A Closing Argument Against Zohran Mamdani

In the cold light of dawn we are moved to offer one more editorial marking the importance of the choice that New Yorkers face at the polls Tuesday. The Democratic Party nomination has been seized by someone who swears fealty to the Democratic Socialists of America and their revolutionary program. He is opposed by Governor Andrew Cuomo and the Republican Curtis Sliwa. Mr. Mamdani, the worst candidate Democrats have yet offered up, is the favorite.Mr. Mamdani’s economic program is economically illiterate and his hostility to Israel is so deep-seated as to be bedrock. He vows to arrest Prime Minister Netanyahu if he comes to New York and put him on trial. His call to freeze the rent on rent-controlled units would, by any measure, warp incentives all the way round. His call to make buses free would, we imagine, create homeless shelters on wheels that would make transportation a harrowing affair. Goodness knows how all of this — and free childcare besides — would be paid for. Our opposition to Mr. Mamdani, though, is a matter of sense as well as cents. He would deny Israel’s existence as a Jewish state, and, before some recent fancy footwork, was an implacable foe of New York’s police department. Former NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly tells our A.R. Hoffman and Rebecca Sugar that Mr. Mamdani’s ideas “won’t work.”Not that long ago Mr. Mamdani called the police “racist, anti-queer and a major threat to public safety.” He has called in the past to “defund this rogue agency,” though now he squirms on that demand. Just two years ago he declared that “We have to make clear that when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF.” That mixed metaphor hammers home just how hostile Mr. Mamdani is to not only Israel but also New Yorkers.While it would have been easy enough to condemn the call to “Globalize the Intifada” — a layup, as they say — Mr. Mamdani has stubbornly refused to do so. Why would he, when he posed, grinning, with Imam Siraj Wahhaj, an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. Speaking of the Twin Towers, Mr. Mamdani appeared in conversation with Hasan Piker, who reckons that America “deserves 9/11.”It is not our intention to suggest that Mr. Mamdani’s own religion poses a problem for his mayoralty. As we have often marked in these columns, the most emphatic sentence in the entire American constitution is the one ordaining that no religious test shall ever be required for any office or trust under the United States. No. Ever. Any. It is our intention, though, to mark where Mr. Mamdani is in the wars currently being waged against America.We worry not only about Mr. Mamdani, but also his camarilla. As the Post puts it, his staff is likely to “treat Gotham as an Oberlin post-graduate study session. No business will go unpunished. No tax dollar will go unspent. Every radical idea from Marx to Noam Chomsky will get an airing.” Mr. Mamdani, in thrall to BDS, is threatening to yank funding from the Technion’s partnership with Cornell, one of the city’s great alliances.For all of these reasons and more we urge a vote for Governor Cuomo. Polls show him, not Curtis Sliwa, as the viable contender to defeat Mr. Mamdani. Whichever of Messrs. Mamdani or Cuomo move into Gracie Mansion, Republicans will have four more long years in opposition to come up with a compelling vision — and a candidate — for 2029. The Big Apple, after all, is too important to be written off as a lost cause.

A Closing Argument Against Zohran Mamdani

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