Michael Goodwin: Mamdani removes his thin mask with first-day order rescinding definition of antisemitism

There are good and bad ways to start an administration, then there’s the way Zohran Mamdani did it.Dreadful, awful and horrible don’t fully capture his First Day fiasco.No political guru in the history of New York elections would advise a new mayor to launch his administration by picking a fight with Israel and adding fresh evidence to the suspicion that the city’s first Muslim mayor is an antisemite.Yet that’s exactly what Mamdani did by announcing that he had rescinded all the executive orders of his predecessor, Eric Adams, going back 15 months.Some were inconsequential, but two notably put the city on the side of Israel and were aimed at blocking official acts that smacked of antisemitism.With New York home to more than 1 million Jews, and with Israel, a key American ally, fighting for its survival against terrorists, it’s an extremely odd way for a mayor to start a four-year term.The sheer irrationality of it is a revealing sign, I believe, of Mamdani’s deep hostility bordering on hatred for the Jewish state and its supporters.Additionally, the swift and broad condemnation of what he did reveals that the Socialist Democrat is not the political wizard his enthralled followers believe he is.He got himself elected, but governing is the point and he begins the long march with a major unforced error.The first acts of any new administration are by definition outsized symbolic statements about priorities.

If Mamdani felt the need to single out a foil and use the bully pulpit to engage in rhetorical combat, there is no shortage of deserving targets.He could have — and should have — used the Day One spotlight to come down hard on gun runners, drug dealers, murderers and rapists, or crooked politicians, failing schools, rapacious unions and sluggish bureaucrats.But to launch an attack on Israel and its supporters by going after the Adams’ executive orders as if they were the devil makes no sense.It was a choice borne wholly of the new mayor’s long-es...