The rise of the Socialist left in New York is a bad omen for obvious reasons.
The radical agenda is uniformly anti-police, pro-criminal, favors wildly expanded government powers over private property and demands punishing taxes on businesses and high-income families to fund its redistribution schemes.
If that were all, it would still be a destructive and dangerous movement.
But the post-election analysis from last week’s New York primary races finds another driving force among the winning candidates.
Namely, the hatred of all things Israel, and those who dare support the Jewish state.
It hardly needs to be said that the pied piper of this sickening eruption is Mayor Mamdani.
He started it and continues to fan the flames of antisemitism.
And now New Yorkers have made the added mistake of electing a cadre of clones.
As Jay Jacobs, the state leader of the beleaguered Democratic Party’s state leader, told The Post, the pro-Palesinian, anti-Israel furor “was a more important issue” in luring voters to races that otherwise had very low turnouts.
Overall, only abut 17% of registered Dems voted in the districts where the Socialist candidates beatprevailed over other Dems, some of them incumbents.
ADL blames hate, too
The Anti-Defamation League effectively reached the same conclusion, saying in a statement that the winners in the three hotly contested congressional primary winnersies rode to victory on a “movement built on antisemitic rhetoric.”
It said that as Mamdani walked through an election night victory party of the Democratic Socialists of America, some people chanted “from the river to the sea,” part of a coded Palestinian message calling for the elimination of Israel.
“We’re witnessing candidates succeed not in spite of demonizing rhetoric against the Jewish community and the Jewish state, but because of it,” the organization added.
It also made a larger point by noting that, “When leaders cheer slogans that dehumanize Jews, it does not stay at a victory party. It bleeds into schools, neighborhoods and daily life, putting Jewish families, children and neighborhoods at risk.”
Against that backdrop, the surge of hate crimes against Jews and Jewish institutions is not a coincidence.
The attacks are the poisoned fruits of a movement based on hate.
That this is happening in New York is more than a minor rupture with the past.
For much of the past 50 years, Democrats were the most ardent and consistent supporters of Israel.
At the same time, in many Jewish households, being a Dem and voting for the party’s candidates became near-religious rituals.
Jews played pivotal roles in the civil rights movement, and have been in the forefront of most liberal causes ever since.
But the party has changed dramatically in recent years.
Barack Obama started his presidency by apologizing to Arabs for America’s Mideast policies.
Beyond his ignorance about much of that history, he demonstrated complete disdain for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Along with his championing Palestinian causes, the moves made Obama the most unpopular American president in Israel since its post-World-War 11 founding.
It’s now clear that the Obama years opened the door for an even bigger shift in the Dems’ view of Israel, which has declined sharply in the past three years.
The oddest thing is what propelled it to change so quickly.
Pollsters have noted a decided turn against Israel since the savage Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack.
A February Gallup survey reported that only 33% of Democrats say they are pro-Israel, while 60% say they view our close ally unfavorably.
Gallup says that is the first time a majority of any political party held negative views on the Jewish state since the question was first asked in 1989.
Dem future at stake
The finding comes despite the horrors of the Hamas attack, but timing suggests Dem views were changed by distorted media coverage of the war in Gaza that followed and that converted Palestinians into the victims.
The bestial slaughter of 1,200 Israelis, most of them civilians, including women and children, who were, raped, killed or taken hostage, were shoved aside by inflated figures about Palestinian casualties released by Hamas propaganda outlets.
Much of that coverage, from American television networks, wire services and leftist outlets led by The New York Times, amplified Hamas’ false charges of genocide and the starvation of children.
As the incomparable Douglas Murray wrote, Israel is the only nation not allowed to win a war.
The media’s stew of falsehoods helped to launch the keffiyeh-wearing mobs on elite college campuses, many of whom demonstrated their antisemitism and their ignorance by denouncing Israel as a colonialist state that has no basis in the region.
That same movement then helped to propel Mamdani from Albany’s back benches into City Hall.
That he vowed not to visit Israel and to arrest Netanyahu if he ever came to New York, breathed new life into the coals of the ancient hatred.
Never mind that Netanyahu was indicted by the International Criminal Court, which the US does not recognize.
What mattered most was that Mamdani expressed his contempt for all things Israel, a view he has repeatedly offered, most recently by being the first mayor in six decades to boycott New York’s Israel Day Parade.
And now his example and support have elected some like-minded bigots.
How and where this ends is impossible to predict, but it seems to me that there are two possible outcomes.
Either decent and wise Dems will rise up and marginalize the Jew haters, or watch as their party is completely consumed by them.