On January 1, 2026, New York's first Muslim mayor sat down on his first day in office and signed.
He revoked Executive Order 61. That was the order giving the city's synagogues extra police protection.
He dropped the IHRA definition of antisemitism.
He lifted the restriction on boycotting Israel.
Three signatures, day one. Nothing had happened yet. No crisis had landed on his desk. He walked in, and this is what he reached for first.
Then look at what followed. In his first month in office, antisemitic incidents in New York rose 182 percent compared to January the year before. Across 2026, 56.9 percent of every hate crime in the city was aimed at Jews. Jews are around ten percent of the population. The number climbed another 8.5 percent.
In July he put out a video about Israel's prime minister. Not welcome in New York, he said, and he called on the federal government to arrest him. The next day a man in a kippah was stabbed on the Upper West Side walking out of his synagogue.
He won't condemn "globalize the intifada." He says genocide the way other people say good morning. He stays away from the Israel Day Parade.
Meanwhile, he makes room for Islam.
He took his oath on the Quran. Just after midnight, in the closed subway station under City Hall, he put his hand on his grandfather's copy and a nearly 200-year-old edition on loan from the New York Public Library. That afternoon, at the public ceremony, he used his grandfather's and his grandmother's.
First mayor in the history of this city to swear the oath on the holy book of Islam.
At an interfaith breakfast he quoted Surah An-Nahl 16:42 and the Prophet to justify the city's sanctuary status, then signed Executive Order 13 while he had the room.
In March he hosted an iftar for city workers. At Eid al-Fitr at the Brooklyn Islamic Center he opened with Assalamu'alaikum and told the room he stood there as the city's first Muslim mayor.
All of that is legal. It was also, every time, a choice. He spent six months making his own faith visible inside the machinery of the city, and the same six months taking police off synagogue doors. Anyone telling you those two things are unrelated is asking you to stop looking.
And then he tells us there is no room for hate of any kind in his city. That criticism of a state is never criticism of a people. He raised the hate crime prevention budget by 800 percent.
That is what you say when you want it both ways. The right words for the camera, and the protection quietly stripped off the buildings.
I have watched this pattern run before. It never opens with hatred. It opens with someone deleting the word for the hatred, deleting the definition, sending the officer home. Then they stand there looking puzzled at the violence, as if it arrived from nowhere.
So let's say the part nobody in office will say.
No religion gets to run the institutions of a Western country, and that includes the schools, the courts and City Hall.
We spent centuries building that wall, and we built it because we already knew what the alternative costs.
Political Islam does not accept that wall. It does not come for it all at once. It comes one accommodation at a time. An exemption here. A sensitivity there. A definition dropped because it got inconvenient. Every step looks like nothing on its own. At the end of it you have a City Hall that has learned whose fear it takes seriously.
That has to be answered in law. Polite concern has not stopped anything yet.
He never asked permission to hate Jews. He asked permission to stop protecting them. He got it, and the numbers show what it bought.