This is exactly the point where the historic tolerance of the middle east is most direly needed, but common ground in so many contexts is absent.
I hope that we can put ourselves back together. We've seen the consequences this year of its lack.
Sure. Broadly. But there is one correct answer a mayoral candidate could give on such an issue, and it’s the one Mamdani gave.
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies—in the final sense—a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than thirty cities.
It is: two electric power plants, each serving a town of sixty thousand population.
It is: two fine, fully equipped hospitals.
It is: some fifty miles of concrete highway.
We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.
We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than eight thousand people.
This—I repeat—is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.
This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/states-war/humanity-hanging...
Eric Adams: Lebanon 2024, Israel 2023, Quatar 2022
Bill de Blasio: Israel 2015
What should not happen obviously does.
Maybe guns or butter is a false dichotomy. Or perhaps the even tougher lesson: a country with an information economy ends up with neither.
We are all receptive of Jewish people. We are not receptive of our country, who cut off food benefits, cut people's flights, cut people's medical insurance subsidies, funding and enabling a state where of the native born population, only Jewish people get to vote and have autonomy, and other non-Jewish ethnicities live under the control of a state they have no rights in purely because of their ethnicity. No one supports that part