God works in mysterious ways. They say that history works in cycles. What rises up can fall down as if caught up in a spinning wheel. That is also why they talk of the "wheel of fortune".
So it comes as a fascinating point in time that within a couple of days of Mamdani being sworn in as New York City's first Muslim Democratic Socialist mayor, none other than Maduro, the deposed dictator of Venezuela, is flown into a prison in New York City to face criminal charges. Mamdani did not waste any time in decrying the capture of Maduro by US special forces and he immediately held a public press conference coming to Maduro's defense and criticizing President Trump's and the United States' actions.
Mamdani lost some of his newly elected golden boy thunder. The headlines coming out of NYC stolen from his fiery neo-communist addresses to the various psycho socialist, Arab, liberal mobs that adore him, now were switching to the shock of Maduro's capture in Caracas and his quick incarceration in a notorious high security prison in Brooklyn.
To add to the historical irony of it all, Maduro and his co-captured wife are to be judged by a 92 year old Jewish judge who the news media says is also an Orthodox Jew, although in our times it is hard to know exactly what that means. This drama is all stranger than fiction.
One wonders if this is what the Trump people had in mind, to put Mamdani on the spot and make a mockery of his newly found limelight. After all Venezuela is in South America, closer to Florida, so Miami would have been a more logical choice for transporting Maduro. Miami was where Panama's dictator Noriega was transferred after President George H. W. Bush ordered the United States military to invade Panama in 1989. Noriega was captured in 1990 and he stood trial and was given a jail sentence of 40 years in Miami, Florida. Maybe Maduro could have been executed on the spot, like Bin Laden was in his hideout, after President Barack Obama ordered an attack on the compound in Pakistan in 2011 and then supposedly dropped his body into a watery grave.
Instead, Maduro and his complicit wife were handcuffed and bound and flown all the way from the heart of Caracas, Venezuela into Manhattan, the heart of New York and the newly established seat of Mamdani's power at City Hall, and then transferred to a dingy prison in Brooklyn, one of New York City's five boroughs. So now within days of becoming New York City's mayor, Mamdani is forced to host and endure the long term spectacle of Maduro sitting in one of the city's worst jails and facing a judge in Manhattan.
This is political theater at its highest level. The media, newspapers and internet podcasters based in New York are now handed a double-headed monster that they cannot ignore: Mamdani and Maduro, Maduro and Mamdani, a match made in political hell and somehow it seems that this was all part of how the Trump people were now dealing with Maduro and Mamdani in the Machiavellian manner the two "M's" deserve!
In fact, Mamdani and Maduro have lots in common. They are both Israel haters. Under Maduro and his predecessor dictator Hugo Chavez, Venezuela's once thriving Jewish community of 20,000 Jews has dwindled down to about 5,000 Jews and is shrinking by the day. Jewish Venezuelans continue to flee the rise of Arab and Muslim influence by Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas supporters, not to mention the malignant influences of China, Russia, North Korea and Cuba.
These "paragons" of Socialism and Communism are the same ones that the Democratic Socialists of America and Mamdani belong to. The grievous blunders of Chavez and Maduro and their cohorts destroyed the Venezuelan economy, deprived them of freedom, aligned them with tyrannical regimes and brought ruin to the people of Venezuela. Eight million Venezuelans fled from their own country to escape the Chavez-Maduro dictatorship/s. It is unlikely that Madani will be discouraged from his intentions and will learn that all his "good intentions" led to a political, economic and societal hell. No wonder many Jews are thinking of running away from Mayor Mamdani and his socialist policies, politics and practices.
Mamdani should take to heart that his madnesses are being carefully watched by others in America. Even though he acts as some kind of newly self-appointed potentate and a cheeky ruler of a "city state", in reality he is only a small cog in a much larger set of city, state and federal politics and economic forces. He and his socialist acolytes are not a law unto themselves. He should learn the lesson of the Maduros of this world that "here today, gone tomorrow" and that just as quickly as he rose to power, given the right correlation of forces aligned against him, his fall from grace, er, Gracie Mansion, could come as suddenly and definitively as that of Maduro, Noriega, Bin Laden et al.
Rabbi Yitschak Rudomin was born to Holocaust survivor parents in Israel, grew up in South Africa, and lives in Brooklyn, NY. He is an alumnus of Yeshiva Rabbi Chaim Berlin and of Teachers College Columbia University. He heads the Jewish Professionals Institute dedicated to Jewish Adult Education and Outreach - Kiruv Rechokim. He was the Director of the Belzer Chasidim's Sinai Heritage Center of Manhattan 1988-1995, a Trustee of AJOP 1994-1997 and founder of American Friends of South African Jewish Education 1995-2015. From 2017-2024 he was a docent and tour guide at The Museum of Jewish Heritage - A Living Memorial to the Holocaust in Downtown Manhattan, New York.He is the author of The Second World War and Jewish Education in America: The Fall and Rise of Orthodoxy. Contact Rabbi Yitschak Rudomin at izakrudomin@gmail.com
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