Voters must boot radical Bowman

DEMOCRATIC Rep. Jamaal Bowman, who represents southern Westchester County and a section of The Bronx, is a radical socialist facing a tough primary challenge.

But regardless of what you think about his opponent and fellow Democrat George Latimer, Bowman deserves any and every criticism you could think to lay on him. He’s just that bad.

Bowman (pictured) beat his predecessor Eliot Engel in the June 2020 primary, right in the midst of the George Floyd riots and the “Defund the Police” hysteria, which Bowman celebrated and amplified. “Only 5% of policing is focused on violent crime,” Bowman claimed, unaccountably. “The other 95% can be handled by other agencies.”

We saw how well that worked in cities that followed the defund agenda. Crime soared, and most cities moved to refund their lawenforcement agencies.

Bowman was a school principal before he entered politics, and he’s made ending the mythical “school-to-prison pipeline” one of his core issues. The problem, he explained, is harsh “discipline practices that are rooted in racism,” which “brutalize” black children in a “vicious cycle of punishment.”

The Biden administration resumed President Barack Obama’s warnings to school districts to monitor disciplinary racial disparities. Guess what? Schools are more disorderly than ever before, with New York City schools registering a 30% increase in “safety incidents” over the past five years.

The New York Times blames the pandemic, but the retreat on school-discipline standards is the obvious culprit.

Bowman had his own brush with a “safety incident” in September, in the middle of a House debate on a continuing resolution to fund government operations. Bowman was caught on security video pulling a fire alarm in the Cannon House Office Building, causing an evacuation and delaying a vote on the measure.

‘Apartheid state’

The congressman made the absurd claim that he pulled the alarm because he “was rushing to make a vote” and “came to a door that is usually open for votes but today would not open.” He “thought the alarm would open the door.”

Nothing Bowman said accorded with reality. He was not on his way to a vote. Right before he pulled the alarm he removed signs marking the door as an emergency exit. And after pulling the alarm, he turned around and jogged away in the opposite direction, without checking to see if the door would open.

Bowman’s stunt was clearly intended to delay the House vote, an effort to disrupt the proceedings of government that, if he were a Republican or an ordinary citizen, would likely have gotten him in federal court on charges of sedition, facing a lengthy prison sentence.

But Bowman was allowed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor, paid a small fine and was censured by the House in a strictly partisan vote no Democrat voted for. He has since joked about the incident, mockingly tweeting “Sound the alarm” when his colleague George Santos was indicted.

But it is Bowman’s imprecations against Israel — which he calls “an apartheid state” — that have most recently raised serious concerns among his constituents.

‘Beheaded babies’

Video emerged this week of Bowman speaking at a November rally repeating gross calumnies about the Oct. 7 atrocities. “There was propaganda used at the beginning of the siege,” he shouted on a White Plains sidewalk. “And there is still no evidence of beheaded babies or raped women, but they still keep using that lie.” There is no question Israeli women were raped by Gaza militants as they committed their savage attack. As a United Nations investigation concluded, “In most of these incidents, victims first subjected to rape were then killed.”

The UN report describes “a pattern of victims, mostly women, found fully or partially naked, bound, and shot across multiple locations.”

Jamaal Bowman is a proven liar and a war-crimes denier, in addition to having terrible policy ideas. It is up to the Democrats of Westchester and The Bronx to decide if he is the man they want representing them in Washington.