The Democratic mayoral candidate for New York City, Zohran Mamdani, has defended his support for the BDS movement.

By Vered Weiss, World Israel News

The Trump administration said it would withhold funds designated for preparations for natural disasters in states that enact a Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) policy against Israel.

To receive $1.9 billion in funds from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, states and cities must confirm that they do not deny “commercial relations specifically with Israeli companies.”

According to 11 agency grant notices reviewed by Reuters, the expenses include search and rescue equipment, salaries for emergency managers and backup power systems, among other items.

“DHS [the Department of Homeland Security] will enforce all anti-discrimination laws and policies, including as it relates to the BDS movement, which is expressly grounded in antisemitism,” a spokesperson for Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said in a statement.

Currently, 34 states have laws on the books against BDS.

Cities that agree to oppose BDS will receive a cut of $553.5 million that will be earmarked to prevent terrorism in dense areas.

Currently, the Democratic mayoral candidate for New York City, Zohran Mamdani, has defended his support for the BDS movement against Israel and his promise to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should the Israeli leader travel there.

Netanyahu and former Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant were issued arrest warrants by the International Criminal Court for alleged crimes during the Gaza war.

“I’ve seen the efficacy of nonviolent movements in creating compliance in international law, specifically with South Africa. That is what brought me to support BDS, and what I’ve said is that one need not visit Israel to stand up for Jewish New Yorkers,” Mamdani said at an event at B’nai Jeshurun synagogue in June.

Since Hamas’s invasion of southern Israel and the subsequent war in Gaza, New York City — home to the largest Jewish population outside Israel — has seen a sharp rise in antisemitic incidents.

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Eric Fingerhut warns of growing threats to Jewish safety and religious freedom across the U.S. following record antisemitic incidents.

By David Brummer, World Israel News

A leading figure in the American Jewish community is raising urgent concerns over escalating antisemitism and its impact on the safety and freedom of Jews and supporters of Israel across the United States.

Eric Fingerhut, president and CEO of the Jewish Federations of North America, warned that the spike in antisemitic threats is placing Jewish institutions under siege.

“You cannot have one faith group, one community, that has to be behind barricades, just to go practice our faith,” he told The Daily Signal.

The Anti-Defamation League reported 9,354 antisemitic incidents in 2024—more than double pre-2020 figures and the highest annual total in over four decades of tracking.

Fingerhut described how Jewish organizations are being forced to cancel or scale back community events due to security risks.

“We’re approaching a point where the cost of securing Jewish life is interfering with our constitutional rights,” he said, noting that the visibility of Jewish identity—such as wearing a kippah or flying an Israeli flag—has increasingly made individuals and institutions targets for harassment and violence.

Fingerhut, a former congressman from Ohio and former head of Hillel International, emphasized the strain placed on Jewish Federations, which operate in 140 communities nationwide.

The organization raises over $2 billion annually for Jewish welfare, but security costs are becoming “an overwhelming responsibility,” he said.

He pointed to the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Nonprofit Security Grant Program as a vital tool in protecting vulnerable institutions.

The program awarded $454.5 million in 2024 for physical security upgrades like reinforced doors, surveillance systems, and blast-resistant windows.

Fingerhut is calling for that figure to be doubled.

Indeed, amid a marked uptick in antisemitic attacks, the Department of Homeland Security on Friday announced a $94 million initiative to over 500 Jewish faith-based organizations, reported The Jewish Voice.

“We know there are many things on the nation’s agenda,” said Eric Fingerhut, CEO of @JFederations, “but we must insist that the safety and security of the Jewish community and the battle against domestic terror be at the very top.” https://t.co/PRzs7SeOLd

— The Jewish Federations of North America (@jfederations) July 3, 2025



In the political arena, he said members of Congress who speak out in support of Israel have faced “vicious threats and incitement to violence,” especially since the October 7 Hamas attacks that triggered the current conflict in Gaza.

Fingerhut also criticized the selective enforcement of university protest policies during recent pro-Palestinian campus encampments.

“The content of many of these protests went beyond free speech—it was incitement,” he argued.

When asked how the public can help, Fingerhut urged Americans to take a firm stand.

“Speak out. Let your local leaders know that antisemitism has no place in our communities,” he said.

“People spreading this hate should not be in positions of influence.”

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FEMA’s failures in Hurricane Helene were not an accident, they were the inevitable outcome of prioritizing ideology over mission, quotas over merit, and race over need.

By Daniel Greenfield, Frontpage Magazine

“I don’t know that anybody could be fully prepared for the amount of flooding and landslides that they are experiencing right now,” FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell protested to CBS News.

The ravages of Hurricane Helene had left parts of Asheville, North Carolina underwater, but it wasn’t just the homes and roads that were underwater, but FEMA’s botched response.

