Zohran Mamdani is the Ken Livingstone of NY
It’s been more than 20 years since I moved with my family from London to New York City. There were many reasons why we traversed the pond, with job opportunities and the chance of a new life in America at the top of the list, but there were also some deeply personal considerations involved as well.
Much as I loved London, and still do, I found myself increasingly anxious at the thought of bringing up two Jewish boys in the city of my birth. I didn’t want fear of antisemitism to govern where they went to school or which neighborhoods we’d be willing to live in. And at that time — with the 9/11 atrocities still fresh, a spate of Palestinian suicide bombings inside Israel, and a war against Saddam Hussein’s regime resulting in a prolonged, US-led occupation of Iraq — this was not idle paranoia but a real set of verifiable concerns.
If any single person could be said to have embodied these concerns, it was the extreme left-wing mayor of London, Ken Livingstone. While in office from the years 2000 to 2008, Livingstone’s hatred of Israel meant that his relationship with the British capital’s Jewish community was at best, tense and strained, and at worst, openly hostile.
After 9/11, Livingstone was firmly in the camp of those who argued that the death and destruction wrought by Al-Qaeda was ultimately the fault of US foreign policy, and that the Americans had essentially brought all this upon themselves. As the war against Saddam loomed, Livingstone enthusiastically endorsed the “Stop the War” coalition, a sinister collection of unreconstructed Stalinists and radical Islamists who briefly found themselves at the pinnacle of a mass protest movement. Most notoriously of all, he befriended a Muslim Brotherhood cleric based in Qatar, the late Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, falsely depicting him as a moderate who could steer angry young Muslims away from the very same antisemitic, misogynistic and homophobic garbage that the Sheikh himself promoted.
As leader of the Greater London Council during the 1980s, when he was Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s bête noire, as well as in the years after he departed the mayor’s office, Livingstone never shied away from endorsing and parroting the wildest and most extreme anti-Zionist myths. Take this gem from 2016: “When Hitler won his election in 1932, his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel. He was supporting Zionism before he went mad and ended up killing 6 million Jews.”
As outrageous as this sounds — claiming that Hitler, a genocidal antisemite, had been in favor of merely deporting Jews to a state that didn’t actually exist in 1932, one year before he became Germany’s chancellor — this sort of thing was par for the course with Livingstone. As I tracked his statements from my new perch in New York City after 2004, I felt a mix of relief that my two small boys weren’t living in this poisonous environment, alongside guilt that my fellow Jews back in London had no choice but to live with it.
Perhaps my chickens are coming home to roost now. In November, New York will hold a mayoral election, and at the current time, a candidate eerily reminiscent of Livingstone is riding high in the polls.
Zohran Mamdani is a supporter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Despite the broadly pro-Israel views of its founder, the social democratic intellectual Michael Harrington, DSA is now the political home of assorted Maoists and other performative revolutionaries who loathe the Jewish state and advocate for its elimination. One faction inside DSA is even agitating for the release of Elias Rodriguez, the antisemitic murderer who shot dead a young Israeli couple last month in Washington, D.C., in the name of a “free Palestine.”
The fact that a thoroughly inexperienced candidate with links to such groups stands a credible chance of winning the mayoral election speaks volumes about the time in which we are living. It also illustrates just how pointlessly divisive the issue of “Palestine” is in the American context. For example, I share Mamdani’s distress at the eyewatering prices in our grocery stores and the lack of affordable housing across the city — hell, absent his obsession with “Palestine,” I might even be tempted to vote for him! But precisely because of his obsession with “Palestine,” I, like many other Jewish New Yorkers, can only oppose him implacably.
A Mamdani administration would be worrying on at least two fronts. Firstly, he has signaled his readiness to defy state and federal laws against the antisemitic “Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions” (BDS) campaign that targets Israel alone; the idea that the most Jewish city outside Israel would be led by someone who wants to isolate the Jewish state as the first step towards its eventual elimination, which is the explicit aim of BDS, is grotesque.
Secondly, the pro-Hamas protest movement, of which Mamdani is a part, is currently the greatest single threat to Jews in America, on the streets of our cities, on our campuses and increasingly in our political institutions. At a time when pro-Hamas thugs have been attacking Hasidic children, harassing Jewish students, vandalizing Jewish communal buildings and turning to outright murder, Jews in New York need the full protection of a strengthened, properly trained New York Police Department, not rationalizations for the sickening violence spawned by a movement with which Mamdani identifies.
“[O]ne need not visit Israel to stand up for Jewish New Yorkers,” Mamdani said at a meeting last week with Jewish leftists at a synagogue on the Upper West Side. “I believe that to stand up for Jewish New Yorkers means that you actually meet Jewish New Yorkers wherever they may be, be it at their synagogues and temples or their homes or on the subway platform or at a park, wherever it may be.” On one level, that’s a vacuous statement. On another, it is completely tone deaf because if you meet Jewish New Yorkers on the subway, where those who wear kippahs are vulnerable to verbal and physical assaults, or at a coffee counter, or wherever else they may be, they will tell you that they can’t remember a time when this great city has been such a hostile place for its Jewish residents. And the reason for that is “Palestine.”
I don’t want New York to go the way of London under Livingstone. As the election approaches, we need to deploy all means to ensure that Mamdani’s bid is defeated — and keep “Palestine” out of New York City politics.
Ben Cohen is a senior analyst with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
Write: Columnist@TheJewishStar.com
