Mamdani pushes the Jewish hate that leads to ‘Allahu Akbar’ stabbing

Thursday’s attack on a Jewish man on the Upper West Side hit particularly close to home.

The stabbing happened a few blocks from my house, and the victim wore a big, black yarmulke, just like me.

But even more troubling than the thought that it could easily have been me — or my son — on the other end of that blade, was the following grim realization: Attacks like this one are only the beginning, never the end.

If you think I’m being needlessly alarmist, just look at France.

In 2017, a Jewish woman named Sarah Halimi was tortured and killed in her apartment; the man who killed her later shouted “Allahu Akbar” while throwing her body off her third-floor balcony.

A year later Mireielle Knoll, an 85-year-old Holocaust survivor, was stabbed 11 times by a Muslim man who later set her apartment on fire.

A 12-year-old Jewish girl was raped in 2024 by three of her schoolmates, who laughed as they hurled antisemitic slurs at her; a year later, a rabbi was assaulted in Orleans.

That’s a very partial list.

Last year, the French government recorded 1,320 instances of antisemitic violence, a historically high rate.

Things aren’t much better in England, where a few harassment cases in 2021 — two years before Oct. 7 and the alleged Israeli “genocide” in Gaza — were followed by a violent attack on a rabbi in Chigwell; a terrorist attack on a synagogue in Manchester during Yom Kippur, killing two; and, just this April, the stabbing of two Jews by a Muslim immigrant from Somalia.

When the violence first started, Jewish groups in England and France reacted much like Jewish groups in New York are reacting right now, expressing shock and outrage and demanding protection.

And English and French politicians rushed, just as politicians in New York are rushing right now, to pay lip service and promise that the attacks were aberrations that cannot and will not be tolerated.

And yet the attacks persisted and grew more deadly, precisely because they weren’t aberrations.

They were the natural, almost predictable outcome of a violent Jihadi ideology — and despite the politicians’ proclamations, they were very much tolerated.

This last part shouldn’t be too hard for New Yorkers to understand.

Those of us who have lived here long enough to see New York transformed from a crime-ridden hellscape to a safe and prosperous city, and then decline again, understand the profound wisdom of the broken windows theory: When you ignore a public-safety problem and let it go unchecked, it’s only going to get much worse.

New York’s politicians have long put up with violence in the name of “Palestine.”

Mayor Zohran Mamdani even encouraged it this week, when he advised his base to take to the streets and protest Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he visits the city in the fall.

Talk like that, and don’t be surprised when the Islamists are emboldened to protest as they always do: with a knife, a gun or a bomb.

And don’t be surprised, either, when your peaceful and prosperous society is no longer either of these things because your streets are now thick with murderous marauders.

That, really, is the most important thing to understand about Thursday’s stabbing: The victim may have been Jewish, but the attack was not against the Jews.

It was an attack on America itself, because a city in which this sort of thing keeps happening — a city where we can no longer walk freely without fearing a religiously motivated attack, a city where elected officials are quick to explain that the stabber shouting “Allahu Akbar” was mentally ill and didn’t really mean it, a city where everyone pledges to fight alleged “Islamophobia” but no one does anything to address the much more acute threat of Islamism — a city like that can no longer be considered an American city.

Because we Americans will never tolerate the sort of murderous chaos we see every other week in England or in France.

We’ll never put up with stabbings as the new normal.

We’ll fight to stay not only safe but also free.

And the first step in this fight is standing firm against those — including, sadly, our own mayor — who cheer on the violence rather than confront it.

Liel Leibovitz is editor at large for Tablet and senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.