Per Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Israel is why things are so tough here at home, right down to the poor conditions in NYCHA buildings -- and even the fact that babies need diapers. Getty Images See more of our coverage in your search results.
Add The New York Post on Google Per Mayor Zohran Mamdani, New York’s problem with Israel goes way beyond the “genocide” in Gaza.
The Jewish state, he explains, is also why things are so tough here at home, right down to the poor conditions in New York City Housing Authority buildings — and even the fact that babies need diapers.
No joke: In a recent sit-down with The New York Times, Hizzoner described an experience he had walking around Washington Heights with Democratic congressional nominee Darializa Avila Chevalier.
“We were discussing the amount of money that our federal government sends, billions of dollars, to the Israeli military,” the mayor related, and “a man came out of a bodega with his hands full with two packages of Huggies. And you see what the priorities are of people living in the district.”
It’s hard to know which part of that anecdote makes the least sense.
The two socialists were talking about the “billions of dollars” the US gives the Israeli military (of course they were), and then — wait for it! — they saw a man buying diapers.
Does the mayor think only poor people buy diapers, and/or that Israel makes babies soil themselves?
Is he implying that, if only we didn’t give Israel so much money, diapers would be free, and parents wouldn’t have to buy them?
Last April, Mamdani told Politico “it is hard” to explain to his constituents in NYCHA’s Queensbridge Houses “why they have to live in substandard conditions . . . while we continue to find billions of dollars to drop bombs that kill tens of thousands of Palestinians.”
To be clear, the United States gives Israel about $3.3 billion in arms credits every year (the cash stays in America). By contrast, NYCHA has a capital repair backlog of $80 billion.
So even if the US cut Israel off completely and Congress dedicated all that funding to NYCHA, it’s unlikely residents at the Queensbridge Houses would notice much difference.
Yet Mamdani’s point is a common theme on the anti-Zionist left.
The US Campaign for Palestinian Rights (the US umbrella group for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement that, per Tablet, also indirectly facilitates tax-exempt donations to Palestinian terror groups) claims New York’s share of military aid to Israel “could instead fund” 929,393 households with one month’s free rent; 3,119,164 families with one month’s free groceries; 515,790 children with free healthcare; and so on.
The USCPR provides similar breakouts for every state.
Wow, you might think: Israel really is the cause of all human misery and need in America today.
Look at everything we could have . . . if it wasn’t for greedy Israel.
Yet creating long lists of everything that $3.3 billion could buy is deceptive.
Behavioral economists call this the “multiple-use fallacy,” which is when a resource is promised simultaneously to satisfy more needs than remotely possible.
Think of a child imagining how he will spend his pocket money: “I can go to the movies, get a new video game, a skateboard, a catcher’s mitt . . . and put the rest in my college fund!”
Mamdani is playing a similar game by repeatedly referencing military funding to Israel in connection with a wide variety of domestic needs, implying all those needs could be answered simply by breaking with Israel.
In reality, $3.3 billion is just 0.04% — four one-hundredths of 1% — of America’s $7 trillion annual budget. (And again, that money is spent in America.)
For perspective, consider that roughly $6.9 billion is lost to Medicaid fraud every year . . . just in New York.
True, some people don’t want to give even one penny to other countries, or to Israel, in particular.
That point of view, applied consistently, might have a legitimate basis.
But playing a shell game as Mamdani and other anti-Israel activists do, pretending that aid to Israel is the reason why New Yorkers have to spend their own money to buy diapers, is a vicious — and ridiculous — lie.
Seth Barron is a member of The Post Editorial Board and the author of the new book “Weaponized.”
