China treats Uighur kids as ‘orphans’ after parents seized

In this Aug. 30, 2018, photo, security personnel inspect camera equipment of journalists outside the Hotel City Kindness Kindergarten, where Meripet learnt her children are kept in Hotan, in western China's Xinjiang region. (AP)
Updated 22 September 2018
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China treats Uighur kids as ‘orphans’ after parents seized

  • The families say that among these children, 14 are known to be in state-run orphanages and boarding schools

ISTANBUL: Every morning, Meripet wakes up to her nightmare: The Chinese government has turned four of her children into orphans, even though she and their father are alive.
Meripet and her husband left the kids with their grandmother at home in China when they went to nurse Meripet’s sick father in Turkey. But after Chinese authorities started locking up thousands of their fellow ethnic Uighurs for alleged subversive crimes such as travel abroad, a visit became exile.
Then, her mother-in-law was also taken prisoner, and Meripet learned from a friend that her 3- to 8-year-olds had been placed in a de facto orphanage in the Xinjiang region, under the care of the state that broke up her family.
“It’s like my kids are in jail,” Meripet said, her voice cracking. “My four children are separated from me and living like orphans.”
Meripet’s family is among tens of thousands swept up in President Xi Jinping’s campaign to subdue a sometimes restive region, including the internment of more than 1 million Uighurs and other Muslim minorities that has alarmed a United Nations panel and the US government . Now there is evidence that the government is placing the children of detainees and exiles into dozens of orphanages across Xinjiang.
The orphanages are the latest example of how China is systematically distancing young Muslims in Xinjiang from their families and culture, The Associated Press has found through interviews with 15 Muslims and a review of procurement documents. The government has been building thousands of so-called “bilingual” schools, where minority children are taught in Mandarin and penalized for speaking in their native tongues. Some of these are boarding schools, which Uighurs say can be mandatory for children and, in a Kazakh family’s case, start from the age of 5.
China says the orphanages help disadvantaged children, and it denies the existence of internment camps for their parents. It prides itself on investing millions of yuan in education in Xinjiang to steer people out of poverty and away from terrorism. At a regular news briefing Thursday, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said the measures taken in Xinjiang were necessary for “stability, development, harmony” and to fight ethnic separatists.
But Uighurs fear that these measures are essentially wiping out their ethnic identity, one child at a time. Experts say what China is doing echoes how white colonialists in the US, Canada and Australia treated indigenous children — policies that have left generations traumatized.
“This is an ethnic group whose knowledge base is being erased,” said Darren Byler, a researcher of Uighur culture at University of Washington. “What we’re looking at is something like a settler colonial situation where an entire generation is lost.”
For Meripet, the loss is agony; it is the absence of her children and the knowledge they are in state custody. A year and a half after leaving home, the 29-year-old mother looked at a photo of a brightly painted building surrounded by barbed wire where her children are believed to be held. She fell silent. And then she wept.
“When I finally see them again, will they even recognize me?” she asked. “Will I recognize them?“

