‘Not a Close Call’: Left-Wing Group Declines To Endorse Socialist in Tight House Race Over ‘Point-Blank’ Refusal To Condemn Hamas

A left-wing New York political club declined to endorse Darializa Avila Chevalier, a democratic socialist backed by Zohran Mamdani, following her "point-blank" refusal to condemn Hamas and its Oct. 7 massacre.

Broadway Democrats voted against endorsing any candidate running for New York’s 13th Congressional District after a "spirited meeting," while its leaders, Curtis Arluck and Paula Diamond Roman, supported the Democratic incumbent, Rep. Adriano Espaillat, the group wrote in a Thursday newsletter.

"We usually support the younger, more progressive candidate," Arluck and Diamond Roman wrote. "But we cannot do this in the 13th District Congressional race, and it is not a close call."

"That is because Espaillat’s chief challenger, Darializa Avila Chevalier, refuses to condemn Hamas or anything about it, its October 7th and hundreds of other murderous assaults on Israeli people, its execution of its own political dissidents, its theocratic view of government and what a society is, its misogyny, its homophobia, its racism," the pair continued. "These statements about Chevalier’s positions are not mere rumor; at our own endorsement meeting, when asked to condemn Hamas and its October 7th attacks, she point-blank refused, turning the question into yet another attack on Israel."

During the March 12 meeting, Chevalier said, "‘The premise of that question, to me, ignores the 75 years of occupation that the Palestinian people have been subjected to and the conditions that folks were living under before this genocide began.’"

Chevalier otherwise appears to align with the brand of left-wing candidates Broadway Democrats typically endorses, including Mamdani, though Arluck acknowledged that he "falls too much into the ‘Free Palestine’ camp," giving "encouragement to the murderous leaders of Hamas." The group has also routinely supported candidates the Working Families Party has run or endorsed.

Broadway Democrats delivered its blow to Chevalier less than two weeks before the June 23 primary. She did, however, score an endorsement from Mamdani after the mayor broke a reported agreement with Espaillat to either endorse him or remain neutral in the contest, and narrowly leads the race, according to a June 11 poll conducted for Justice Democrats by Data for Progress.

The 13th district, which covers Upper Manhattan and the West Bronx and is overwhelmingly Democratic, includes a large, Modern Orthodox Jewish community. And while Espaillat supports Israel, potentially putting him at odds with Mamdani, Chevalier has a long history of supporting Palestinian terrorists and scored an endorsement from Track AIPAC, which accuses pro-Israel U.S. politicians of being "foreign agents."

As a Columbia University student, Chevalier openly championed Rasmea Odeh, a notorious female terrorist convicted of plotting an Israeli supermarket bombing that killed two people, the Washington Free Beacon reported.

"Help Rasmea come home! ," Chevalier posted to Facebook in December 2014 during Odeh’s immigration fraud trial in Detroit following the terrorist’s release from her life sentence in an Israeli prison as part of a prisoner swap before slipping illegally into the United States. She included a link to a fundraiser for Odeh’s bail.

Chevalier also cofounded Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a notorious militant campus group which openly supports "armed resistance" by Hamas, and organized the hugely disruptive protest encampment on Columbia's campus in spring 2024. By that fall, it had become so radical that it withdrew its apology for a member's statement that "Zionists don't deserve to live" and in February declared "Death to America" after the United States launched its current conflict against Iran.

More recently, Chevalier attended a pro-Hamas rally in Times Square the day after Hamas's Oct. 7 massacre of Israelis.

Earlier this month, Chevalier pivoted on Hamas, but attacked Israel in the process.

"What we fund is the Israeli military. While, yes, I do condemn Hamas, the problem is that … our money and our tax dollars are going … towards indiscriminate slaughter," Chevalier said during a June 4 primary forum.

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