Mayor? - Surely Not.

New York's fateful choice. I'll be back soon to look anxiously at the consequences Melanie Phillips Nov 4 Zohran Mamdani I left New York last night as the city braced itself for a fateful decision. Today it votes for a new mayor, and the front runner is Zohran Mamdani. Mamdani is an individual who believes Israel shouldn’t exist as a Jewish state and who doesn’t see anything wrong with chanting to “globalise the intifada”. He has claimed that the Israelis are behind acts of violence committed by the New York Police Department — a riff on the ancient antisemitic trope that the Jews are responsible for problems that have nothing to do with them. His pledge to shut down the NYPD’s strategic response group, which broke up the violent anti-Israel protests at Columbia university, suggests that he won’t protect New York’s Jews against the tsunami of antisemitism to which they are being subjected. Less than three weeks after the Hamas-led atrocities in Israel on October 7 2023, he was rabble-rousing on New York streets inciting the mob against Israel’s “genocide”. He has a raft of extreme left policies, including diverting the police from tackling crime to social work, and wants to pay for free child-care, bus travel and rent freezes by soaking the rich. New York is the beating heart of America’s economy. Mamdani stands to bankrupt it and turn it into a dysfunctional hell-hole dancing to the tune of radical Islamists and their left-wing enablers. He is a weapon deployed by the enemies of America and the west. Given his ideological agenda, what this man may do if he gains power over the police and the education system scarcely bears examination. Over the next few weeks, I shall be returning to New York and elsewhere in the US on speaking engagements. I’ll be anxiously looking at how things have developed after today’s events, and will be taking the temperature of a city and a nation confronting a gathering cultural and existential crisis.