“PROTECTION OF DISADVANTAGED CHILDREN“
When Xi came to power in 2012, an early challenge to his rule was a surge in violent attacks that killed several hundred people and which Beijing pinned on Uighur separatists. Since then, Xi has overseen the most extensive effort in recent years to quell Xinjiang, appointing in 2016 the former Tibet party boss Chen Quanguo to lead the troubled region bordering Afghanistan.
Chen rolled out unprecedented security measures such as internment camps that hold Muslims without trial and force them to renounce their faith and swear loyalty to the Communist Party. China has described religious extremism as an illness that needs to be cured through what it calls “transformation through education.” Former detainees say one can be thrown into a camp for praying regularly, reading the Qur’an, going abroad or even speaking to someone overseas.
The camps are among the most troubling aspects of Xi’s campaign to assert the party’s dominance over all aspects of Chinese life, which has drawn comparisons with Mao Zedong. Authorities heeding Xi’s call to “Sinicize” religion across the country have shut underground churches , burned Bibles , replaced pictures of Jesus with ones of Xi, and toppled crescents from mosques. The party also has beefed up its ability to track the movements of its 1.4 billion people, with Xinjiang serving as an important testing ground.
In Xinjiang, detention has left countless children without their parents. Most of these families in China cannot be reached by journalists. However, the AP interviewed 14 Uighur families living in Turkey and one Kazakh man in Almaty with a total of 56 children who remain in China.
The families say that among these children, 14 are known to be in state-run orphanages and boarding schools. The whereabouts of the rest are unknown because most of their adult relatives in Xinjiang have been detained.
Some interviewees, like Meripet, requested that they be identified only by their first names because they feared official retaliation against their relatives. Others insisted their full names be used despite the risks, saying they were desperate for their stories to be heard. They pleaded with reporters to track down their families in Xinjiang, and one interviewee pressed a piece of paper into a reporter’s hand with a Chinese address scribbled on it.
The regional government appears to be moving quickly to build centers to house the children of these exiles and of detainees. An AP review of procurement notices in Xinjiang has found that since the start of last year, the government has budgeted more than $30 million (200 million Chinese yuan) to build or expand at least 45 orphanages, known variously as children’s “welfare centers” and “protection centers,” with enough beds to house about 5,000 children.
In July and August alone, the government invited bids for the construction of at least nine centers for the “protection of disadvantaged children” in the Xinjiang city of Hotan and several counties in Kashgar, Aksu and Kizilsu prefectures, inhabited primarily by ethnic minorities. Most orphanages have a minimum of 100 beds mandated by the government, and some are much larger. One notice called for an orphanage in Moyu county with four four-story dormitories, coming to 22,776 square meters in size — nearly as big as four football fields.
These numbers do not include kindergartens and other schools where some children of Uighur detainees are being housed. It’s impossible to tell how many children of detainees end up at these schools because they also serve other children.
Shi Yuqing, a Kashgar civil affairs official, told the AP over the phone that “authorities provide aid and support to everyone in need, whether they’re the children of convicted criminals or people killed in traffic accidents.” But such services may not be welcome. A government report from Bayingolin Mongol Autonomous Prefecture in June last year acknowledged that relatives were resistant to “handing over” their extended families’ kids to the orphanages because they “lack trust or confidence” in the centers.
A friend told Meripet last November her four children were living in the Hotan City Kindness Kindergarten in southern Xinjiang. The friend said Meripet’s sister-in-law had visited her children and was permitted to take them home for one night only.
The school looks like a house-sized castle, with a bright marigold facade, orange turrets and blue rooftops. Its entrance is blocked by an iron gate and a walled enclosure lined with barbed wire. “We Are Happy and Grateful to the Motherland,” say the red characters emblazoned on one fence.
The principal, who gave only her last name, Ai, told AP reporters that the institution is “just a normal kindergarten.” But the authorities’ anxiety was clear: armed police officers surrounded the reporters’ car minutes after their arrival at the school and ordered them to delete any photos.
Gu Li, a propaganda official for Hotan who also immediately appeared on site, said: “There are really young kids here — some of them may even be orphans whose parents have died.”
A report published this February in the Xinjiang Daily, a party newspaper, called Hotan City Kindness Kindergarten a “free, full-time” kindergarten for children 6 and younger that provides accommodations and clothing to those whose “parents cannot care for them for a variety of reasons.”
“Soon after many of the kids arrived at the school, they grew taller and got fatter, and quickly started using Mandarin to communicate,” the article said. Another state media report in January said $1.24 million (8,482,200 yuan) had been invested in the kindergarten.
Satellite imagery shows that the kindergarten was constructed less than three years ago, just as an initiative was launched to strengthen “bilingual” education in Xinjiang. More than 4,300 bilingual kindergartens were built or renovated last year, according to the government. A report on the project in a state-run regional newspaper said such kindergartens teach children “civilized living habits.”
“The children started educating their parents: your hands are too dirty, your clothes are too dirty, you haven’t brushed your teeth,” the report quoted Achilem Abduwayit, a deputy chief of the Hotan city education bureau, as saying.
Life in an orphanage could have a lasting psychological and cultural impact on children, said James Leibold, an expert on Chinese ethnic policy at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia.
“You grow up as a ward of the state,” he said. “They’re told to be patriotic citizens, told that the identity and religion of their parents was abnormal, if not radical, and thus needs to be eradicated.”
Meripet has at least an inkling of where her children are. Her brother, a 37-year-old doctor named Aziz, has not heard any news of his three youngest children since his wife was taken to a re-education center in June 2017.
Aziz fled to Turkey more than a year ago after he received a call from his local police station ordering him to report to authorities immediately. More than half his neighbors had already been taken away to re-education centers or prison, he said.
Now the young doctor is often shaken awake by a nightmare in which his kids are huddling at the bottom of a cliff, their faces smudged with dirt, calling to him to hoist them up. Aziz walks for what feels like hours but cannot reach them. He awakens with their cries ringing in his ears.
“If I could, I would choose not to have been born as a Uighur, to not have been born in Xinjiang,” Aziz said. “We are the most unfortunate ethnic group in the world.”

