Mamdani’s radical wife Rama Duwaji can’t be a ‘private citizen’ but get a taxpayer-funded escort to Syria

I just returned from a lovely weeklong trip to Italy’s Amalfi Coast.

You’ll be glad to hear that no NYPD officers had to accompany me to ensure my safety while I enjoyed lemon gelato and gnocchi alla Sorrentina.

Why? Because I’m a private citizen, and as such am not entitled to a taxpayer-funded security detail of New York’s Finest.

Easy, right?

Tell that to Dora Pekec, Mayor Mamdani’s spokesperson.

Earlier this week, Pekec announced that first lady Rama Duwaji willl soon be traveling to the Middle East — and will be taking a few boys in blue along for her protection.

“Upon the strong recommendation of the NYPD,” Pekec said, “the first lady’s security detail will be joining her when she travels to visit family in Syria and Lebanon.”

Which, it turns out, was news to the NYPD: The department, a spokesman said on Tuesday, “does not send officers to countries with level four travel advisories for discretionary reasons not linked to investigative work.”

Both ways

Because irony is Mamdanistan’s greatest natural resource, Duwaji’s trip just happens to coincide with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to New York to attend the UN General Assembly — a trip likely to keep the NYPD busy now that Mamdani has encouraged his followers to take to the streets and protest.

It’s a delightful debacle, and yet another reminder — as if more reminders were needed — that nothing good happens when the college theater kids take over America’s largest city.

Yet the affair raises two pointed questions, and they’re no laughing matter.

The first has to do with what role, exactly, Duwaji plays in her husband’s administration.

To hear the mayor tell it, his missus is absolutely, resolutely, positively a private person.

That’s the line Hizzoner takes every time a new report reveals the depths of his wife’s depravity.

Did Duwaji cheer for Hamas after the attacks of Oct. 7, 2023?

Did she crow that the Jewish state had no right to exist?

Did she choose to illustrate work by an author, Susan Abulhawa, who described Israelis as “rootless, soulless ghouls”?

Don’t bother me with such trifles, said the mayor: “My wife is the love of my life,” Mamdani told the press, “and she’s also a private person who has held no formal position on my campaign or in my City Hall.”

But, like the cat in Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment who was somehow both alive and dead at the same time, Duwaji has managed to be both private and very, very public — sitting for a glamorous photo shoot with New York Magazine one moment and clamming up the next.

This most recent controversy, then, is a good reminder that City Hall can’t have it both ways.

If Duwaji is a public enough figure to demand a measure of protection that isn’t guaranteed to her by law, she’s also public enough to sit down with the press and do some ’splaining.

And then, there’s the question of the trip itself.

Why, pray tell, is the city’s first lady ignoring the US State Department’s warning not to travel to Syria and Lebanon “for any reason”?

And if the trip’s ultimate purpose is, as City Hall insists, to “visit family,” why is she willing to put NYPD officers at risk to do so?

It’s called corruption

These are not just petty qualms; they’re perfect windows into the Mamdani administration’s mindset — one in which Beirut is much nearer to heart and mind than Borough Park, say, and in which the city’s public servants are required to serve the very private interests of the mayor and his wife first and foremost.

There’s a simple English word for this mindset: It’s “corruption.”

From wasting $5.2 million of our dollars to pay the salaries of hand-picked propagandists to demanding that cops risk their lives and waste their time and our money to accompany his wife as she pals around with her kin in some of the world’s most feverishly anti-American nations, Mamdani is giving us a master class in misconduct.

We always knew the mayor was fond of musical theater.

But we never figured he’d turn New York City into his own real-life staging of “Evita.”

Liel Leibovitz is editor at large for Tablet and senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.