A Miracle in NYC

...And it's not the one in the movie "Miracle on 34th Street"

[Note: A version of this essay appeared in this morning’s edition of American Thinker, and may be seen here.]

There's a miracle happening in New York City. It might be the greatest miracle since "Miracle on 34th Street," that classic Christmas movie starring Edmund Gwenn and Maureen O'Hara, about a department store Santa who just might be the real St. Nicholas.

This latest miracle is in no way as positive as the one on 34th St., but it is a miracle nevertheless.

The miracle is that a candidate for Mayor of NYC, the position that New Yorkers call "Hizzoner," has come along who makes the most abysmal of NYC's previous mayors actually look good! And that is no mean feat, considering just how godawful some of NYC's mayors have been!

It's hard to imagine that someone could make Abe Beame or David Dinkins look good, but they were merely corrupt and/or incompetent. They pale in comparison to the likes of Michael Bloomberg, Bill de Blasio or Eric Adams, all of whom deliberately implemented policies that increased the cost of living while decreasing freedom and the quality of life. But now comes Zohran Mamdani, who seems to be on track to be NYC's next mayor, and yet also seems on track to finish NYC off once and for all, or at least to complete the fundamental transformation of NYC into a Third-World shithole.

To expose Mamdani as a doctrinaire Socialist (he's a member of Democratic Socialists of America) doesn't really do him justice, and criticizing him for the negative effects on economics and crime his policies will bring does not condemn him nearly enough.

Because, in addition to being a big-time proponent of "Defund the Police" (he believes that the police are more responsible for rising crime than are criminals, lenient judges and no-bail policies), and in addition to believing that food stores exploit the people and should be taken over and run by the city, and in addition to proposing that public transit be free, and rents be frozen (all of which policies will be disastrous), Mamdani is unabashedly pro-"Palestinian" and anti-Israel.

He is on record as stating as stating that he does not believe that Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state, which is a criticism he has not leveled at any other nation, be it Muslim, Christian, or Hindu. Let that sink in for a moment. Consider the chutzpah it takes for a candidate for Mayor of NYC to make such a statement (except that chutzpah can be cute, and there's nothing cute about denying Israel's right to exist).

And he has also proudly declared that should Israeli PM Netanyahu appear in NYC, Mamdani will have him arrested. (It’s nice to know that, despite his disrespect, contempt and hostility for the NYPD, Mamdani can still find them useful!)

• New York City Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, who declared victory in the Democratic primary for mayor on Tuesday, previously said that he would arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he ever visited the city. (Getty Images) •

He is a Jew-hater of the first order, and has even invoked the phrase "Globalize the Intifada" in his speeches and has put forth the patently spurious spin that "intifada" has nothing to do with anti-Jewish violence.

Mamdani even added insult to injury by claiming that "intifada" merely means "uprising" and comparing it to the uprising against the Nazis by the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto. And this in a city that has the largest Jewish population outside of Israel! I shudder to think of what will become of the Jewish population of NYC with this slick Muslim huckster at the city's helm.

As unabashed a Jew-hater as he is, Mamdani is also an unabashed Trump-hater. Thus, he has great appeal among those whose hatred for Donald Trump surpasses even their capacity for rational thought and their very instincts for self-preservation. Among them are self-hating Jews (of which, tragically and perplexingly, there is no shortage in NYC) who will cut off their own noses to spite Donald Trump.

All this is nothing short of miraculous in how it makes de Blasio and Adams look far more preferable by comparison. Even Andrew Cuomo, the former governor of New York State whose COVID policies condemned so many elderly citizens to a lonely death, came out looking like a far more palatable alternative to Mamdani, although Mamdani now appears to have prevailed, casting Cuomo back onto the ash-heap of history (where he so deservedly belongs).

Just as London, England's election of Sadiq Khan as mayor is one of the factors that has led many to now call London "Londonistan," we can look forward to NYC becoming "New Yorkistan," with all its attendant accommodations to Muslim "values" as well as to Socialism.

So far, at least, no plans have been announced to convert the bathrooms in Gracie Mansion to Turkish toilets, or whether there will be ritual beheadings on the front lawn.

What I'd really like to see, however unlikely, would be the real miracle of enough New Yorkers wising up (and rising up!) and electing Curtis Sliwa, who is the Republican nominee for mayor. He ran in 2021 and was defeated by Eric Adams.

Curtis is a Polish-Italian Catholic who was born in 1954 in Canarsie; by contrast Mamdani, a Muslim, was born in 1991 in Uganda, to an Indian-Ugandan father and an Indian-American mother.

Sliwa is the founder of the Guardian Angels, and embodies the true spirit of what NYC once was. I remember Curtis from his early days as a Bronx McDonald's manager and martial artist who organized his crew to clean up around his restaurant. While doing so, they intervened in several muggings. This led to riding "The Muggers' Express," one of the subway trains that Curtis rode between the Bronx and his home in Brooklyn.

This was in about 1977 (when Mayor Abe Beame brought the city to the brink of bankruptcy), and the subways, like the rest of the city, were rife with crime. Curtis's crew was "diverse" before "diversity" was a catchword; they called themselves "The Magnificent 13" and were the self-appointed protectors of the riders on that subway train. In 1979 Curtis formed The Guardian Angels and the rest is history.

[I didn’t set out to make this essay swerve into a paean to Curtis Sliwa, but if it has, so be it. If I were to wear a T-shirt depicting a beret-clad “heroic” figure, it wouldn’t be the cowardly murdering psychopath Ché Guevara, it would be the truly heroic and quintessential New Yorker, Curtis Sliwa.]

I am hoping for a history-making miracle: Not the election of NYC's youngest mayor ever and its first foreign-born and first Muslim mayor, but the election of a true American and true New Yorker, who believes in Capitalism, the Constitution, and the values that were once cherished by most New Yorkers and most Americans.

ST