“THEY WON’T BE LIKE US ANYMORE“
The government says all 2.9 million students attending compulsory elementary and junior high school in Xinjiang will receive Mandarin instruction by this month, up from just 39 percent in 2016.
Even preschoolers are steeped in the language. A former teacher at a “bilingual” kindergarten outside Kashgar said all lessons were given in Mandarin and the entirely Uighur student body was banned from speaking Uighur at school. A colleague who used Uighur to explain concepts to students was fired, according to the teacher, who lives in Turkey but asked for anonymity because she fears retribution against family in China.
Like all schools in China, this one immersed children in patriotic education. Kindergarten textbooks were filled with songs like “Without the Communist Party, There Would Be No New China,” the teacher said.
Dilnur, a 35-year-old business student in exile in Istanbul, said officials regularly visited her children’s kindergarten in Kashgar and asked the students if their parents read religious verses at home or participated in other faith-based activities. The questions effectively forced children to spy on their own families. A man was taken away by police after his grandson said in class that he had made a pilgrimage to Makkah, she said.
Her seven-year-old daughter once complained that her throat was sore from chanting party slogans. “Mama, what does it mean to love the motherland?” she asked.
Some bilingual schools are boarding schools, which are not uncommon in China. Xinjiang has long provided voluntary boarding school programs that are seen as coveted opportunities for the best minority students. But several Uighurs asserted that in many cases boarding school was now mandatory for minority children, even though Han Chinese children could choose to continue living at home.
The Xinjiang government did not respond to repeated requests for comment. The government has said the tuition-free boarding schools relieve parents of education and living expenses and help raise Mandarin standards, which will make their children more employable.
But Uighurs say they don’t want their culture erased.
“If the kids are forced to speak Mandarin and live like Han Chinese every day, I’m afraid they won’t be like us anymore,” said Meriyem Yusup, whose extended family has four children sent to state-run orphanages in Xinjiang.
Adil Dalelkhan, an ethnic Kazakh sock merchant in exile in Almaty, said that even though his then 5-year-old son could live with relatives, he was forced to stay at his preschool Mondays through Fridays instead. The father called the policy a “terrifying” step toward extinguishing Kazakh culture.
A Uighur businessman in Istanbul, also named Adil, told a similar story. Adil’s son was 9 years old when the school system automatically transferred him to a boarding school. All children of a certain age in their Uighur district were obliged to attend boarding school, Adil said. His son was only permitted to come home on weekends and holidays.
“There were iron bars like we saw in a zoo in Kashgar,” Adil recalled.
Dilnur said her neighbors too were only allowed to visit their kids at boarding school on Wednesday nights, and even then they had to hand them candies through a fence.
“The educational goals are secondary to the political goals,” said Timothy Grose, a professor at Indiana’s Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology who has done research on Xinjiang boarding schools. “They aim to dissolve loyalties to ethnic identity... toward a national identity.”
A government notice posted in February in Kashgar states that children in the fourth grade and above with parents in detention must be sent to boarding school immediately — even if one parent is still at home. Students must be instilled with socialist values, the notice said, and be taught to “be grateful for education and love and repay the motherland,” and avoid the “75 types of behavior that show religious extremism.” Such behavior ranges from calling for ‘holy war’ to growing beards and quitting smoking and drinking for religious reasons, the government says.
China insists it guarantees the freedom of religion, but Uighurs view the Chinese education system as a threat to it. In schools, children are taught to respect teachers more than their parents and may criticize their parents’ Islamic faith, according to Byler.
“The students, children, might question them and say, you know, this is backward, this is extremist,” he said.
The Kashgar notice also said schools being modified to house students should place no more than 24 beds in one room--an indication of the program’s size. In 2015, a sprawling new boarding school complex was completed on the outskirts of Kashgar, with the capacity to house 23,400 students and teachers, according to the state-run China Daily.
Abdurehim Imin, a writer from Kashgar, said a friend told him his 14-year-old daughter was sent to a bilingual school in 2015 after his wife was arrested, ostensibly for receiving a gift of olive oil he sent her. When AP reporters visited what was likely his daughter’s school, Peyzawat County No. 4 High School, a local plainclothes officer who identified herself as Gu Li said it was a bilingual boarding school. She said that while Uighur students had to study Mandarin, there were also Han Chinese students studying Uighur.
Yet the exterior of the school bore bright red lettering that said: “Please speak Mandarin upon entering the schoolyard.” Barbed wire around the campus extended for miles, with rows of tall apartment buildings marked as dormitories.
A historian at the University of Sydney, David Brophy, said the move toward boarding schools brings to mind Aboriginal children in Australia who were forcibly separated from their families in the 1900s and placed into state-run institutions that discouraged indigenous identity.
“Should China’s policies continue in this direction, we may be talking about a Chinese version of the Stolen Generation,” he said.

’AN ETERNAL TORTURE’
Since coming to Istanbul by himself in 2014, 42-year-old Imin, the writer, has led a solitary existence in a dimly-lit apartment with bare walls and stacks of writings. For the first year, he avoided looking at photos of his children.
“We are dying every day,” Imin said. “We cannot see our kids, we cannot see our parents. This is an eternal torture.”
In December, he was sent a photo of his daughter wearing a traditional Chinese “qipao.” He deleted the picture because he could not bear to look at it, he said, and could not sleep for nearly a month.
Imin also has four other children in Xinjiang. Last summer, a friend who had visited his home in Kashgar told Imin that two of his kids were killed in a traffic accident while his wife was in jail. He doesn’t know where the other two are.
Feeling helpless, he wrote verse after verse in mourning:
“I will go...to tear down your dark, endless night...
I will go, to embrace again my hometown...
I will go, bearing my sorrow to your tomb.”
Elsewhere in Istanbul, Meripet’s house was quiet during Eid Al-Adha, a Muslim holy festival heralded by large family reunions. In a room at the end of the hall, there rose the distant laughter of relatives’ children, children who were not hers.
She flipped through the photographs which she keeps in her purse: Abdurahman, the oldest; Adile, her only daughter; and her two younger sons, Muhemmed and Abdulla. Meripet has a fifth child, a son named Abduweli who was born in Turkey. She calls him “my only light.”
“Sometimes I wonder if I will go crazy from this pain,” she says. “I have only been able to keep living because I know there is hope — I know one day I will see my children again.”


Intense debate in Senate on Trump's big budget bill as group warns of bigger deficit and millions getting uninsured

Updated 8 sec ago
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Intense debate in Senate on Trump's big budget bill as group warns of bigger deficit and millions getting uninsured

  • Review says 11.8 million more Americans would become uninsured by 2034 if the bill becomes law
  • It also said the package would increase the deficit by nearly $3.3 trillion over the decade

WASHINGTON: Debate is underway in the Senate for an all-night session Sunday, with Republicans wrestling President Donald Trump’s big bill of tax breaks and spending cuts over mounting Democratic opposition — and even some brake-pumping over the budget slashing by the president himself.
The outcome from the weekend of work in the Senate remains uncertain and highly volatile. GOP leaders are rushing to meet Trump’s Fourth of July deadline to pass the package, but they barely secured enough support to muscle it past a procedural hurdle in a tense scene the day before. A handful of Republican holdouts revolted, and it took phone calls from Trump and a visit from Vice President JD Vance to keep it on track.
GOP Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina announced Sunday he would not seek reelection after Trump badgered him for saying he could not vote for the bill with its steep Medicaid cuts. A new analysis from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget

Office found that 11.8 million more Americans would become uninsured by 2034 if the bill became law. It also said the package would increase the deficit by nearly $3.3 trillion over the decade.
But other Senate Republicans, along with conservatives in the House, are pushing for steeper cuts, particularly to health care, drawing their own unexpected warning from Trump.
“Don’t go too crazy!” the president posted on social media. “REMEMBER, you still have to get reelected.”
All told, the Senate bill includes some $4 trillion in tax cuts, making permanent Trump’s 2017 rates, which would expire at the end of the year if Congress fails to act, while adding the new ones he campaigned on, including no taxes on tips.
The Senate package would roll back billions in green energy tax credits that Democrats warn will wipe out wind and solar investments nationwide, and impose $1.2 trillion in cuts, largely to Medicaid and food stamps, by imposing work requirements and making sign-up eligibility more stringent.
Additionally, the bill would provide a $350 billion infusion for border and national security, including for deportations, some of it paid for with new fees charged to immigrants.
If the Senate can push through overnight voting and pass the bill, it would need to return to the House. Speaker Mike Johnson has told lawmakers to be on call for a return to Washington this coming week.
Democrats ready to fight all night

 

