New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s hate-crime plan will increase funding for Partners Against the Hate, a coalition that includes a group which backed pro-Gaza protests after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks.

Washington Examiner reporting shows Mamdani’s office said Tuesday that the city’s plan to stop hate crimes will include increased funding for Partners Against the Hate. Mamdani says the program will combat antisemitism.

The city has cast the effort as “historic.” The money still flows to a 2021 partnership whose roster includes activists with a very different public record on Israel, Jews, and the protests that followed Hamas’s massacre.

Partners Against the Hate launched with six leading advocacy groups. One of them is the Arab American Association of New York, known as AAANY.

AAANY’s post-Oct. 7 record sits inside the mayor’s coalition

Linda Sarsour led AAANY for more than a decade. She is also described as a Mamdani supporter.

The same Washington Examiner account states that AAANY’s social media posts show the group cheered on a 2024 encampment demonstration at Columbia University and other pro-Gaza protests after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, including when those protests led to arrests.

That is the partner now in line for a larger share of city hate-crime funding under a mayor who says the program fights antisemitism.

The office statement did not name the other five groups in the 2021 launch. It did not spell out the size of the new funding or how the city will measure results against antisemitic attacks. It did name the mechanism: more money for Partners Against the Hate.

City hall sells protection; the partner list tells another story

Mamdani’s pitch is straightforward. Hate crimes are up. The city will answer with a strategy. Partners Against the Hate is part of that answer.

The problem is not abstract. After Oct. 7, Jewish New Yorkers faced a wave of harassment, vandalism, and fear. Campus encampments, Columbia’s among them, became national flash points. Arrests followed. AAANY’s posts, as reported, still celebrated the protest wave.

Now the same organization sits inside the coalition the mayor is reinforcing with public funds. The city calls the plan a fight against hate. The partner list includes a group that treated post-Oct. 7 street pressure, even when it ended in handcuffs, as a cause worth cheering.

Taxpayers covering an antisemitism strategy should not have to support partners who spent the months after Oct. 7 applauding the chaos.