By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News
Zohran Mamdani is now third in the amount of campaign funds he has banked among the dozen people running in New York City’s mayoral elections to be held in November.
He has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars in the last two months, and with matching funds from the government, he now trails only the incumbent mayor, Eric Adams, and former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, with a war chest of some $3.2 million.
He received a huge boost over the last week alone, after a face-off with border “czar” Tom Homan went viral, garnering some three million views.
In the clip, besides objecting loudly to Homan’s mandate to deport the illegal immigrants who have flooded the country over the last four years, Mamdani can be seen yelling, “How many more New Yorkers will you detain? How many more New Yorkers without charge? Do you believe in the First Amendment?”
This was a reference to the case of Mahmoud Khalil, who was arrested for his support of Hamas, a proscribed terror organization in the U.S, which he demonstrated especially last year as one of the leaders of anti-Israel protests and building takeovers at Columbia University, where he was a graduate student.
The authorities are in the midst of deportation proceedings for the permanent resident, and his defenders are outraged, saying that what he has said and done is covered under his right of free speech.
Mamdani said after the confrontation that “There is no answer for taking a man from his pregnant wife.”
He called the arrest an act of “cowardice” and said that New Yorkers are “looking to their leaders for courage and conviction” instead of “collaboration.”
Mamdani has stood out for his anti-Israel stance, as could be seen in a capsule description written about of all the candidates on city&stateny.com, which covers local politics and policies.
Mamdani’s ideological stance was described as “The left-est of them all. A pro-Palestine Socialist Democrat who isn’t shy about it.”
His summarized platform, it said, was “to freeze the rent, make buses free, make child care free, build public supermarkets and criticize Israel.”
An unnamed veteran political campaigner told The New York Post Wednesday that Mamdani was “in a category all by himself. I’ve never seen someone so far to the left. He’s anti Israel, he’s all up in the protests and violence. This is not how a mayoral candidate behaves.”
An assemblyman from Queens, Mamdani is a Muslim who has the endorsement of the Democratic Socialists of America, a virulently anti-Israel party whose members have been heavily involved in many of the demonstrations that call for the Jewish state’s destruction and support Palestinian terrorism as acts of legitimate “resistance.”
