Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo during last week’s final New York City mayoral debate at Rockefeller Center. (Photo by Angelina Katsanis-Pool/Getty Images)
Pool/Getty Images
In late December 1657, the citizens of the small town of Vlissingen, now known as Flushing in the proud borough of Queens, wrote to Peter Stuyvesant, the director-general of New Netherland. Their subject was the increasingly draconian enforcement of a provision of the 17-year-old Charter of Freedoms and Exemptions, which restricted public religious expression in the colony to the Dutch Reformed faith.
The authors of what has become known as the Flushing Remonstrance expressed their disdain for the director-general’s recent statements and actions that persecuted Quakers, Lutherans and Jews — policies that stood in opposition to both the Bible and the Dutch tradition of tolerance.
Article continues below this ad
“The law of love, peace and liberty in the states extending to Jews, Turks and Egyptians, as they are considered sons of Adam, which is the glory of the outward state of Holland, so love, peace and liberty, extending to all in Christ Jesus, condemns hatred, war and bondage,” they wrote.
In one of the high points of former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s tenure, he invoked the Flushing Remonstrance in an August 2010 speech on Governors Island, where he defended a city panel’s decision to not stand in the way of the development of a mosque in Lower Manhattan. The project (which never came to fruition) had become the locus of ugly post-9/11 Islamophobia stirred by Mr. Bloomberg’s fellow Republicans during an election year. With the Statue of Liberty in the background, Mr. Bloomberg said the people of New York City “would betray our values and play into our enemies’ hands if we were to treat Muslims differently than anyone else. In fact, to cave to popular sentiment would be to hand a victory to the terrorists — and we should not stand for that.”
With two weeks remaining in the New York City mayoral race, the public is being subjected to some of the worst expressions of Islamophobia since the “Ground Zero mosque” moral panic. The reason: State Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, a Muslim, is ahead in almost every poll, and his main opponent, former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, is responding to the possibility of a career-ending defeat with all the grace of a cornered badger.
Just days ago, his campaign was forced to apologize for releasing a starkly racist AI-generated video depicting Mr. Mamdani eating rice with his hands alongside a cast of villainous ethnic stereotypes, including a Black pimp in “Superfly” garb and a Black shoplifter who is for extra measure wearing a keffiyeh. A campaign spokesman said the ad “wasn’t done yet,” which in theory means the now-scuttled final edit might have been even worse.
Article continues below this ad
The next morning, Mr. Cuomo appeared on Sid Rosenberg’s radio show — which has been a comfy media berth for Mr. Cuomo’s fellow Queens boy, President Donald J. Trump — to castigate Mr. Mamdani’s fitness for the job in an oddly specific way: “Any given morning there’s a crisis and people’s lives are at stake,” Mr. Cuomo said. “God forbid another 9/11. Can you imagine Mamdani in the seat?”
“Yeah, I could: He’d be cheering,” Mr. Rosenberg responded, providing Mr. Cuomo with a golden opportunity to say something along the lines of, Well, that’s taking things a bit too far — I’m just saying he wouldn’t be equipped for the job.
Instead, Mr. Cuomo laughed and agreed with the host: “That’s another problem,” he said.
A few hours later, Mayor Eric Adams — who, just weeks after calling Mr. Cuomo “a snake and a liar,” decided to endorse him — poured more kerosene on the bonfire: “New York can’t be Europe, folks; I don’t know what is wrong with people,” he said, raising the question of which “people” he was referring to. “You see what’s playing out in other countries because of Islamic extremism — not Muslims, let’s not mix this up — but those Islamic extremisms (sic) that are burning churches in Nigeria, that are destroying communities in Germany.”
Article continues below this ad
What any of this had to do with Mr. Mamdani, who has advocated for none of the things the scandal-scarred mayor mentioned, was not made clear. Despite his aside that he was not talking about Muslims, the mayor appeared to be mixing things up intentionally.
Speaking of Europeans: It would be nice to report that Peter Stuyvesant was sufficiently moved by the Flushing Remonstrance — which resides in the State Archives in Albany — that he abandoned his efforts to clamp down on other faiths. Instead, the persecutions continued for several more years, until a group of prominent merchants warned that the resulting drop in immigration was bad for business, and the Dutch West India Company ordered Mr. Stuyvesant to dial it down.
In the digital age, a more immediate response to Mr. Cuomo’s rhetoric is required from the new burghers of New York City and the rest of the state, as well as the politicians who purport to stand for the principles on which New York was founded.
Article continues below this ad
It is not surprising to once again find the ex-governor on the low road; the voters of New York City should ensure that he proceeds to the exit ramp.