Criswell, who had been appointed to head FEMA by the Biden-Harris administration as a reward for coordinating New York City’s horrendously botched response to the pandemic, posed in a starched FEMA blouse and gold necklace on a morning show even as private volunteers were once again having to step in because the Federal Emergency Management Agency had failed.

FEMA was unprepared for the flooding because under Criswell, a DEI hire whose resume included being “the first woman commissioner of New York City Emergency Management”, the agency had shifted from disaster management to DEI disasters.

Goal 1 of FEMA’s Strategic Plan was to “instill equity as a foundation of emergency management”. FEMA’s Objective 1.1 was also not disaster management, it’s to “cultivate a FEMA that prioritizes and harnesses a diverse workforce”.

FEMA’s leadership was required to make its priority “integrating diversity, equity, and inclusion in delivering the agency’s mission.”

Leading the way in implementing FEMA’s new ideological disaster management was Vice President Kamala Harris who claimed that she had started one of the “first environmental justice units of any DA’s office” when she helped turn San Francisco into a crime zone, and claimed that it’s “communities of color that are most impacted by” weather and natural disasters.

Kamala then argued that “we have to address this in a way that is about giving resources based on equity” so that minorities would be first in line for aid regardless of who has the greater need.

FEMA kicked off hurricane season in 2022 with a preparedness campaign contending that black people were more vulnerable to hurricanes because, according to FEMA Deputy Administrator Erik Hooks, “black communities are on the frontlines of climate change.”

Hooks, another Biden-Harris nominee, had been appointed deputy administrator despite only five years of experience in emergency management, in order to “infuse equity across our agency” described the campaign prioritizing black people for natural disasters as reaffirming “our commitment to equity”.

But FEMA’s commitment to equity was getting people killed.

“Black and African American communities often suffer disproportionate impacts from disasters. This is something that we must work to change and that starts with how we prepare,” FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell argued.

A few weeks later, Hurricane Ian became the third most expensive weather disaster and claimed over 150 lives. Most of the dead were white senior citizens. Elderly people living near the coast were the ones actually most at risk.

FEMA had sacrificed their lives for equity.

Instead of atoning for the lives lost, Administrator Criswell doubled down by signing an agreement with the NAACP, a Biden-Harris administration ally, and assured illegal aliens that they could apply for taxpayer-funded aid.

FEMA directed millions to creating “equitable” fire departments and tried to make sure too many white people weren’t applying for disaster aid.

During the devastating fires in Hawaii last year, FEMA was busy running DEI training which falsely claimed white supremacy is “ingrained in nearly every system and institution in the U.S” as part of ‘Goal 1’ and its mandate to make “equity a foundation of emergency management.

The introduction to FEMA’s Building Alliances for Equitable Resilience by Chauncia Willis, a former wellness and diversity coach, urges disaster officials to reach out to “LGBTQ+ advocacy groups, Black Lives Matter chapters”.

The DEI bureaucracy at FEMA had fundamentally tainted its risk calculations. As Freedom Center Investigates revealed in a 2022 investigation, the agency’s National Risk Index had baked in a “social vulnerability” component based on the percentage of minority groups.

A town that is 40% black, 33% Hispanic and 12% Asian is calculated by FEMA as being more at risk than a town that is made up of 23% Italian-Americans, 44% Irish, 9% Jews and 18% Swedish-Americans.

Two towns with the same risk level, but different racial numbers will put the minority town ahead of the non-minority one when it comes to aid to prepare for a disaster.

Asheville, North Carolina, which has an 84% white population and only 4.5% black population, was doomed to be considered lower risk than similar black or minority areas because of the systemically racist algorithms being employed by federal bureaucrats at FEMA.

Administrator Criswell told the media that FEMA couldn’t have been prepared for the historic flooding in North Carolina, but the area has a history of floods going back two centuries.

The Great Flood of 1916 killed 80 people and flooded the area with more rain than ever. Had FEMA studied the history of floods, instead of the history of race, it might have been ready.

But the Biden-Harris administration had illegally mandated racial discrimination across every federal agency with its ‘equity’ executive orders.

The dead in North Carolina are just more of the victims of the systemic racism of equity.

FEMA’s failures in Hurricane Helene were not an accident. They were the inevitable outcome of prioritizing ideology over mission, quotas over merit, and race over need.

A DEI leadership dedicated to enacting DEI has ineptly presided over another natural disaster.

From East Palestine to Ashevillle, the Biden-Harris administration has allowed innocent people to suffer and die because the racist ideology of equity values some lives less depending on their race.

The foundation of disaster management can either be racial equity or disaster response.

FEMA Administrator Criswell, Deputy Administrator Hooks, and FEMA’s DEI bureaucracy have demonstrated that it cannot be both because there’s no room for DEI when people are dying.

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