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[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]
Two years after the atrocities of October 7, 2023, it looks as if Zohran Mamdani, a previously obscure New York State assemblyman who became a U.S. citizen in 2018 (he remains a citizen of Uganda, where he was born) and who somehow manages to be both a Communist and a radical Muslim, will be elected mayor of New York City in November. Among other things, Mamdani looks fondly upon jihadist terrorism, hates Israel, calls it an apartheid state, supports Palestinians, considers Israel’s war in Gaza an act of genocide, supports the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, and has said he would arrest Benjamin Netanyahu if he set foot in New York. In 2017, Mamdani put out a rap song celebrating the leaders of the Holy Land Foundation, an ally of Hamas.
About a million New Yorkers are Jewish. You’d expect them to be fiercely opposed to Mamdani’s candidacy. On the contrary, a July poll showed that 43% of the city’s Jews, and 67% of Jews between 18 and 44, support Mamdani.
In late September, the leaders of Bend the Arc: A Jewish Partnership for Justice, an organization of progressive Jews, issued the first mayoral endorsement since its founding in 1999. On September 30, Eli Williams-Szenes, the group’s Director of Advocacy and Political Affairs, released a statement explaining this decision. “First,” wrote Williams-Szenes, “the greatest threats to Jewish safety in the U.S. are Trump and the MAGA movement – and they want us to be divided from our allies. They’ve used every tactic to try to pull apart the progressive coalition behind Zohran, from smokescreen antisemitism to anti-Muslim bigotry and racism.”
Second, Williams-Szenes maintained that Zohran, who has “visited synagogues” and “met with Jewish constituents and rabbis,” is an opponent of anti-Semitism. Mamdani, he noted, enjoyed “the support of Jewish leaders representing the largest Jewish communities in the nation – from Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine to the Upper West Side’s Congressman Jerry Nadler to State Senator Brad Holyman-Sigal.” Also backing Mamdani is Brad Lander, whose position as the city’s comptroller makes him “the most senior Jewish leader in New York City government.” Williams-Szenes quoted Lander on Mamdani’s run: “This is more than an election, it’s a story of what’s possible when we work together to create a coalition against fascism. This multifaith, multiracial coalition is the antidote to MAGA hate.”
Got it? Donald Trump, who moved the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, and mediated the historic Abraham Accords, is an apostle of hate – particularly, one gathers, anti-Semitic hate.
On August 4, the New York Times ran an article by Liam Stack about Jewish voters who support Mamdani. Among Stack’s interviewees was Ben Sadoff, a canvasser for Mamdami’s campaign, who said that the Jewish voters he spoke with were more concerned with rent and child-care costs than with Israel – and if they did bring up Israel, “their comments often focused on their anguish over Israel’s war in Gaza.” Indeed, many Jewish voters “said that Mr. Mamdani’s views on Israel, and his vocal opposition to its treatment of Palestinians, echoed their own.” Among them was Emily Hoffman, 37, who said she was “proud to vote for him as a Jew” and that “the images she had seen of the humanitarian conditions in Gaza…reminded her of pictures she saw as a child when she first learned about the Holocaust.” Another Jewish voter, Lisa Cowan, 57, “praised Mr. Mamdani’s focus on affordability and the ‘positive spirit’ he had brought to the campaign. His comments on Israel did not bother her, she said, because he struck her as ‘a nuanced thinker’ and ‘someone who loved New York and loved New Yorkers.’” She added that “she thought Mr. Mamdani’s experience with Islamophobia helped him understand what it felt like for Jewish New Yorkers to face religious bigotry.”
Such breathtaking naivete may seem hard to believe. But as someone who lived most of his life in New York City, I have no trouble buying it.
If elected, Mamdani would be New York’s first Muslim mayor. One might have expected at least some voters to look to the example of London, which has declined precipitously during the mayoralty of Sadiq Khan, a devout Muslim who took office in 2016 and who has striven ever since to forge a new image of London as a city where native Englishmen don’t belong; at one point, he posted on his official website a photograph of a white family with a caption stating that such a family “doesn’t represent real Londoners.” Under Khan, Muslim misfits have had free rein while critics of Islam have been subject to arrest and imprisonment. In the months after October 7, virtually every weekend saw massive pro-Hamas demonstrations in the streets; Jews who dared to show up for these events wearing yarmulkes or Stars of David were harassed by police.
But you don’t have to be Jewish, or to know anything about recent developments in London, to worry about electing a Muslim mayor of New York. All you need is to have a vague awareness that what is now the Islamic world, consisting of 53 Muslim-majority countries, was not always Muslim. Every part of it outside of the Arabian peninsula became Muslim through violent, bloody conquest. In places like Nigeria, that conquest is still underway. Europe, too, including London and the rest of the United Kingdom, is being conquered, but through mass immigration and institutional infiltration rather than military invasion.
The man who has done more to stand up for British liberty against the encroachments of Islam is Tommy Robinson. After the Yom Kippur attack on a synagogue in Manchester, Amichai Chikli, Israeli Minister for Diaspora Affairs, invited Tommy to visit Israel later this month, calling him a “British patriot” and a “courageous leader on the front line against radical Islam.” Tommy quickly accepted the invitation, saying that he would travel to Israel directly after his October 13 trial. The murders in Manchester, he stated, had “strengthened my conviction that the United Kingdom and Israel are fighting the same battle – against the scourge of Islamic jihad.”
Just as there are Jews in New York who plan to vote for Mamdani, however, there are Jews in Britain who found Chikli’s invitation to Tommy Robinson appalling. According to the Daily Mail, the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Jewish Leadership Council issued a joint statement declaring that Chikli, in British Jews’ “darkest hour,” had “ignored the views of the vast majority of British Jews, who utterly and consistently reject Robinson and everything he stands for.” Tommy, the organizations maintained, “is a thug who represents the very worst of Britain” and that he “undermines those genuinely working to tackle Islamist extremism and foster community cohesion.”
Community cohesion! That’s what it’s all about – preserving that beautiful sense of unity, trust, and love between Muslims and non-Muslims that reigns in the UK. Yes, let’s “tackle Islamist extremism” – but let’s do it without stepping on any Muslim toes. What a joke. What could be more cowardly and delusional? This is an attitude taken by lily-livered people who have convinced themselves – or pretend to have convinced themselves, because they dare not face the reality that they live with every day – that it’s possible to stop jihadist violence in Britain while allowing the rise of Muslim power to continue unchecked.
Also bad-mouthing Tommy was Baroness Sayeeda Warsi (“the first Muslim woman to serve in cabinet”), who said it was “irresponsible and deeply dangerous” to invite to Israel “a man with multiple convictions for violence and fraud.” Israel, she said, was “sowing division in our country, supporting and promoting those that platform hate and making our country unsafe.”
No, Israel is standing at the front line in the defense of Western freedom against the Muslim attempt to conquer the West. Meanwhile the current government of Britain is a gang of pusillanimous sell-outs, eager to give Muslims aristocratic titles, to appoint them to positions of authority, and to shower them with grotesque amounts of unearned praise, all in the fatuous, fainthearted hope that when the monster finally gains power, it’ll show them mercy and devour others while leaving them alone – or, at the very least, leave them for last. You’d think that Jews, within living memory of the Holocaust, would be incapable of such thinking. Alas, from London to New York, all too many Jews are clinging to perilous illusions and – hopelessly misguided on the question of who are their friends and who are their enemies – are doomed, one fears, to suffer consequences that may make October 7 look like a walk in the park.
43% of the city’s Jews, and 67% of Jews between 18 and 44, support Mamdani.
Given Jewry’s demographic profile, a small youth cohort amongst the secular and the opposite amongst the orthodox and with about 1/4 NYC Jews being orthodox, substantially ALL secular Jews44 and under are voting Mamdani. Is this about right?
We truly are our misfortune.
I wouldn’t trust any source of those statistics. Polls are almost always designed to manipulate public opinion rather than gauge and record it.
Your math is ridiculous. 12% of population is 42,000,000.There are at last count 18,000,000 jews worldwide. Just about the same as it was in 1939. pre holocaust.
What math did I cite, retard? I sure didn’t fail at simple addition and multiplication like you did.
The “Commie” Jews are JINOs
Too many people of real or imagined Jewish ethnicity are fully capable of converting to the strange religion of wokism. This makes them essentially impervious to appeals to genuineJewish values.
That is what you want.
This is nonsense. Jews are doing exactly what their co-religionists want, since their religions are White Guilt and Liberalism.
What you’re saying, in essence, is that the entirety of the secular Jewish youth vote up to age 44 is for Mamdani.
Our enemies are very clear who their enemies are. Our elites are unwilling to name our enemies and act on that knowledge.
That’s because our elite are money grabbers beholden to Qatar. They’re also cowards who live with a wet finger in the air and will betray anything and anyone.
If you can’t name your enemy…they win; you lose
“Also bad-mouthing Tommy was Baroness Sayeeda Warsi …”
Also bad-mouthing Tommy was Melanie Phillips, a woman I like very much and whose views on this existential battle between Islam and … well, pretty much everyone else, are dead on; but, she cannot tolerate Tommy. I have seen a bit of football hooligans and find their behavior repulsive, but the UK has gotten itself into such a mess that Tommy Robinsons are what’s needed and in short supply.
Tommy is the Meir Kahane of Britain.
I agree with you. I usually look to Melanie Phillips for insight on Israel and Britain. But her previous column castigating the Israeli government for inviting Robinson, and drawing a scurrilous portrait of him was very disturbing. Meanwhile, Robinson is one of the few speaking out against the islamization of Great Britain.
A special Message from the Jewish Sheep Free the Wolves
Someone once described the attitude of “as a Jew” Jews as “Chickens for Col. Saunders”
Jews for Mamdani? Jews against Tommy Robinson? That’s like saying Christians for Satan and against President Trump.
Moron Mamdouchey is an islamopithecine. You know. The subhumans who want a “final solution” for Jews and Christians worldwide?
That probably tickles your tiny balls, Sebastard.
Ah yes, the self-gassing Jews, with whom I share a common past — bitter and tragic as that is — is only an accident of birth.
The Jews have again proved to be susceptible to another religion. This is the religion of socialism. Socialism appeals to those who are destitute or those who believe themselves to be more intellectual than anyone else.
These are the same type as many of the people who marched to the trains in 1942 Europe. Admitting error is not possible. Trying to assimilate while maintaining the facade of judaism while really worshiping socialism cannot last. These jews will fight for socialism but surrender judaism.
They will surrender in Gaza by next week and sit idly by waiting for the next wave of their slaughter while wondering why it occurs. If they do not throw the muslims out, they deserve no support.
My empathy meter for American secular Jews has been pegged at zero for a while now. They always seem to vote for their own executioners.
They hit the jackpot when 1) they came here after WWII as refugees and 2) when they collectively vote democrat for the last 70 years. Big mistake. Hint: the Dems aren’t your friends.
Oct 7 taught them nothing. It’s that damn Tikkun Olam crap that turns them into pansies. In pre war Germany they thought they would be just fine because they thought of themselves as Germans. They effed around and found out.
Intrepid attends a homosexual approved ELCA Lutheran fake church… which teaches they also worship the fake god allah of satanic islam…
He bragged about having a Bass Guitar collection of two guitars… where he claimed they were worth @ $4000 each…
He’s rich… lol…
He also bragged about playing the Bass Guitar at his church on stage… where he said he searches out the women in the congregation to take home a have sex with.
Of course… I’ve always thought Intrepid was Bi-sexual… and flirted with the men at his fake church too…
I believe he’s divorced and can’t keep a women…
Nowadays… Intrepid claims everything he said was a lie… but I don’t believe it. Because Intrepid is a narcissist, in love with himself…
Personally… I wonder if Intrepid sits on park benches drooling, while he twiddles his greasy fingers…
Intrepid needs major help…
Wrong on everything except that I play bass at a Lutheran church. The rest I either fed to you or you made up the rest. You don’t want to believe it because you will expose yourself as the gullible stupid little sh*t that you are.
If you think you can prove everything then prove it assling. Otherwise you just so much useless hot air.
It is you that needs a psychiatrist. Oh yeah one of the basses is worth $6000 made in ’64. The other one is worth $4000, made in ’72. And I am rich….richer than you. If you had a real job or owned a real church you wouldn’t have time to indulge your fantasies. I suspect you don’t have much going on upstairs or in your life.
You are a pathetic loser.
Basically you are simply a cheap little troll who doesn’t have much of a life beyond this website. Now that what I call pathetic.
That said I am off to church for a rehearsal with the choir and some brass players our choir director has hired for the Sunday service.
Have fun playing with your computer. I have a feeling that is what you mostly play with.
Prove I said that. assling
And yes you really are that stupid.
Jews that survivied the Holocaust believed in the center of politics, The far right scared them as it brought them hitler.The democrat party of JFK and even clinton is far gone. The far right is now center, and democrats are now communists, that hate jews.
“Jews For Hitler”? You be the judge.
A Jew don’t buy an umbrella because is cloudy outside. He waits until he get soaking wet.
This is the history of diaspora Jews for the last 2000 years. Sadly Israeli Jews starting to behave the same way. a.k.a Oct 7.
This is a persistent problem, to say the least. A very disproportionate percentage of our tiny tribe are brainwashed fools who vote for candidates who are determined to destroy America and endanger Jews along the way. It should be clear that the religion for these so-called Jews is leftism. They are a dreadful group of useful idiots that refuse to wake up. In addition, it’s difficult to ask non-Jews to care about our fate when so many of our own seems to not to care. All the way around, it’s awful, awful, awful.
Throughout History, some of the most virulent anti-semites have been self-hating Jews
Mandami remains a citizen of Uganda, where he was born. How does that happen? Among the principles embedded in the oath to become a US citizen includes
“Renounce and abjure absolutely and entirely all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which the applicant was before a subject or citizen” Being a dual citizen defies that principle.
This is complete bullshit. Simply not true. The only jews that support this creep are self loathing in name only jews like bernie sanders that has never seen the inside of a synagogue.
Bernie Sanders was last in a synagogue as a congregant during Eisenhower’s first term. The Kibbutz he visited in the early 1960’s was run by Communists who thought Stalin was “The Sun of All Nations”, and even they kicked Bernie out because he did no work and had constant verbal diarrhea.
New York Jews who vote for Mamdani are as out of touch with objective reality as the Jews who stood in line for showers at Auschwitz believing the Nazis would hand out soap. Denial is not a survival strategy––not then and not now. Freedom is an adult enterprise which requires living in the adult world of facts. Tommy Robinson exposed the horrific facts of British governments’ complicity in the coverup and protection of Muslim rape gangs in Britain at the expense of young British schoolgirls. World Jewry should be applauding truthteller Tommy Robinson as a hero and protector of children, instead they choose Mamdani’s lies. Shame on them––they should know better.
I have three hyper-woke adult millennial nieces, one of whom is married to a Jewish hyper-woke lifetime super-liberal (he’s 53) — I didn’t speak to any of them for 4 years because their woke shit is poison to me (woke forced me into early retirement so ended my career and many longtime “friendships”) — and their woke shit is also hated by their own long-suffering mother (my sister) and her Jewish boyfriend, both about 70 and conservative/centrist.
After Oct 7th 2023, my niece’s husband began openly supporting Israel and they had a baby at that time and both seemed to be coming out of their woke mania so I reconnected with them because babies bring families together and she’s so adorable. Well his “coming to his senses” didn’t last long. My nephew just told me his Jewish brother-in-law’s “liberal programming glitch” is over and he’s supporting Gaza and the “Palestinians”. A personal anecdote but it typifies the cognitive dissonance and self-destruction of so many liberal Jews who refuse to let go of their liberalism even after Oct 7th. It’s a sickness.
Also this week a Toronto high school broadcast the Canadian national anthem as it does every morning, but on Oct 7th the lyrics were not in English or French but were in Arabic (who knows what the singer was actually saying). Jewish students complained to their parents. The government blustered to the media that they’re “investigating”. The Toronto District School Board smirked. In the 1990s, I worked for this school board (as a writer in the adult education dept.) and was forced to join one of Canada’s largest public servants’ unions called CUPE that back then was further left than Ho Chi Min and is now one of the main epicentres of woke leftism and violent anti-Israel anti-Jew pro-Hamas fanaticism in Canada. (CUPE president Fred Hahn is a rabid communist queers-for-palestine psychopath.) One of CUPE’s woke or muslim employees (and they’re all either one or the other) pulled this stunt knowing that nothing will happen to her since Marx Carney recently declared to Canada’s official “Islamophobia czar” (face of a constipated muslim weasel) that “islamic values are Canadian values”.
While I’m ranting — what happened to Trump’s huge “breakthrough” Sunday deadline “ultimatum” to Ham Ass? More lies. More bullshit. More capitulation to islamic oil money. Blah blah blah.
More salient, sobering, unpleasant and necessary truths and analysis from Mr. Bawer. Thank you.
NY should not be recommended based on one’s IQ.
Is British columnist Melanie Phillips also a member of the UK Jewish directors board? I noticed her attacking Robinson too with unverified claims he’s a baddie, and if she’s going to go miles out of her way to do what the UK government may want, that’s very sad, and I’m not sure I can continue reading her op-eds anymore.