Mamdani’s Criticism of America Warrants a Fact Check

New York’s self-described socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, could not resist using the nation’s 250th anniversary celebration to trash the very country that he and his parents voluntarily sought out.As is his custom, Mr. Mamdani speaks in stereotypes and generalities, offering few if any examples, all laced with his accustomed unctuous hypocrisy.Let’s deconstruct his incoherent riff on the eve of July 4:“America, they will tell you, belongs only to those with the right accent or the right shade of skin. The rest of us, they insist, should be grateful for merely being allowed to visit. How small they are. How weak, how unoriginal…“At every moment in our past, those who led through exclusion and isolation have tried to win power and enrich themselves by turning us against one another.”Thus spoke the man who immigrated to America with his now-endowed professor father and elite filmmaker mother. Upon arriving, the Mamdanis joined what is statistically America’s wealthiest and most highly credentialed ethnic group: the enormously privileged Indian American community. Yet how was that possible in Mamdani’s version of a racist America that supposedly detests the wrong accents and skin colors?When this nepo baby includes himself among the supposedly “victimized” (“the rest of us”), should we laugh or cry?If Mr. Mamdani wishes to invoke the tired Marxist oppressed-oppressor binary (“how small they are” versus “the rest of us”), then, by his own revolutionary vocabulary, he once belonged to a settler-colonial Indian expatriate elite.After all, although Uganda’s Indian community comprises only about 1 percent of the population, it still controls roughly 60 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product.Mr. Mamdani melodramatically alleges of America: “The rest of us, they insist, should be grateful for merely being allowed to visit. How small they are. How weak, how unoriginal.”I would argue that the United States has asked nothing of the Mamdanis, much less demanded gratitude from a family whose books, films, and activism have consistently reflected anti-Americanism.Far from demanding that the Mamdanis express gratitude for exchanging Uganda for America or begrudging their rapid rise to multimillionaire status, America might reasonably ask why Mr. Mamdani is so angry at the country that welcomed his family and afforded it such extraordinary opportunities. Why is he so eager to slander it as xenophobic and racist?Does he think there is less opportunity — but more oppression, misogyny, and religious and racial intolerance — in America than in Uganda or India?In any case, what is so objectionable about assuming that foreign nationals who wish to immigrate and become American citizens might feel gratitude toward a country that welcomes them?Americans welcome more immigrants each year than any other nation, and they have long admired legal immigrants who enriched the country by assimilating, acculturating, and integrating—not by carving out near-permanent ancestral enclaves.Yet Americans are understandably astonished when recent immigrants from failed states — plagued by caste prejudice, dictatorship, endemic racism, religious intolerance, Marxist-induced poverty, antisemitism, systemic violence, misogyny, and homophobia — begin lecturing their American hosts about America’s supposed shortcomings.Stranger still, many of these angry socialist immigrants were either far less critical of the countries they left behind or, in some cases, actually belonged to the privileged — and despised — ruling castes that presided over those failed societies.Moreover, is it unreasonable to expect that no immigrant community engineer costly welfare fraud schemes, as we have seen with the disproportionate number of Somali immigrants charged or under investigation in Minnesota?What is so difficult about applying for legal entry into the United States instead of swarming the border under the assumption that illegal entry will be rewarded with generous housing, education, food, medical care, and other public subsidies?Is it too much to expect that the roughly 500,000 convicted criminal immigrants living in the United States — many of whom entered the country illegally — not commit crimes against the citizens of the country that admitted them?Can Mr. Mamdani explain why this supposedly racist and nativist America has since the mid-1960s admitted millions of immigrants — the overwhelming majority of them nonwhite — if it is so systematically xenophobic and racist?If America is as hostile toward people of Indian ancestry as Mr. Mamdani alleges, why have some 5.4 million Indians immigrated here, making them one of the nation’s largest and fastest-growing foreign-born populations? Why do roughly 150,000 more choose to come to this racist hellhole each year? Do they come to be insulted — or to become prosperous, educated, privileged, and secure?As for the alleged cruelty shown toward those with different accents or skin colors, Mr. Mamdani discloses a remarkable ignorance of America’s long tradition of self-criticism and self-correction.Consider the diversity visa lottery, the hurdles confronting legal immigrants, and the de facto amnesties often extended to illegal immigrants. An alien visitor from another planet studying the demographics of the past seven decades might conclude that America is indeed racist — against immigrants from Europe and other English-speaking countries.As for America’s past sins, some 165 years ago, roughly 700,000 mostly white Americans slaughtered one another in a war to abolish slavery — an ancient and evil institution that had brought ten times as many Africans to Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking Latin America as to the American South, while more than 15 million others were sent into the Muslim world through slave trades facilitated by African rulers who sold rival tribes into bondage.To address the toxic legacy of segregation in the American South, Americans have spent roughly $25 trillion on income- and race-based entitlements for the poor and for nonwhites since the War on Poverty and Great Society programs began some six decades ago.Yet for decades, federal and state governments ignored civil rights laws and court rulings prohibiting racial preferences, allowing race-based college admissions, separate dormitories, safe spaces, and graduation ceremonies to flourish. As for Mr. Mamdani’s charge that “At every moment in our past, those who led through exclusion and isolation have tried to win power and enrich themselves by turning us against one another,” such tactics of divide and conquer are precisely what he himself has mastered in demonizing whites and Jews. Indeed, such racialism has become a hallmark of his Democratic Socialists.Few contemporary politicians have done more than Mr. Mamdani to exploit racial division in pursuit of political power — except, perhaps, others in his own movement who are similarly maniacally obsessed with castigating whites and Jews.After all, who proposed targeting “whiter neighborhoods” with higher taxes? Who called the American Israel Public Affairs Committee“monsters”?Mr. Mamdani’s housing tsar, Cea Weaver, declared that homeownership was a “weapon of white supremacy.” She also endorsed a platform calling for “no more white men in office.”One of Mr. Mamdani’s former campaign operatives, Darializa Avila Chevalier, attacked white women as “ugly colonizer women.”Mr. Mamdani’s newly appointed director of appointments, Catherine Almonte Da Costa, resigned after her past comments resurfaced about “money-hungry Jews” and the importance of ensuring “that white people feel defeated.”Mr. Mamdani’s wife, Rama Duwaji, reportedly liked more than 70 Instagram posts celebrating the October 7, 2023, massacre of 1,200 Jews. She also illustrated a book by the infamous and antisemitic Susan Abulhawa, who has called Jews “supremacist vampires,” “rootless soulless ghouls,” and “dual-loyalty Zionists.”The projectionist Mr. Mamdani should look in the mirror.Few contemporary politicians in America have done more in so short a time to exploit race and antisemitism in pursuit of political power.That such rhetoric comes from a member of a remarkably privileged elite is less ironic than fitting. Mr. Mamdani has already described himself: “Those who led through exclusion and isolation have tried to win power and enrich themselves by turning us against one another.”That fits Mamdani to a T.Tribune Content Agency

Mamdani’s Criticism of America Warrants a Fact Check

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