Rudy: Great Mayor, Ally of Jewish Americans and Israelis

Rudy Giuliani, Newsmax and I were on the same wavelength in New York City on October 27, 2023.

During a Newsmax TV interview that Friday evening, the 79-year-old, former NYC mayor righteously denounced the “hateful, violent antisemitism” spewed at several pro-Hamas, anti-Israel violent protests in the nation’s most-populous city, home to 1.1 million Jewish Americans.

That same afternoon, I attended a pro-Israel rally in front of the Brooklyn Museum, where a long Shabbat table had been set up, with the names and photos of each of the more than 200 Israeli and foreign hostages held by Hamas Islamic terrorists in Gaza.

The peaceful demonstration of several hundred was sponsored by the Lubavitch Hasidism (Chabad), whose international headquarters are one mile east of the Brooklyn Museum on Eastern Parkway.

On Saturday Oct. 28, the Jewish Sabbath, 7,000 pro-Hamas protesters began a virulent, anti-Israel rally at the Brooklyn Museum, but they were prevented, by a massive NYPD deployment of between 1,500 and 1,800 officers, from marching east to the Lubavitch neighborhood in Crown Heights.

Instead, they went north on Flatbush Avenue, and then across the Brooklyn Bridge to lower Manhattan.

Jeff Maddrey, the NYPD’s Chief of Department, had assured Chabad leaders, in a Zoom conference on Friday, Oct. 27, that “there will be no repeat of 1991,” alluding to the notorious Crown Heights riots.

In Aug. 1991, during the first night of what exploded into three additional days and nights of antisemitic rioting, Yankel Rosenbaum, an Orthodox Jewish scholar from Australia, was murdered by a mob of Black men and teenagers.

In the recent Newsmax interview, Giuliani compared the current pro-Hamas violent demonstrations, to the “disgraceful” riots, warning that “I think they want to repeat it tomorrow, that was the pogrom in Crown Heights.”

He also noted that approximately 1,000 NYPD officers were injured in this unprecedented civil disorder in 1991.

Mayor Eric Adams, an NYPD officer between 1984 and 2006, deserves enormous credit for preventing a potential riot in this quintessential Jewish neighborhood.

By contrast, Al Sharpton, who has odiously been a top adviser to Democratic Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, was a major instigator of the Crown Heights riots 32 years ago.

Despite the widely-publicized, pro-Hamas and anti-Israel demonstrations in Brooklyn and Manhattan, Jews in NYC have been proudly standing tall for Israel during the last month of the Israel-Hamas War.

On Nov. 6, I joined 12,000 demonstrators at pro-Israel, peaceful rally in Manhattan on Central Park West near the Museum of Natural History.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a lifelong Brooklynite, and several relatives of the Israeli hostages held by Hamas were among the speakers.

On Nov. 14, I will join hundreds of thousands of Israel’s supporters at a rally on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

Since the recent Newsmax interview with the indomitable Republican fighter Rudy Giuliani occurred 30 years after his election as mayor on November 2, 1993, in which he narrowly unseated the serially incompetent Democratic Mayor David Dinkins (I voted for Rudy), a recounting of several of the former mayor’s greatest achievements is timely.

Between Jan. 1994 and Jan. 2002, Mayor Giuliani made the nation’s largest city great again, as annual murders plunged a phenomenal 66%, between Dinkins’ last year in office in 1993 when there were 1,927, and Giuliani’s last year in 2001, with 649.

Mind-bogglingly, a New York Post opinion article in Sept. 2023, by Nicole Gelinas, credited Dinkins for the city’s astonishing reduction in homicides during the last three decades, while ignoring Giuliani’s pivotal role.

Gelinas tendentiously wrote that murders plunged from 2,262 in 1990, Dinkins’ first year in office, to 292 in 2017. In fact, during his four-year catastrophic tenure between 1990 and 1993, murders averaged 2,085 annually.

During Giuliani’s first term between 1994 and 1997, murders averaged 1,123, or a remarkable 46% decline.

Former Mayor Giuliani’s second historic achievement is the city’s robust 9% population growth, between 1990 when it was 7,323,000, and the 8,008,000 in 2000.

By contrast, NYC’s population in 2022 was 8,336,000, or a puny 4% increase in 22 years.

Furthermore, since January 20, 2021 when President Joe Biden opened the border with Mexico, hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants settled in the Big Apple.

Without this nefarious policy of replacing the hundreds of thousands of NYC residents, who have fled since the COVID pandemic erupted in March 2020, the city’s population would today be under 8 million.

Rudy Giuliani’s third historic accomplishment occurred in 1995, when he evicted arch-Palestinian terrorist Yasser Arafat from a Lincoln Center concert, commemorating the 50^th anniversary of the establishment of the U.N.

Unquestionably, Rudy Giuliani ranks as one of NYC’s greatest mayor during the last century, alongside Fiorello La Guardia (1934-1945), whose mother, Irene Luzzatto-Coen, hailed from a prominent Sephardic Italian-Jewish family.

Amazingly, La Guardia’s sister, Gemma La Guardia Gluck (1881-1962), who was born in NYC, and her daughter and grandson, survived incarceration in the Ravensbruck concentration camp during the last year of World War II.

They were remarkably re-united in Europe in 1946, when La Guardia ably served as director-general of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration.