[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.