Unable to stop the march toward passage of the 940-page bill, the Democrats as the minority party in Congress is using the tools at its disposal to delay and drag out the process.
Democrats forced a full reading of the text, which took some 16 hours. Then senators took over the debate, filling the chamber with speeches, while Republicans largely stood aside.
“Reckless and irresponsible,” said Sen. Gary Peters of Michigan. “A gift to the billionaire class,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
Sen. Patty Murray, the ranking Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, raised particular concern about the accounting method being used by the Republicans, which says the tax breaks from Trump’s first term are now “current policy” and the cost of extending them should not be counted toward deficits.
“In my 33 years here in the United States Senate, things have never — never — worked this way,” said Murray, the longest-serving Democrat on the Budget Committee.
She said that kind of “magic math” won’t fly with Americans trying to balance their own household books.
“Go back home and try that game with your constituents,” she said. “We still need to kick people off their health care — that’s too expensive. We still need to close those hospitals — we have to cut costs. And we still have to kick people off SNAP — because the debt is out of control.”
Sanders said Tillis’ decision not to seek reelection shows the hold that Trump’s cult of personality has over the GOP.
“We are literally taking food out of the mouths of hungry kids,” Sanders said, while giving tax breaks to Jeff Bezos and other wealthy billionaires.
GOP leaders unphased
Republicans are using their majorities to push aside Democratic opposition, and appeared undeterred, even as they have run into a series of political and policy setbacks.
“We’re going to pass the ‘Big, beautiful bill,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, the Budget Committee chairman.
The holdout Republicans remain reluctant to give their votes, and their leaders have almost no room to spare, given their narrow majorities. Essentially, they can afford three dissenters in the Senate, with its 53-47 GOP edge, and about as many in the House, if all members are present and voting.
Trump, who has at times allowed wiggle room on his deadline, kept the pressure on lawmakers to finish.
He threatened to campaign aginst Tillis, who was worried that Medicaid cuts would leave many without health care in his state. Trump badgered Tillis again on Sunday morning, saying the senator “has hurt the great people of North Carolina.”
Later Sunday, Tillis issued a lengthy statement announcing he would not seek reelection in 2026.
 

Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina state is one of the few Republicans opposed to Trump's big bill with its steep Medicaid cuts. (AP Photo/ File)

In an impassioned evening speech, Tillis shared his views arguing the Senate approach is a betrayal of Trump’s promise not to kick people off health care.
“We could take the time to get this right,” he thundered. But until then, he said he would remain opposed.
Democrats can’t filibuster, but can stall
Using a congressional process called budget reconciliation, the Republicans can muscle the bill through on a simple majority vote in the Senate, rather than the typical 60-vote threshold needed to overcome objections.
Without the filibuster, Democrats have latched on to other tools to mount their objections.
One is the full reading of the bill text, which has been done in past situations. Democrats also intend to use their full 10 hours of available debate time, now underway.
And then Democrats are prepared to propose dozens of amendments to the package that would be considered in an all-night voting session — or all-day, depending on the hour.
GOP senators to watch

As Saturday’s vote tally teetered, attention turned to Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, who was surrounded by GOP leaders in intense conversation. She voted “yes.”
Several provisions in the package are designed for her state in Alaska, but some were out of compliance of the strict rules by the Senate parliamentarian.
A short time later, Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., drew holdouts Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, Mike Lee of Utah and Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming to his office. Vance joined in.
Later, Scott said, “We all want to get to yes.”
 


Thousands set up street blockades in Serbia after arrests of anti-government protesters

Updated 14 min 12 sec ago
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Thousands set up street blockades in Serbia after arrests of anti-government protesters

  • Tens of thousands of people attended the rally held after nearly eight months of persistent dissent that has rattled populist President Aleksandar Vucic

BELGRADE, Serbia: Thousands of people Sunday set up street blockades in Serbia, angry over the arrest of anti-government protesters who clashed with police at a massive rally a day earlier demanding early elections.
Protesters put up metal fences and garbage containers at various locations in the capital Belgrade, also blocking a key bridge over the Sava river. Protesters in the northern city of Novi Sad pelted the offices of the ruling populist Serbian Progressive Party with eggs.
Serbian media said similar protest blockades were organized in smaller cities in the Balkan country.
Protesters on Sunday demanded that authorities release dozens of university students and other protesters who were jailed for attacking the police or for allegedly plotting to overthrow the government at the rally Saturday in Belgrade.
Tens of thousands of people attended the rally held after nearly eight months of persistent dissent that has rattled populist President Aleksandar Vucic.
Protesters also declared the current populist government “illegitimate” and laid the responsibility for any violence on the government.
Clashes with riot police erupted after the official part of the rally ended. Police used pepper spray, batons and shields while protesters threw rocks, bottles and other objects.
Police said on Sunday that 48 officers were injured while 22 protesters sought medical help. Out of 77 people detained, 38 remained in custody Sunday, most of them facing criminal charges, said Interior Minister Ivica Dacic.
At least eight more people were detained during the day, the prosecutors said.
Vucic earlier Sunday announced the arrests at a press conference, accusing organizers of the rally of inciting violence and attacks on police, urging legal prosecution.
He also criticized “terrorists and those who tried to bring down the state,” singling out University of Belgrade’s head dean, Vladan Djokic, who was among the protesters.
“There will be more arrests,” Vucic said. “Identification of all individuals is underway.”
Anti-government protests started after a renovated rail station canopy collapsed in November, killing 16 people. Many in Serbia blamed the tragedy in the northern city of Novi Sad on corruption-fueled negligence in state infrastructure projects.
Vucic has repeatedly rejected the student demand for an immediate snap vote instead of regular elections planned for 2027.
“Serbia won. You cannot destroy Serbia with violence,” Vucic said Sunday. “They consciously wanted to spur bloodshed. The time of accountability is coming.”
Critics say Vucic has become increasingly authoritarian since coming to power over a decade ago, stifling democratic freedoms while allowing corruption and organized crime to flourish. He has denied this.
Serbia is formally seeking European Union entry, but Vucic’s government has nourished its relations with both Russia and China.


