Welcome to a Citations Needed News Brief. I am Nima Shirazi.

I'm Madam Johnson.

You can follow Citations Needed on Twitter and Blue Sky at CitationsPod, Facebook, Citations

Needed, and become a supporter of the show through Patreon.com slash Citations Needed podcast. All your support through Patreon is so incredibly

appreciated as we are 100% listener funded. We do these news briefs in between our regularly

scheduled full-length episodes of citations needed. And today, Adam, we wanted to talk even more

about the dizzying level of Islamophobic, racist, bad faith, absurd attacks

on Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, since he has won the primary election

to become the Democratic candidate for the mayor of New York City,

that general election is, of course, in November.

And so now we are being subject to constant round-the-clock attacks on him, not only from the right,

which would be predictable, kind of gross, racist, Islamophobic attacks

on the first Muslim candidate for mayor of New York City, for someone who is outspoken

about his belief that colonialism and imperialism and apartheid and genocide are bad. And so we have

seen these attacks, obviously, bad faith and gross from the

right. But what we really want to talk about today, Adam, is where we're also seeing these

attacks kind of smuggled in from a more centrist slash liberal media set that actually does more

damage in a way than the frontal assault, the more obvious attacks from the right?

Yeah, so the word Islamophobia, which I typically prefer the term anti-Muslim racism, because that's kind of what it is.

But I think it's appropriate here because this largely hinges on a spooky Arabic word that's associated with Palestinian uprisings, violent or nonviolent,

of previous years in the 80s and the 2000s, which is the word intifada, which we will get into is kind of this supposedly inherently anti-Semitic word.

The boogeyman of Arabic language existing.

...