Mayor Johnson adopts "blame Israel" as a cornerstone of his reelection bid
Facing at least 10 challengers for reelection, a desperate Mayor Brandon Johnson is reaching for Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) talking points in a bid to rally his progressive base. While repeating the usual rhetoric about shifting power from corporations to the working class, the centerpiece of his strategy has become blaming "powerful moneyed interests" — who seek to dislodge him from office — for his public criticism of Israel and the war in Gaza.
Johnson needs to rally progressives by making this election about Israel, Gaza, and Iran, rather than the mountain of home-grown crisis points for which he has offered only simplistic sloganeering, not solutions. Chicago continues to lead the nation in total homicides, youth murders, and mass shootings. Residential property taxes are escalating with no relief in sight. Meanwhile, the dismantling of school choice by Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) allies is denying poor families — overwhelmingly Black and Latino — viable alternatives to failing neighborhood schools.
The mayor does not want to make this election about his lack of investment in Chicago’s poorest communities, particularly as his budgets have prioritized housing and services for non-citizen migrants over local neighborhood needs. For example: The city has allocated over $300 million in municipal funds to support arriving migrants, while creating fewer than 500 new affordable housing units and reopening just three of the mental health clinics closed under Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
It would be easy to dismiss this as mere political expediency. Yet, it represents the latest example of a troubling pattern of behavior and rhetoric that borders on anti-Semitism, the byproduct of which is the further demonization of the Jewish community. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) platform has explicitly adopted anti-Zionism as a core tenet, frequently minimizing or deflecting from violence committed against Jewish civilians.
Critics point to a sequence of policy decisions, public appearances, and administrative appointments made by Mayor Johnson that have alienated Chicago's Jewish community and tolerated rhetoric hostile to Jews. While the mayor’s representatives maintain that he condemns all forms of hate, his record fails to reflect those statements:
● The Ceasefire Resolution: Mayor Johnson cast the deciding tie-breaking vote to pass a symbolic City Council resolution calling for an unconditional ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war. Major civic organizations, including the Jewish United Fund (JUF), strongly denounced the move, noting that the meeting fostered hostile anti-Jewish rhetoric and resulted in a one-sided resolution.
● The school board appointment: Johnson appointed the Reverend Mitchell Ikenna Johnson as president of the Chicago Board of Education. Within days, media reports exposed social media posts in which the appointee made statements criticizing Jewish colleagues, making inflammatory remarks about Israel, and promoting conspiracy theories. Following widespread bipartisan backlash and calls to resign from state and city leaders, Rev. Johnson stepped down.
● Keffiyeh appearance: Johnson drew criticism from civil rights organizations, including the Combat Anti-Semitism Movement, after choosing to wear a Palestinian keffiyeh during a public Arab Heritage Month event amid heightened geopolitical tensions — a move critics viewed as a deliberate political signal.
● The mayor’s courtship of Hassan Piker: Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s joint appearance and livestream with far-left online streamer Hasan Piker prominent left wing political commentator and Twitch streamer pairs the mayor with a controversial figure accused of extreme anti-Semitism but also anti-Americanism. He has gone so far as to assert America “deserved 9/11.”
● Dismissal of targeted anti-Semitism: Local Jewish leaders and Alderman Debra Silverstein (50), the City Council’s lone Jewish member, have repeatedly criticized the administration’s response to anti-Jewish hate crimes. Rather than establishing a dedicated task force to address the sharp rise in anti-Semitic incidents, municipal responses have repeatedly blurred anti-Jewish bigotry under generic categories of "hate in all forms."
The most explicit demonstration of this approach involved the Chicago Commission on Human Relations. Following a 58 percent spike in anti-Jewish hate crimes in Chicago, the commission drafted a report outlining recommendations to combat anti-Semitism. The mayor’s office sent back edits that explicitly erased targeted references to anti-Jewish hate, broadening the language to cover all demographic groups. Human Relations Commissioner Nancy Andrade subsequently resigned in protest of what members described as an effort to "whitewash" findings on soaring antisemitism.
Concurrently, the mayor and his allies have remained silent on broader international atrocities: the Iranian regime’s killing of tens of thousands of political dissidents; the Syrian Assad regime’s slaughter of hundreds of thousands of civilians; and the murder of tens of thousands of Christians alongside the destruction of thousands of churches by fundamentalist militants across Africa — a striking silence from a mayor whose own father is a Pentecostal pastor.
Anti-Semitism is unique in human history for its persistence, adaptability, and ability to reinvent itself across millennia. In antiquity, its roots were theological; during the Middle Ages, economic restrictions fueled false narratives of "Jewish greed." For centuries, political actors have deployed it to distract populations, consolidate power, and scapegoat minorities — a trajectory that culminated in the Holocaust. Today, antisemitism morphs into ideological opposition to the existence of the Jewish state.
It is a tragedy that Mayor Johnson has succumbed to the temptation of leveraging anti-Israel hostility to protect his political interests. The anti-Zionism embraced by his core political supporters is matched only by their underlying hostility toward American institutions. As a Black leader and the son of a pastor, his continued silence regarding atrocities committed against African Christians — while weaponizing the Middle East conflict for local political gain — is an equal failure of leadership.