How Democrats in America’s most Jewish city embraced a critic of Israel for New York mayor

Updated 30 June 2025
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How Democrats in America’s most Jewish city embraced a critic of Israel for New York mayor

  • Mamdani’s success reflects the ideological realignment of many American Jews since the Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas on Israel that led to Israel’s invasion of Gaza

NEW YORK: In choosing Zohran Mamdani as their candidate for mayor, Democrats in America’s most Jewish city have nominated an outspoken critic of Israel, alarming some in New York’s Jewish community and signaling a sea change in the priorities of one of the party’s most loyal voting groups.
The 33-year-old democratic socialist’s surprisingly strong performance against former Gov. Andrew Cuomo makes clear that taking a stance against Israel is no longer disqualifying in a Democratic primary. The state Assembly member has declined to support the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state, refused to denounce the term “global intifada” and supports an organized effort to put economic pressure on Israel through boycotts and other tactics.
Yet he excelled in the city with the largest Jewish population outside of Israel, and with the support of many Jewish voters.
Mamdani’s success reflects the ideological realignment of many American Jews since the Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas on Israel that led to Israel’s invasion of Gaza. Many Democratic voters, including Jews, have grown dismayed by Israel’s conduct in the war and are deeply critical of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. That is especially true among younger, more progressive voters, many of whom have rejected the once-broadly accepted notion that anti-Israel sentiment is inherently antisemitic.
For others, Mamdani’s showing has spurred new fears about safety and the waning influence of Jewish voters in a city where anti-Jewish hate crime has surged. Last year, Jews were the target of more than half of the hate crimes in the city.
“Definitely people are concerned,” said Rabbi Shimon Hecht, of Congregation B’nai Jacob in Brooklyn, who said he has heard from congregants in recent days who hope Mamdani will be beaten in the November general election, where he will face Mayor Eric Adams, who is running as an independent, Republican Curtis Sliwa, and possibly Cuomo, if he stays in the race.
“I think like every upsetting election, it’s a wake-up call for people,” Hecht said. “I strongly believe that he will not be elected as our next mayor, but it’s going to take a lot of uniting among the Jewish people and others who are concerned about these issues. We have to unify.”
Veteran New York Democratic political strategist Hank Sheinkopf put it more bluntly, predicting a hasty exodus of religious Jews from the city and a decline in long-standing Jewish influence that would be replicated elsewhere.
“It’s the end of Jewish New York as we know it,” he said, adding: “New York is a petri dish for national Democratic politics. And what happened here is what will likely happen in cities across the country.”
Israel was a key campaign issue
Mamdani’s top Democratic rival, the former governor, had called antisemitism and support for Israel “the most important issue” of the campaign.
Mamdani’s backers repeatedly accused Cuomo of trying to weaponize the issue. Many drew parallels to the way Republican President Donald Trump has cast any criticism of Israel’s actions as antisemitic, claiming Jews who vote for Democrats “hate Israel” and their own religion.
For some Mamdani supporters, the election results signaled a rejection by voters of one of Cuomo’s arguments: that an upstart socialist with pro-Palestinian views posed a threat to New York’s Jewish community.
Many were focused on issues such as affordability in a notoriously expensive city, or flat-out opposed to Cuomo, who was forced to resign in disgrace amid sexual harassment allegations.
Aiyana Leong Knauer, a 35-year-old Brooklyn bartender who is Jewish and backed Mamdani, said the vote represented “New Yorkers, many of them Jewish, saying we care more about having an affordable city than sowing division.”
“Many of us take really deep offense to our history being weaponized against us,” she said. “Jewish people all over the world have well-founded fears for their safety, but Jews in New York are safe overall.”
Others agreed with Mamdani’s views on Israel.
Beth Miller, political director of Jewish Voice for Peace Action, an anti-Zionist, progressive group that worked on Mamdani’s behalf, said Mamdani “was actually pretty popular among a lot of Jewish voters.”
“That is not in spite of his support for Palestinian rights. That is because of his support for Palestinian rights,” she said. “There has been a massive rupture within the Jewish community and more and more Jews of all generations, but especially younger generations,” she said, now refuse to be tied to what they see as a rogue government committing atrocities against civilians.
Polls show support for Israel has declined since the war began. Overall, a slight majority of Americans now express a “somewhat” or “very” unfavorable opinion of Israel, according to a March Pew Research Center poll, compared with 42 percent in 2022. Democrats’ views are particularly negative, with nearly 70 percent holding an unfavorable opinion versus less than 40 percent of Republicans.
Beyond the mayoral race
Mamdani’s wasn’t the only race where Israel was on voters’ minds.
In Brooklyn, City Councilwoman Shahana Hanif, who represents Park Slope and surrounding areas, drew criticism for her Palestinian advocacy. Some said she had failed to respond forcefully to antisemitic incidents in the district.
Yet Hanif, the first Muslim woman elected to the City Council, easily beat her top challenger, Maya Kornberg, who is Jewish, despite an influx of money from wealthy, pro-Israel groups and donors.
That outcome dismayed Ramon Maislen, a developer who launched Brooklyn BridgeBuilders to oppose Hanif’s reelection and said antisemitism did not seem to resonate with voters.
“We were very disappointed with our neighbors’ response,” he said.
While campaigning against Hanif, he said he was routinely screamed at by residents and accused of supporting genocide.
“I think that those of us in the Jewish community that are attuned to that are cognizant that there’s been some kind of cultural sea change that’s occurring,” he said. “What we’re seeing is a legitimatization of hatred that isn’t happening in any other liberal or progressive space.”
Mamdani’s record and rhetoric
Mamdani has repeatedly pledged to fight antisemitism, including during an appearance on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” where he was grilled on his stance. He was joined on the show by city comptroller and fellow candidate Brad Lander, the city’s highest-ranking Jewish official, who had cross-endorsed him. He has also said he would increase funding for anti-hate crime programming by 800 percent.
But many of his comments have angered Jewish groups and officials, most notably his refusal to disavow the phrase “globalize the intifada,” which has been used as a slogan in recent protests. Many Jews see it as a call to violence against Israeli civilians. In a podcast interview, Mamdani said the phrase captured a “a desperate desire for equality and equal rights in standing up for Palestinian human rights.”
Given another opportunity to condemn the phrase, Mamdani on Sunday told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that it was not his role to police speech and he pledged to be a mayor who “protects Jewish New Yorkers and lives up to that commitment through the work that I do.”
Mamdani also supports the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which aims to pressure governments, schools and other institutions to boycott Israeli products, divest from companies that support the country, and impose sanctions. The Anti-Defamation League calls it antisemitic and part of a broader campaign to “delegitimize and isolate the State of Israel.”
Mamdani has also said that, as mayor, he would arrest Netanyahu if the Israeli leader tried to enter the city.
The ADL in a statement Thursday warned candidates and their supporters not to use “language playing into dangerous antisemitic canards that time and time again have been used to incite hatred and violence against Jews.”
In his victory speech, Mamdani alluded to the criticism he’d received and said he would not abandon his beliefs. But he also said he would “reach further to understand the perspectives of those with whom I disagree and to wrestle deeply with those disagreements.”


