OPINION:
A rally this week outside Gracie Mansion, the mayor’s residence in New York City, highlights Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s antisemitism problem: the fact that the mayor doesn’t really consider antisemitism a problem.
The 1,000 or so protesters were mostly Jewish. The speakers were diverse, including a Muslim woman, a Hindu activist and William Donhue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights.
New York is the largest Jewish city in the world, with 960,000 Jews living in the five boroughs. That it has become the epicenter of Jew-hatred in the United States is ironic. Jews have even been attacked for speaking Hebrew in the streets.
A particularly chilling incident was the siege of New York City’s Park East Synagogue by jihadists who objected to a real estate fair which promoted the sale of homes in Israel on what radicals call “stolen land.”
It’s possible there would have been bloodshed if the police had not set up barriers to contain the crowd. Mr. Mamdani condemned both the attack and the real estate expo, which he said he “deeply opposed.”
The mayor claims that one can oppose both antisemitism and Zionism, which is akin to saying that you can oppose anti-Catholicism but not attacks on the Vatican City.
Israel is the home to 7.5 million Jews, or 46% of the world’s Jewish population. Without a state to protect them, they would be as helpless as Europe’s Jews were during the Holocaust. Mr. Mamdani would remove that protection.
As much as socialism, antisemitism has been a constant in Mr. Mamdani’s career. As a candidate, he declared that as mayor, he would arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if the latter came to New York.
Leftists believe that any city they govern is sovereign territory, whether it involves immigration enforcement or foreign policy.
At Gracie Mansion, demonstrators demanded the mayor’s ouster. Some went so far as to call for his deportation. (Mr. Mamdani is a naturalized citizen who was born in Uganda.) That’s not going to happen any more than demonstrators are likely to change his mindset.
Mr. Mamdani is a Marxist whose “thinking,” if you can call it that, is frozen in the 19th century.
The rally’s importance is to continually call attention to the mayor’s crimes against sanity. Like Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner, the dude with the Nazi tattoo, Zohran Mamdani must figuratively be hung around the neck of the Democratic Party for all to see as we approach a crucial election.
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