That Race For Mayor

By: Larry Gordon

We hear it a lot, especially out here on Long Island as well as other parts of the country where this publication is distributed.

The discussion about the mayoral race in New York City really got underway this week as summer dissolves into the past and people begin to think in earnest about what type of statement they’d like to make as they consider casting their vote.

First off, whether you reside in the Five Towns or Teaneck or Boca Raton or Jerusalem, you have a stake in this election on a number of levels.

Of course, the greatest potential danger is the strong possibility that Former Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani will become the next mayor of New York City. He is a danger to all New Yorkers, and especially Jewish New Yorkers, not just because of his Socialist policies, but also because of what he represents politically, and the message he sends to the world about where this country is headed in the post-Donald Trump era.

Mamdani represents what Barack Obama was hoping to do to America but failed. He represents the policies of Senator Bernie Sanders, the Squad, Jew-haters like Rashida Tlaib, and the policies of the worst mayor ever, Bill de Blasio, who left the city in such decline that people wondered if it was fixable.

One of the odd things about Mamdani is that for all practical purposes, he’s not running against incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, former Governor Andrew Cuomo, or Curtis Sliwa (our choice for mayor). It seems that all summer long, he has been running against President Donald Trump. But Trump, as we know, is not running for mayor of New York City.

In these days, with politics being at the sad, mistrusting level that it is on a national level, the only hope for failing Democrats is to run against the president if they want to capture any media attention at all.

Zohran Mamdani, until he launched his campaign for mayor of New York, was an obscure and insignificant member of the New York State Assembly, where being a leftist liberal is nothing new and little more than a big yawn.

In fact, if you look at his campaign to date, you will note that he had no real traction until he came out against Israel and in support of terrorism and terror merchants like Hamas and Hezbollah. If this is whom the majority of New Yorkers will vote for, they deserve whatever they get.

Mamdani uses buzz words like “BDS” and “seizing the means of production” that infuriate many and manage to encourage support among his significant number of slavish supporters. For example, one of his policies that he refuses to compromise on is to “Globalize the Intifada.” That means plainly and simply that you attack Jews wherever you can find them around the world.

In a meeting with business leaders on Tuesday, he was asked about his call to globalize the intifada. He responded that he does not plan to use that phrase again. In other words, he might think those words, and encourage others to scream them, but he will not utter them going forward.

He is also a devotee of “From the river to the sea” and “Free, free, free Palestine.” These are all phrases that can be interpreted at their simplest level to mean one thing: kill Jews and destroy Israel.

New York has the largest population of Jews after the State of Israel. If he wins, Mamdani will have the power to determine how the sanitation department is going to collect garbage and plow our streets after it snows. He will have to deal with union employees, whose mostly “no show,” superfluous, and highly remunerative jobs he will fight to keep on the books to ensure a second term.

He says he wants to do away with misdemeanor convictions and mostly allow those who commit crimes to leave jail before their victims can be released from the hospitals.

Mayoral Candidate Zohran Mamdani 

Credit Dmitryshein

But you hardly ever hear Mamdani issue a word about those issues. He’s running for mayor of New York, but all he can talk about is a Palestinian state and how to terrorize Jews in New York City and on campuses like Columbia and Harvard. If he gets elected, it will be a bad day for New York on multiple levels.

Firstly, the already ongoing exodus of businesses from New York in all likelihood will accelerate with a Mamdani mayoral victory. As of today, 48% of all New York City taxes are paid by 1% of the population. If most of that 1% picks up and leaves for Florida or Texas, and President Trump freezes all federal funding, which he said he would do, then get ready for New York to be in real fiscal peril.

As for the other candidates on the ballot, at this point none of them appear ready to withdraw their candidacy. We have the incumbent, Eric Adams, whose campaign has been shrouded in controversy, which essentially revolves around kickbacks and payoffs linked to the migrant crisis of the last few years where the mayor awarded no-bid contracts worth many millions of dollars. That pretty much ended the Adams campaign, which has been refused funds, which in New York City, amounts to $8 for every $1 raised.

