New York, New York

This article first appeared in New English Review. 

Once again, New York City is back in the news for all the wrong reasons. Now everybody is talking about the man who will be the Democrat candidate for mayor. Zohran Mamdani defeated Andrew Cuomo in the Democrat primary this past week. Given Mamdani’s positions as a socialist who would basically give everything away and his record of opposition to Israel and inflammatory statements in support of the Palestinians, the shock waves are being felt all over the country. One can only draw the conclusion that the Democrat party is increasingly radical and increasingly anti-Semitic.

 For example, the day after the horrific Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, Mamdani, a Muslim, was attacking Israel, not Hamas. Shocking? Keep in mind that as a student at Bowdoin College in Maine, he co-founded a Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter. SJP is a brown shirt organization with chapters in well over 100 universities. They regularly engage in tactics of disruption, intimidation, and disorder to promote the anti-Israel agenda. They disrupt Jewish events on campus (some of which I personally witnessed at the University of California at Irvine), and harass and bully Jewish students. SJP was co-founded by UC Berkeley professor Hatem Bazian, a Palestinian immigrant with a long history of inflammatory anti-Semitic rhetoric. This organization is anti-Semitic to the core-even though they deny it, and even though some members are misguided, leftist Jewish students.

In short, all signs point to Mamdani being a total anti-Semite.

Mamdani was born in 1991 in Uganda to Indian parents. After moving to South Africa briefly, the family immigrated to the US when Mamdani was 7. He was reportedly naturalized in 2018. Some Republicans in Congress have called for Mamdani to be stripped of his citizenship and deported. I doubt that will go anywhere. We basically have to hope and pray that he is defeated by Eric Adams, the current mayor, in the upcoming mayoral election.

But Mamdani is just one element of what I see as a scary trend going on in New York City. With Columbia University, its sister college, Barnard, and New York University being very prominently in the news the past two years with pro-Hamas demonstrations and occupations that have become increasingly violent, now coupled with anti-ICE protests, everyday life in the city looks hellish, at least to an outsider. The protests, with all their Palestinian and/or Mexican and Central American flags, have become more aggressive, more brazen, and more obnoxious than ever. 

I don’t claim to be intimately familiar with the city.  I have been there several times, almost always in my work as a DEA agent, going there for cases and to testify in federal trials. It’s never been my favorite city, and I’ve never gone there for personal reasons. I must add here that while New Yorkers appear to be impatient and brash on the outside, I came to know quite a few in DEA. Once you get to know them, you come to like them. (They are great storytellers.) So this piece is no indictment of New Yorkers as people.

But what I have seen in the news over the last couple of years has been downright ugly. I can’t imagine what it must be like for the NYPD, night after night, having to stand there in the streets and take verbal and physical abuse from hundreds of knuckleheads, to say nothing of all the other crime they have to deal with. Add to that the fact that under the previous mayor, Bill de Blasio, they got virtually zero support from the city leaders. Not surprisingly, de Blasio is a supporter of Mamdani. I firmly believe that the NYPD, which has great enforcement capabilities, could effectively protect Jewish citizens if it were not handcuffed by the politicians.

New York City has the nation’s largest Jewish community. The implications for them if Mamdani is elected are enormous and troubling. Already being targeted on the streets for attacks, their situation can only get worse under Mamdani as mayor, especially for the highly visible Hasidic community.

Given the Trump administration’s battles against state and local politicians like Governors Gavin Newsom of California and Janet Mills of Maine, not to mention the cutting off of federal funding to out-of-control universities, it will be interesting to see what happens if Mamdani is elected. It would tickle me pink if federal funding were cut off or reduced.

I would hope that if Mamdani is elected, we would see a mass exodus of people and businesses from the city with the resultant loss of tax revenue. Whether that would happen is another matter. While I am no fan of Eric Adams, I sincerely hope he wins running as an independent in a heavily Democrat city. In addition to de Blasio, Mamdani is also supported by New York congressional members, Jerry Nadler and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. If you are wondering how those two could ever get elected to office in New York, don’t be surprised if Mamdani pulls it off.