli intelligence agency attended his funeral. He had been suspected of being a triple agent by the British foreign office, with funding from the USSR and a longstanding link with the Mossad, for which he is suspected of selling backdoored software to Los Alamos and involvement in the kidnapping of a nuclear whistleblower in London who then spent 18 years in captivity in Israel.

So Epstein certainly had connections with dabblers in targeting US government institutions and human traffickers.