Dr. King gave us the playbook less than 60 years ago. His movement didn’t rely on lesser-evil voting—it demanded clear moral commitments. It didn’t campaign for parties—it used direct action to force change. It didn’t beg politicians for justice—it built a movement that made justice unavoidable. They secured voting rights, ended legal segregation, and reshaped the entire political landscape. And they didn’t stop there. They fought to end war, lift the working class, and demand economic dignity for all. Affordable cities. Good slogan for New York. Good slogan for planet earth. - Matthew Cooke
"Zoharan Mandani won the primary. That's not good—it's great, because democratic socialism means economic rights—the kind that Roosevelt implemented that led to the creation of the first majority middle-class society in the history of the entire world.
You know, the 1950s dream that MAGA wants to get back to?
Zoran wants that, minus the shameless racism.
And he has tens of thousands of Jewish supporters. So, cut it out with the lies and smears and fake religious wars you want to start. Nobody's buying it anymore.
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are three branches of one family tree that share the same origin story, prophets, prayers, words, and ideas. The differences between Judeo, Christian, and Muslim values are no greater than the differences between any human being and another. Nobody gets to define what somebody's religion means to them.
Just between you and me, everybody knows a white nationalist assassinating public servants, regulating women's bodies, or photographing their kids over the holidays with firearms has a lot more in common with al-Qaeda than the people who want to feed the hungry, house the houseless, and love the foreigner—which appears to be the same religion as Zoharan Mandani. Thousands of New York Jews reflect the words on our Statue of Liberty and the explicit teachings of Jesus Christ.
The word religion comes from "religio," which asks what do you hold sacred, or "relegare," to what do you bind yourself. Is it creativity, caring for one another? If so, we have the same religion. If it's destruction—a gun or a bomb—I do not know you. If you believe that which caused the entire universe and keeps it spinning cannot possibly be fathomed by a human being, or that surrendering one's ego to the highest power is the healthiest way to navigate this mystery—mashallah, we have the same religion, mas'tov, and praise Jesus (although that was definitely not his name). It's okay; words are not as important as intentions, which are not as important as actions. Like, graffiti on a warplane is just a sign of humanity, but signatures on bombs are confessions of war crimes, although I'm not sure that's worse than genocide denial. But nothing is worse than genocide itself: the deliberate and systemic destruction of a group of people based on their ethnicity, nationality, religion, or race, with the intent to destroy in whole or in part.
That word was coined in 1942 by a Polish Jewish lawyer named Raphael Lemkin, and his Lemkin Institute, along with every major human rights organization on earth, has recognized that genocide is the crime that Israel is committing against the people of Palestine. And in case there's any doubt, their public officials confess it repeatedly. People march in their streets chanting "death to Arabs." Israel's own newspaper, Haaretz, has now published firsthand accounts from IDF soldiers admitting they were instructed to kill starving men, women, and children in what can only be described as killing fields. Over 410 people killed just in the last month.
Forty-four medical professionals told the New York Times that they had witnessed children shot in the head or chest deliberately, over and over. One 5-year-old girl was shot 335 times. Over 56,000 people have been killed—that's just the official number; it's probably way more. One third to nearly half of that number are children. Two million people have been bombed out of their homes, held hostage—not for leverage, nor trade, not for the return of dozens of Israeli hostages. The only demand placed upon these millions of people is to die or somehow disappear. And this has been the mission from the beginning, as expressed by Israel's first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion in a letter to his own son, where he wrote, "We must expel Arabs and take their place."
And that has been the official policy position of Western governments—anti-Islam, anti-Arab—convenient, as the military-industrial complex needs endless war and a forever enemy to stay in business. As the world's largest fraudster, failing every audit since auditing began, in the business of dropping bombs week after week on 90% civilians, making every bomb a weapon of mass destruction and every bomb maker a war criminal. But nobody appears to have the guts or power to stop them because they have the world's largest annual budget—free taxpayer money, zero accountability—which they use not only to kill the innocent and perpetuate forever war, but to guzzle down endless fossil fuels as the world's biggest polluter and purchase every congressperson, every senator, and every White House figurehead regardless of political party, which is why the US and Israel will always have the right to exist—in conflict.
A project which uses 1,984 different versions of doublespeak to spin a 75-year ethnic cleansing campaign as the right to self-defense—like claiming that everybody has equal rights in Israel except for the Palestinians. This is not the spirit of Abraham or Moses or Christ that backs genocide, bombs sovereign countries, shreds its constitution, inducts big tech executives into the army (which is the core feature of fascism—the fusion of corporate power with the state), that has a secret police force disappearing Spanish speakers and Haitians, putting them in concentration camps while inviting white Afrikaners to seek asylum from the black nation that dared to imagine all human beings are equal.
And now, in one big ugly bill, wants to exponentially increase budgets for more concentration camps across the country, while kicking millions and millions off Medicaid—which is mostly low-income families, their kids, people with disabilities, and our elders. So if anyone wanted to know what the world would have looked like if the Nazis had won—welcome to it. And God forbid cities become affordable for everyone—which happens to be the slogan for Zoharan Mandani.
What a radical, what an extremist, what a rare miracle to find someone who might be worthy of being the representative of what is culturally, economically, historically the real capital of the United States—the world's most famous city, the world city, our city.
Perhaps we will have Zoharan Mandani as our mayor and an affordable city modeled on the same policies that created a middle class in the first place, when there was a promise of making America great one day.
Insha’Allah
Im Yirtzeh Hashem
God willing" - Matthew Cooke