There are those who have objected to the ongoing criticisms The Jewish Press and others have been leveling against Mayor Zohran Mamdani over what we have been characterizing as his steady mayoral embrace of both religious and political anti-Jewish radical Islamism. In fact, though, it seems to us that barely a week goes by without some remarkable outrage of this sort voiced by Mamdani.
Most recently was his reiteration in the course of the St. Patrick’s Day Parade of his repetition of the over-the-top, wholly unsubstantiated Islamic mantra that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza. It will be recalled that he made the genocide claim at his Oval Office meeting with President Trump last November and criticized the U.S. for funding it.
To be sure, Mamdani’s defenders maintain that his policies on Islamic beliefs and practices are in sync with New York City’s long history of accommodating Jewish New Yorkers. But this is a false equivalence that deliberately ignores the fundamental difference between passive accommodation and active endorsement.
When previous mayors – from Ed Koch to Michael Bloomberg – showed an affinity towards Israel at the request of the Jewish community, they were most certainly not reflecting a religious point of view or participating in religious ritual, but rather acknowledging established U.S. foreign policy and the conventional wisdom about where U.S. interests lay and what constituted terrorism.
And when they accommodated Jewish religious observance, they were exercising what constitutional scholars call “negative liberty,” not promoting or endorsing anything – they were directing the government to simply stay out of the way.
Thus, suspending alternate-side parking regulations for Rosh Hashanah, allowing the stringing of an eruv on municipal utility poles, or adjusting sanitation schedules around Passover are classic accommodations. These measures required no active participation, no theological endorsement, no significant financial investment from the city. They existed solely to ensure that rigid bureaucratic rules do not unnecessarily punish or burden New Yorkers for quietly practicing their faith. When the city suspends parking rules for Yom Kippur, the government is not participating in the holiday – it is merely ensuring that a citizen isn’t slapped with a fine while sitting in synagogue.
But this is all in sharp contrast to the Mamdani approach, which has aggressively shifted from removing burdens to providing megaphones. When the mayor utilizes the historic Blue Room of City Hall – a publicly funded municipal infrastructure housed in his official residence – to host a religious service like the end of Ramadan and allow one of his prominent Islamic invitees’ call at the dinner for the killing of “infidels” – a tenet of radical Islam – to pass without comment, that is not an accommodation.
Nor was it an accommodation when Mamdani also left unremarked that same individual’s subsequent public characterization of the Oct. 7 massacre as “the attempt…by a desperate, ignored people to tell the story of its plight…and break the cycle.”
And did we mention that very same individual was reportedly a leader in the forcible takeover of Columbia University last year?
Mayor Mamdani has plainly signaled that the official promotion of Islam over other religions is now OK in N.Y.C. And that, further, by contextualizing the brutal events of Oct. 7, they can be explained away as a “desperate” necessity, then what constitutes “unjustifiable” has been seriously compromised.
Mayor Mamdani has been and is going way too far.