Mayor Zohran Mamdani failed to appear at New York’s iconic Columbus Day Parade — offending Italian Americans in a move gubernatorial candidate Bruce Blakeman called “disgraceful” and “divisive.”
“It’s indicative of him being the most divisive mayor we’ve ever had,” Blakeman told The Post from the Fifth Avenue parade Monday.
“I think that’s an affront to Italian Americans,” Blakeman added. “The fact is that he is a very divisive guy. He’s got people at each other’s throats. As an elected official, you’re supposed to make people happy, bring them together.”
Though not Italian himself, Blakeman aptly spoke for many Italian-Americans attending the parade.
“It’s very sad. He should be here, he represents this city,” 33-year-old Brooklynite Mike Gullo said, calling Mamdani’s snub “insulting.”
“It’s very disrespectful, you can ask anyone here and they would say the same,” Gullo said.
Word of Mamdani’s parade snub broke Sunday but came as no surprise — the lefty mayor has long reviled the iconic Italian explorer, dismissing him as little more than a colonizer and criminal for his violent treatment of natives.
And the mayor has given little quarter to the role Columbus historically played in the hearts and minds of Italian-Americans, who revere him as one of the greats of American history for “discovering” the New World with his famous 1492 voyage that brought the continent into contact with the rest of the world.
Mamdani has long focused on the darker sides of Columbus’ story, joining leftist calls to eradicate any monuments to the Italian — notoriously posting “Take it down” alongside a photo of himself giving a Queens statue of Columbus the middle finger in 2020.
And it was behavior like that which left some parade-goers grateful Hizzoner decided to skip.
“It’s better that he’s not here,” 60-year-old Woodsider Anne Marie said. “It probably would have been controversial. Nobody wants to look at his face.
“I think it’s horrible,” she added. “I’m not surprised he’s not here.”
“I’m happy,” 79-year-old Camile Staffe said of Mamdani’s absence. “It’s about the Italians.”
“Italy doesn’t get enough credit but we contribute to America. They try to make it about indigenous people. It’s not fair,” she added. “My grandfather helped build the Empire State Building.”
Mamdani’s attitude towards Columbus wasn’t the only reason Italian-American New Yorkers are raising their eyebrows at him — a July administration map of the Big Apple’s “Immigrant Enclaves” mentioned the likes of Little Yemen, Little Pakistan and Koreatown, yet failed to note Little Italy.
That’s despite Little Italy being one of New York’s single most iconic immigrant neighborhoods, known and renowned the world over.
“Leaving little Italy off the map, he’s definitely against the Italian people,” Anne Marie said. “He’s trying to make them irrelevant. That’s not going to happen.”
Mamdani’s former mayoral opponent and an Italian-American, Curtis Sliwa, put his view’s on the mayor’s behavior bluntly: “We have a word for that in the streets. It’s disgrazia.”
“He has said basically uufa to the Italian Americans and that is disgrazia.”