Trump blasts ‘communist’ winner of NY Democratic primary

Updated 29 June 2025
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Trump blasts ‘communist’ winner of NY Democratic primary

  • Trump’s White House has repeatedly threatened to curb funding for Democratic-led US cities if they oppose his policies, including cutting off money to so-called sanctuary cities which limit their cooperation with immigration authorities

WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump branded the winner of New York City’s mayoral Democratic primary a “pure communist” in remarks that aired Sunday, an epithet the progressive candidate dismissed as political theatrics.
Zohran Mamdani’s shock win last week against a scandal-scarred political heavyweight resonated as a thunderclap within the party, and drew the ire of Trump and his collaborators, who accused Mamdani of being a radical extremist.
The Republican’s aggressive criticism of the self-described democratic socialist is sure to ramp up over the coming months as Trump’s party seeks to push Democrats away from the political center and frame them as too radical to win major US elections.
“He’s pure communist” and a “radical leftist... lunatic,” Trump fumed on Fox News talk show “Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo.”
“I think it’s very bad for New York,” added Trump, who grew up in the city and built his sprawling real estate business there.
“If he does get in, I’m going to be president and he is going to have to do the right thing (or) they’re not getting any money” from the federal government.
Trump’s White House has repeatedly threatened to curb funding for Democratic-led US cities if they oppose his policies, including cutting off money to so-called sanctuary cities which limit their cooperation with immigration authorities.
Mamdani also took to the talk shows Sunday, asserting he would “absolutely” maintain New York’s status as a sanctuary city so that “New Yorkers can get out of the shadows and into the full life of the city that they belong to.”
Asked directly on NBC’s “Meet the Press” whether he is a communist, Mamdani — a 33-year-old immigrant aiming to become New York’s first Muslim mayor — responded “No, I am not.
“And I have already had to start to get used to the fact that the president will talk about how I look, how I sound, where I’m from, who I am, ultimately because he wants to distract from what I’m fighting for,” Mamdani said.
“I’m fighting for the very working people that he ran a campaign to empower, that he has since then betrayed.”
The Ugandan-born state assemblyman had trailed former governor Andrew Cuomo in polls but surged on a message of lower rents, free daycare and buses, and other populist ideas in the notoriously expensive metropolis.
Although registered Democrats outnumber Republicans three to one in New York, victory for Mamdani in November is not assured.
Current Mayor Eric Adams is a Democrat but is campaigning for re-election as an independent, while Cuomo may also run unaffiliated.

