The Next Worry

Admittedly, New York City will not soon be threatening Israel with nuclear weapons, even if Mamdani wins, so the greatest threat to my loved ones has been largely removed. But I have many friends living and working in the Big Apple, and I fear for their safety in a city run by a 33-year-old former rapper who has advocated defunding the police and who has made no secret of his antipathy to the only majority Jewish country in the world.

On a deeper level, I worry that Mamdani’s victory is a harbinger of a dark future for the United States, and that rabid anti-Israel beliefs have become de rigueur among a certain class of overeducated, young progressives. Historically, at least going back to the Roman Empire, great empires have met their downfall not primarily at the hands of stronger enemies but because of the internal rot of their decadent upper classes.

On that score, Mamdani’s triumph is only one of many recent warning signs. The first was the widespread campus support for Hamas in the immediate aftermath of the Simchas Torah massacre. Support for the most savage and sadistic murders of over 1,000 Israeli civilians — murders that put the Manson family to shame — and the widespread brutalization of women is a form of mental derangement, and a reminder of why Dostoevsky’s portrayal of the Russian anarchists of his time is better translated as The Demons than by the more familiar title The Possessed.

The same mental derangement is found among groups loudly proclaiming their support for Hamas, but whose members would be hung from the nearest lamppost or cast from the top of a tall building within five minutes of arriving in Gaza.