Arrivederci, Little Italy!

www.americanthinker.com

The “Mamdani-zation” of New York City, and perhaps the Democrat party, is alive and well. Don’t look now, but you may not recognize The Big Apple the next time you visit there.

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Let’s check this out from Townhall:

New York City has long been celebrated as a city of immigrant neighborhoods. Little Italy, Chinatown, Harlem, Washington Heights, Brighton Beach - these communities tell the story of generations of newcomers who helped build America’s largest city while gradually becoming part of it.

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That history makes one omission from Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s recently released map of immigrant communities particularly striking.

Little Italy wasn’t there.

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Instead, the map highlighted a series of neighborhoods identified as “Little Pakistan,” “Little Senegal,” “Little Yemen” and even “Little Palestine.” City Hall defended the project by saying it was never intended to identify religious enclaves but rather neighborhoods with substantial foreign-born populations from around the world.

That explanation raises an obvious question: If the goal was to recognize immigrant communities, how does one leave out perhaps the most iconic immigrant neighborhood in New York City?

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Little Italy is more than a tourist destination. It represents one of the defining chapters in the city’s history - a reminder of the millions of Italian immigrants who arrived in America, endured discrimination, built businesses and eventually became woven into the fabric of American life. Omitting it while highlighting far newer and, in some cases, unofficial neighborhood designations sends a message, whether intended or not, about which immigrant stories deserve recognition.

Yes, this is not about the story of immigrants who built New York City. This is about deleting those immigrants we deem oppressors and replacing them with the ones whom we designate as victims. Again, this is not about telling the history of New York City, but rather another “woke” attempt to rewrite U.S. history.

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The mayor is obviously looking for an excuse, from saying that it was an administrative error to blaming it on Mayor Adams. He wants us to forget two things:

1.    Back in 2020, Mamdani, then a candidate for the New York State Assembly, was seen with a “take it down” sign in front of the Columbus statue; and

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2.    The creation of all these communities is the mayor’s way of recognizing who voted for him. In other words, he probably swept the precincts in Little Senegal and Little Yemen, but didn’t do so well in the Italian American ones.

Again, this is about destroying the country’s history and replacing it with a woke version that distorts it. This is what communists do. We saw this in Cuba, where new history books were published, historical photos were deleted, and my parents did not recognize what the history teachers were teaching me.

Rewriting history is what communists do. So the Italians need to stand up, and someone in the Democrat party needs to say “enough is enough.”

Image created using AI.

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