 


US Senate pushes ahead on Trump tax cuts as nonpartisan analysis raises price tag

Updated 29 June 2025
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US Senate pushes ahead on Trump tax cuts as nonpartisan analysis raises price tag

  • The Senate only narrowly advanced the tax-cut, immigration, border and military spending bill in a procedural vote late on Saturday, voting 51-49 to open debate on the 940-page megabill

WASHINGTON: The US Senate version of President Donald Trump’s sweeping tax-cut and spending bill will add $3.3 trillion to the nation’s debt, about $800 billion more than the version passed last month by the House of Representatives, a nonpartisan forecaster said on Sunday.
The Congressional Budget Office issued its estimate of the bill’s hit to the $36.2 trillion federal debt as Senate Republicans sought to push the bill forward in a marathon weekend session.
Republicans, who have long voiced concern about growing US deficits and debt, have rejected the CBO’s longstanding methodology to calculate the cost of legislation. But Democrats hope the latest, eye-widening figure could stoke enough anxiety among fiscally-minded conservatives to get them to buck their party, which controls both chambers of Congress.
The Senate only narrowly advanced the tax-cut, immigration, border and military spending bill in a procedural vote late on Saturday, voting 51-49 to open debate on the 940-page megabill.
Trump on social media hailed Saturday’s vote as a “great victory” for his “great, big, beautiful bill.”
In an illustration of the depths of the divide within the Republican Party over the bill, Senator Thom Tillis said he would not seek re-election next year, after Trump threatened to back a primary challenger in retribution for Tillis’ Saturday night vote against the bill.
Tillis’ North Carolina seat is one of the few Republican Senate seats seen as vulnerable in next year’s midterm elections. He was one of just two Republicans to vote no on Saturday.
Trump wants the bill passed before the July 4 Independence Day holiday. While that deadline is one of choice, lawmakers will face a far more serious deadline later this summer when they must raise the nation’s self-imposed debt ceiling or risk a devastating default on $36.2 trillion in debt.
“We are going to make sure hardworking people can keep more of their money,” Senator Katie Britt, an Alabama Republican, told CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday.

HITS TO BENEFITS
Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia, said this legislation would come to haunt Republicans if it gets approved, predicting 16 million Americans would lose their health insurance.
“Many of my Republican friends know ... they’re walking the plank on this and we’ll see if those who’ve expressed quiet consternation will actually have the courage of their convictions,” Warner told CBS News’ “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan.”
The legislation has been the sole focus of a marathon weekend congressional session marked by political drama, division and lengthy delays as Democrats seek to slow the legislation’s path to passage.
Top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer called for the entire text of the bill to be read on the Senate floor, a process that began before midnight Saturday and ran well into Sunday afternoon. Following that lawmakers will begin up to 20 hours of debate on the legislation. That will be followed by an amendment session, known as a “vote-a-rama,” before the Senate votes on passage. Lawmakers said they hoped to complete work on the bill on Monday.
Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, the other Republican “no” vote, opposed the legislation because it would raise the federal borrowing limit by an additional $5 trillion.
“Did Rand Paul Vote ‘NO’ again tonight? What’s wrong with this guy???” Trump said on social media.
The megabill would extend the 2017 tax cuts that were Trump’s main legislative achievement during his first term as president, cut other taxes and boost spending on the military and border security.
Representative Michael McCaul, however, warned that fellow Republicans who do not back Trump on the bill could face payback from voters.
“They know that their jobs are at risk. Not just from the president, but from the voting — the American people. Our base back home will not reelect us to office if we vote no on this,” McCaul also told CBS News.
Senate Republicans, who reject the CBO’s estimates on the cost of the legislation, are set on using an alternative calculation method that does not factor in costs from extending the 2017 tax cuts. Outside tax experts, like Andrew Lautz from the nonpartisan think tank Bipartisan Policy Center, call it a “magic trick.”
Using this calculation method, the Senate Republicans’ budget bill appears to cost substantially less and seems to save $500 billion, according to the BPC analysis.
If the Senate passes the bill, it will then return to the House of Representatives for final passage before Trump can sign it into law. The House passed its version of the bill last month.