Over the last six months, Adams had serious corruption charges from the Department of Justice dropped at President Trump’s direction. He is now running as an Independent since Mamdani won the Democratic primary back in June. Actually, Mamdani defeated Andrew Cuomo as Adams was running as an Independent once it became clear that Cuomo was in the race and for a while it looked like Cuomo was going to be able to defeat Mamdani in the primary.

As you know, that didn’t happen. Mamdani had a come-from-behind victory, handily defeating Cuomo.

The dynamics of this race suggest that if both Adams and Sliwa withdraw their candidacies, Cuomo will score a victory over Mamdani and save New York from the crazed lunatic left.

The fact of the matter is that neither Cuomo nor Adams should be considered worthy of our votes. Cuomo presided over a horror show during the Covid pandemic and came out of the disaster believing himself to be a hero when in fact he was the opposite, the man who oversaw a debacle for so many New Yorkers.

Mayoral Candidate Andrew Cuomo

Credit Pat Arnow

In fact, Cuomo at one point thought he was doing such a great job and commanded so much TV news time that there was talk that while Biden was losing it, Cuomo might be named as his heir apparent. Yes, for a while, the buzz was that Cuomo might be the man.

That was of course until two things occurred almost simultaneously. First, while Cuomo was bragging about how well he was managing the pandemic in New York State, his policies ended up causing the deaths of more than 18,000 people who resided in nursing homes.

Through his own personal mandate, Cuomo insisted that nursing homes should accept patients from hospitals, even though they were still infectious, while he convinced himself that the pandemic racing through nursing homes like wildfire was being brought in by the staff, who came and went home, possibly carrying the virus.

But the infections were traced back to those elderly patients from hospitals who even though still were ill with the virus, had to be released from the hospitals to make more room for infectious patients.

In the meantime, politics played a big part in Cuomo’s negligence that resulted in the deaths of so many people. This was during the first Trump presidency, when the president converted the Javits Center in Manhattan into a facility with 3,000 hospital beds that Cuomo refused to use simply because they were furnished by President Trump. There was no other reason.

President Trump also had a hospital ship docked on the West Side of Manhattan, fully staffed with doctors and nurses, that Governor Cuomo refused to use only because it was furnished by the Republican president.

After that lethal fiasco, Cuomo was also charged with sexually harassing as many as a dozen women, mostly in his office in Albany.

So, is this the retread that New York needs now? Is this our best bet as a way of keeping the leftist lunatic Mamdani out of our lives?

Caption Mayoral Candidate Curtis Sliwa

And then there is long-time radio host and Guardian Angels founder, Curtis Sliwa. Okay, perhaps he’s not the seasoned politician that Cuomo and Adams are, but those two are so tainted that if we get lucky, let’s say, and either is elected, there is bound to be more trouble for them down the road.

Curtis Sliwa has a clean political record and knows the ins and outs of the city unlike anyone else seeking elected office. For some reason, even though he is the Republican candidate, President Trump refuses to utter his name. Perhaps Sliwa did not support Trump strongly enough in 2024, or maybe there are some other reasons on either or both of their pasts.

In any event, so far this week Sliwa is moving up in the legitimate polls while the other candidates are mostly stagnating. Cuomo last week manufactured his own paid for poll that showed him up 11% on Mamdani.

There are two months until Election Day with a great deal at stake. I’d like to see Trump make a bold move and throw his support behind Sliwa and force Adams to go home and wait for another opportunity on another day.

This might be the first election where the future mayor of New York is best known for calling for the destruction of Israel while encouraging others to look away as Jews in the city are assaulted.

Doesn’t anyone out there have any shame? n

Read more of Larry Gordon’s articles at 5TJT.com. Follow 5 Towns Jewish Times on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter for updates and live videos. Comments, questions, and suggestions are welcome at 5TJT.com and on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.