Mayor Mamdani has thrown his support behind DSA activist Darializa Avila Chevalier, who helped organize anti-Israel protests at Columbia University.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani upended Democratic expectations this week when he abandoned his pledge to endorse longtime congressman and Hispanic Caucus chairman Adriano Espaillat’s reelection bid. Instead, Mamdani threw his support behind Espaillat’s insurgent challenger, Darializa Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old organizer with the Democratic Socialists of America.
The otherwise unknown Chevalier’s claim to fame stems from her efforts to “organize protests at Columbia University against the war in Gaza,” the New York Times observed. That record might appeal to the rabid activist class, but those with a clearer recollection of the “tentifada” to which she contributed are unlikely to agree.
According to Columbia’s own after-action reports, the anti-Israel demonstrations that erupted on campus in the immediate aftermath of the October 7 massacre featured plenty of violence. Israeli students were assaulted. The visibly Jewish were intimidated, harassed, and even attacked. The campus was compelled, after prolonged delays, to rely on the NYPD to quell the disruptions. Administrators even briefly closed the campus just to get their hands around the mob. It was a national scandal and a disgrace that compelled former university president Minouche Shafik to step down amid withering congressional scrutiny of her permissiveness.
According to the findings of the university’s antisemitism task force (another lamentable legacy of that violent outburst), hundreds of Jewish students testified to the bitterness of their experience at the hands of their pro-Hamas tormentors. They “were on the receiving end of ethnic slurs, stereotypes about supposedly dangerous Israeli veterans, antisemitic tropes about Jewish wealth and hidden power, threats and physical assaults, exclusion of Zionists from student groups, and inconsistent standards,” the task force’s report found.
The spectacle on campus was so menacing that the panel insisted on adding a clause to the school’s code of conduct, which would contend that “celebrating violence against Jews or Israelis and discriminating against them based on their ties to Israel” is antisemitic. As though that needed to be said.
In a just world, the DSA would get the recognition it deserves as a run-of-the-mill hate group. But because socialism and its attendant prejudices are all the rage these days, the DSA and its agitators get a pass. The voters of New York’s 13th congressional district might be willing to look beyond Chevalier’s indiscretions, but the national GOP would be foolish not to shine the spotlight on her and her comrades.
The GOP may have an odor about it these days, but the alternative to Republican governance is ghastly.