Snow uncleared, garbage piling up? Mamdani’s remedy is to take a page out of the Middle Eastern playbook he’s spent his entire adult life admiring.
The homeless are dying in the streets, consigned to their chosen fates by a city that regards anything other than deference to mental illness and drug addiction as a compassion deficit. The death toll in New York City has risen to 17 so far this year — a figure that is illustrative of the “breakdown of a lot of systems here,” according to local union vice president Anthony Almojera.
The trash is piling up on city streets. Garbage collectors are unable to reach their targets because of persistent snow cover that has also not been cleared nearly two weeks after the last bout of winter precipitation. “New York City’s 311 system is temporarily not accepting trash complaints until routes resume their normal schedule,” PIX11 reported. Sanitation and public health concerns have led New York City residents to pick up the city’s slack themselves.
Metaphors for NYC’s elementary failures of governance abound, including a “real dumpster fire,” as the New York Post captioned the image of the flaming dump truck that rolled through Queens on Monday. It was just one of the many large trucks and buses that have struggled to navigate the still-snowbound city, depriving residents of the services and deliveries on which they depend.
What’s a mayor to do? Well, if you’re Zohran Mamdani, you might take a page out of the Middle Eastern playbook that you’ve spent your entire adult life admiring.
When constituents in the Muslim world begin to vocally resent the breakdown of essential civil services, their leaders redirect their discontent by leaning hard into their anti-Zionist bona fides. If those governments cannot provide their residents competent and capable governance, they can at least dispense a good deal of anti-Israel propaganda. Mayor Mamdani’s “Global Oppression Working Group,” somehow a division of the city’s Department of Health, seems perfectly calibrated to compensate for his nascent administration’s failures.
“We really developed in response to the ongoing genocide in Palestine,” said one of the “Working Group’s” presenters reading from a mission statement in a video first reported by the Post. “And the working group aims to address the growing interests among the health department staff to learn about current and ongoing global oppression in its many forms and how it influences the advancement of health equity.”
The Post continued:
Weeam Hammoudeh, a professor at Hunter College and committee member for the Palestine Global Mental Health Network, was one of the presenters — and accused Israel of treating Palestinians as second-class citizens during the meeting.
“So Palestinian citizens of Israel are citizens but they’re not considered nationals of the state so they’re more restricted in terms of the areas that they can live in and then some like jobs and other opportunities also require military service, and that creates another set of sort of disparities in outcomes,” she said. . .
“Developed in response to the ongoing genocide in Palestine, the working group aims to address the growing interest among health department staff to learn about current and ongoing global oppression in its many forms and how it influences the advancement of health equity,” the mission statement said.
It has been abundantly clear for some time that what really enthuses Mamdani is not the banalities of municipal governance but his lifelong antipathy toward Israel. His many progressive policy preferences have, to one degree or another, proven negotiable. His unfounded belief that Israel is a genocidal apartheid state is not.
Perhaps Mamdani hopes that the hate he hopes to cultivate will keep his fellow New Yorkers warm through this cruel winter. But New Yorkers are not accustomed to the level of dysfunction at which the Middle East’s polities languish. Maybe they’d better get used to it.