“All New Yorkers at heart are in mourning today,” Bernard-Henri Lévy was moved after the election of Democrat Zohran Mamdani. “Nothing justifies anti-Semitism. No social programs, no concern for minorities – nothing. Mr. Mamdani’s anti-Semitism is not an opinion, it is a crime”he lamented on X this Wednesday, November 5.
Already on Monday, the philosopher was worried about his potential victory, believing that the Muslim candidate had made comments of a “pure and simple, unvarnished anti-Semitism”. Bernard-Henri Lévy was referring to statements made in 2023, during a convention of Democratic Socialists of America, where Zohran Mamdani assured that Israel was linked to police violence in the United States: “To ensure that everyone feels concerned about these issues, we have to make them local, very concrete. We must make it clear that when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it is the IDF that laced it. »
New York’s first Muslim mayor
“May the voters of New York remember this”hoped, in vain, Bernard-Henri Lévy. Donald Trump’s appeal to Jewish voters to block the candidate, an activist for the Palestinian cause, did not work either. The 34-year-old socialist finally won the mayoralty of New York on Tuesday at the end of an evening of local elections in which the American president suffered several setbacks. On January 1, Zohran Mamdani will become the first Muslim mayor of the “Big Apple”. He will also be the youngest to ever hold this position.
Born in Uganda into a family of intellectuals of Indian origin, arrived in the United States at seven years old and naturalized in 2018, Zohran Mamdani committed, in his victory speech, to “build a town hall that (…) will not weaken in the fight against the scourge of anti-Semitism.”
