The Mamdani Disaster
New York — a city with more Jews than Jerusalem — has elected a mayor whose antisemitism and antipathy towards Israel is blatant.
Although I am no longer a New Yorker, and have no plans to ever be one again, I could not help but notice the amazing rise of mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani.
Mamdani, as most are aware by now, is a charismatic, young, millionaire socialist who was born of Indian parents in Uganda and migrated to the U.S. at age seven. He became a New York assemblyman who has now won the Democratic primary in a campaign that excited progressives nationally — including endorsers Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — and defeated the well-funded favorite, former governor Andrew Cuomo. Although he still has to face Mayor Eric Adams in the general election, polls indicate that a Mamdani mayoralty is a done deal.
Mamdani’s victory has made many New Yorkers nervous due to his progressive wishlist. New York has had far-left mayors before — former mayor Bill de Blasio was “an admirer of Nicaragua’s ruling Sandinista party,” for example — but Mamdani’s economic and social agenda makes even mayors like de Blasio seem like Calvin Coolidge.
He has called for taxpayers to put out 65 million dollars for “trans medical treatment,” including sex-change operations for children:
“Mamdani, 33, also vowed to go after private medical institutions that continue to deny trans youth care, stating he would work with state Attorney General Letitia James and local district attorneys in the five boroughs to ‘investigate and hold public hearings on hospitals that deny trans youth their rightful healthcare and hold them accountable to the law.’”
On his campaign website, he says he will “ensure our immigrant New Yorkers are protected by strengthening our sanctuary city apparatus: getting ICE out of all City facilities and ending any cooperation, increasing legal support, and protecting all personal data.” This goal of strengthening NY’s sanctuary city apparatus comes despite how much illegal immigration is hurting New York as well as the Black and legal immigration communities (as I have previously mentioned here and here).
Mamdani has a number of economic proposals that, if passed, seem likely to expedite the flight of the rich and businesses out of New York City. This list of proposals include a $30 per hour minimum wage (is McDonald’s going to pay their full-time cashiers over $60,000 a year?), raising taxes on the rich, and opening nonprofit, city-owned grocery stores.
Already, real estate stocks have fallen in light of Mamdani’s nomination, and the owner of the Gristedes supermarket chain has said he will consider relocating his business out of New York.
But, the most shocking aspect of Mamdani’s election is not that New York — a city with more Jews than Jerusalem — elected a Muslim as mayor, but that it elected a mayor whose antisemitism and antipathy towards Israel is blatant.
Mamdani essentially admitted to these views in a recent mayoral debate. One of the moderators, likely mindful that, because NY mayors traditionally travel internationally frequently, as befitting being the chief executive of a city that imports and exports hundreds of billions of dollars in goods each year, asked the candidates which country he or she would visit first.
Strangely, given how much revenue and how many NY jobs depend on international trade, Mamdani claimed that he would stay in New York. There was no follow-up question during the debate (or after, as far as I know) to Mamdani probing why he rejects the role of being an advocate for New York’s global trade.
However, a moderator did follow up by asking if he would visit Israel as mayor. Mamdani answered:
“As the mayor, I'll be standing up for Jewish New Yorkers and I'll be meeting them wherever they are across the five boroughs, whether that's in their synagogues and temples or at their homes or at the subway platform. Because ultimately we need to focus on delivering on their concerns.”
In other words, Mamdani, as mayor of the second most Jewish populated city in the world, would be the first choosing not to visit a nation that is one of his city’s most important trading partners, Israel. Neither the task of being an advocate for NYC-Israel trade nor a representative to his Jewish constituents appeals to him.
Mamdani’s hostility to trade with Israel, which he refers to as an apartheid regime, is long documented. Mamdani “was the founder at his campus of Students for Justice in Palestine—an absolutely vile anti-Israel group which has wreaked havoc on campuses everywhere.” He continues to support the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement which aims to harm Israel economically. As an assemblyman Mamdani co-sponsored “Not On Our Dime,” a bill that targeted NY charities giving to Israel and was seen as so hostile and antisemitic that it was “rebuked with a joint statement from a majority of Democratic lawmakers in the New York State assembly.”
In subsequent interviews, Mamdani rejects Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, I would not be the first to notice that those like Mamdani who find the existence of one Jewish state problematic do not find the existence of 57 Muslim states so. In fact, so hostile is Mamdani to Israel that he promises that if Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visits New York, he will have him arrested.
Perhaps worse of all, Mamdani has endorsed the slogan “globalize the intifada,” As the New York Times reports:
“Palestinians and their supporters have called the phrase a rallying cry for liberation, but many Jews see it as a threatening call to violence against Jews around the world. The phrase, which contains the Arabic word for “uprising,” alludes to Palestinian rebellions, including violent attacks, against Israel in the 1980s and 2000s.”
Mamdani may be a disaster for New York even if he is only able to enact part of his agenda. No matter. He is now a leading figure in a Democrat Party that favors young, radically leftist, people of color and/or female, candidates who hate capitalism and Trump, but love anything associated with transgenders and illegal immigrants.
Most of all, Mamdani embodies the unfortunate growing hatred of Israel evident now in both political parties. In one of the oddest political twists one may be able to see, Cuomo ran for mayor of a city with the second largest Jewish population in the world as the pro-Israel candidate and lost.
—DK