You Hate To See It

Spare a thought for poor Zohran Mamdani. He had no idea that if he spent his entire adult life egging on a radical pro-violence movement and then used that movement’s talking points to demagogue his way into power, he might one day lose control of the monster he hastily stitched together.

Populist demagoguery has consequences? Who’da thunk it?

Not Mamdani, the Chosen One. The New York Times “reports” on this superhero, this Icarus with fireproof wings, this messiah come to save the world from the Jews:

“If pro-Palestinian activists had designed a New York City mayor in a political science lab, they would have strained to do much better than Zohran Mamdani.

“He is the Muslim son of a prominent anticolonial scholar whose childhood home often teemed with leading Palestinian American thinkers, primed since his youth in Uganda and post-apartheid South Africa to connect the pain of Palestinians to liberation struggles around the world.

“Galvanizing at a microphone and disarming in person, he has helped guide and expand the Democratic Socialists of America as the Palestinian cause has become a defining D.S.A. focus locally and nationally.”

In other words, “Zohran Mamdani” is the name of a composite character written into the world by his influential parents. And there he is, confidently riding the Wells Fargo wagon a-coming down the street, a redemptive figure for our fallen world.

But a funny thing happened on the way to Gracie Mansion.

Though the Times gushes that Mamdani could have been built in a lab, he is running into a problem: his voters believed him.

Mamdani was always looking for ways to up the ante—rhetorically, at least. And so he infamously told socialist activists that the Jewish state was to be blamed for every local New York City problem. If you see police brutality, he mused, picture an IDF soldier lacing the cop’s boots. Then he insisted he would abuse his office by directing the NYPD to arrest a foreign head of government, the prime minister of the one and only Jewish state.

These were ludicrous claims, and they suggested Mamdani was very much a bigoted con man who would try to sell New Yorkers the air they breathed. But people believed him, because they hated Israel enough to believe anything.

And what is one thing you’d expect of a man who blamed Jews for NYPD misbehavior and who claimed total control over the police force as if it were his praetorian guard? Of course: His rabid supporters want the head of Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, who wears a Star of David pendant around her neck.

Demands to purge high-profile Jews who haven’t renounced their own people are not unprecedented, of course. But rarely are they so nakedly proposed in New York, home to more Jews than any city outside Israel (and most cities inside Israel).

Of course, the pro-Palestinian fire-the-Jewess campaign is part of a larger menu of items on which anti-Zionists seek to gorge themselves. As the Times notes, Mamdani “is being asked to fulfill an activist wish list unlike any delivered to mayors in the recent past. It includes abolishing the City University of New York Board of Trustees (over investments tied to Israel); intervening in the programming decisions of local synagogues; and halting any military shipments to Israel through the city’s major airports, which the mayor does not control.”

Why would they think he had control over U.S. foreign policy? Perhaps because he indicated that he had precisely those powers when he threatened to J. Edgar Hoover the NYPD on Bibi Netanyahu.

The reporting on this all suggests poor Zohran Mamdani has been put in a tough spot. But of course, that’s not true at all. Mamdani put himself in that spot. He deserves all of this. It is important, in fact, that an anti-Semitic power-hungry demagogue be brought back down to earth with simple politics.

Mamdani’s mob wants what it voted for. They won’t get it—not all of it—and Mamdani will look like what he is: a man who over-promised and under-prepared for a serious role in a democracy.

+ A A -