JOHN PODHORETZ: New York Magazine’s evil ‘Habibi City’ cover sends a message: Jews aren’t welcome in Mamdani’s NYC.
New York Magazine this week dubbed our town “Habibi City” to mark the rising prominence of Middle Easterners and Muslim immigrants united by fun, frolic — and a consuming hatred of Israel and Jews.
It’s a familiar formulation, harking back to 1966, when newly elected Mayor John Lindsay declared New York to be “Fun City.”
Yes, such fun! Lindsay’s two terms drove NYC into civil and budgetary collapse.
A crime tsunami rotted neighborhoods across the five boroughs, and feckless budgetary policies emptied the city’s coffers.
And the population of Lindsay’s “Fun City” declined by half a million people.
Facing a government that didn’t seem to care what happened to them, much of the middle class voted with their feet.
Something similar may happen in Habibi City, but this time the effort to make life unbearable for some New Yorkers is entirely intentional — and aimed at a specific minority.
Lindsay was incompetent, but he certainly didn’t want respectable taxpayers to leave.
Not so the subjects of New York Magazine’s current cover package, and their beloved Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
At The Free Press, Liel Leibovitz adds: New York Is Not ‘Habibi City.’
[Zaina] Arafat, whose book You Exist Too Much won the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Fiction, herself attempts an answer, embodied in the name of one of her favorite SWANA-ese publications: it’s called Bidoun, meaning “without,” which is a name “meant to evoke existing without the concreteness of space.” In other words, because SWANA is really a state of mind, we must make sure America becomes its forever home.
It’s a perfect manifestation of a specific grad school sensibility, light on logic and high on pretense and self-importance. But it also captures the real tragedy—and threat—at hand: For Habibi City to be born, New York City must die.
A question like “what is New York” is too complex, too weighty, and frankly too annoying to discuss in brief. But if you’re looking for a solid working definition, it goes something like this: New York is the gorgeous, impossible, maddening rock upon which dreamers from all over the world crash in the desperate, ridiculous, and absolutely sublime hope of changing their fortune by harnessing themselves to the great American engine of reinvention. It’s why the greatest movie ever made about immigrants in New York, The Godfather, begins with the battle cry that, for centuries, quickened the pulse of every newcomer to this city: “I believe in America.”
Tell that to Arian Moayed, an actor who tells Arafat, with unveiled disgust, how terrible it felt to walk around Times Square in the aftermath of September 11 and see everything, and everyone felt so. . . patriotic. Tell that to Arafat herself, whose vision of life in America consists exclusively of SWANA loyalists railing against “xenophobia, Islamophobia, and Zionism.” Or, for that matter, tell that to New York magazine, once the epitome of New York cool and sophistication and now the organ of Third World feeblemindedness masquerading as radical chic.
Which is all the more ironic, because Tom Wolfe introduced the phrase “radical chic” via a 1970 article he wrote for a very different iteration of New York magazine. Long after Wolfe moved on, I still used to like that version of New York magazine, and would pick up a copy when I lived in New Jersey and took the train into Fun City during the Ed Koch and David Dinkins era.
But that was then. Today, as Ira Stoll writes at the Washington Free Beacon, “James Murdoch just demonstrated that Rupert Murdoch sure was right to fight a protracted legal battle to prevent him from taking over the Wall Street Journal and Fox News:” Under James Murdoch, New York Magazine Tilts Toward Hamas.