In a sign of things to come in Zohran Mamdani’s People’s Republic of New York City, a radical councilman wants to evict two local manufacturing startups from the Brooklyn Navy Yard because their clients include the Israeli army, the Border Patrol and — worst of all? — “even the NYPD.”
Easy Aerial builds drones; Crye Precision makes tactical gear, including body armor.
Chi Ossé, a Mamdani cheerleader who just joined the local Democratic Socialists, says “companies complicit in genocide should not be doing business in Brooklyn.” Especially when they “bring zero benefit to our communities.”
Employing New Yorkers and generating tax revenue sound like pretty good benefits. What else should they do — make Chi posters?
But this radical proposal — punishing businesses with any ties to Israel — will surely be standard Mamdani administration policy.
The would-be mayor is a longtime, fervent advocate for the “Boycott Divestment Sanctions” movement against Israel; in Albany, he’s pushed a bill to strip pro-Israel charities of their tax status.
When he gets to City Hall, going after Israel and local Israel-related entities will be low-hanging fruit .
Here’s the thing: A lot of Mamdani’s pie-in-the-sky “affordability” agenda is out of reach. He may be able to freeze some rents for a year or two, but he can’t raise most taxes nor boost the minimum wage to $30.
What Mamdani will be able to do is mess with Israel and anyone who won’t boycott it.
He can order every city agency to review its contracts and supply chains and “de-Zionize” them.
Heck, Mamdani has already called for a boycott of Cornell Tech — the graduate center on Roosevelt Island seen as a lynchpin of growing Silicon Alley —because it’s a partnership with the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, one of the world’s premier tech universities.
He vows to withdraw whatever “municipal subsidies” go to Cornell Tech, with no concern for how it might harm the city’s economic future.
It gets much worse: Mamdani has signaled that he’ll let lefty protests run wild.
It’s not just that he’s vowed to disband the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group, which handles counter-terrorism and riots, among other duties: He’s also declared that “First Amendment activity” will get wide latitude.
In other words, cops will have to sit on their hands rather than head off wildcat demonstrations, traffic sit-ins and hostile marches into Jewish neighborhoods.
Will he make the NYPD stand back, Portland-style, as antifa attacks federal courthouses?
Even if Mamdani doesn’t explicitly call for antisemitic pogroms, the violent agitators in his base already feel emboldened, as the city’s have seen in recent days.
Everyone voting for “affordability” may discover they’ve instead bought the city four years of rioting.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
