A far-left congressional candidate handpicked by Mayor Zohran Mamdani once claimed the United States has committed worse atrocities than Hamas, sticking up for the terror group years before its fighters would butcher 1,200 Israelis on October 7.

Darializa Avila Chevalier floated the claim on Twitter in June 2021. Replying to a user who insisted American violence was “categorically incomparable to the worst things Hamas has ever done or ever could do,” Avila Chevalier jumped in to pile on, writing that only one of the two was “a nuclear power that’s ever used that kind of force,” an apparent nod to the World War II bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Two minutes later she doubled down, citing “the countless other forms of colonial violence” she said America had carried out.

The comments amount to a defense of a group that the United States and dozens of other countries have long branded a terrorist organization, one with a decades-long résumé of suicide bombings, rocket barrages, and a founding charter dedicated to wiping Israel off the map. Avila Chevalier’s apparent verdict: the world’s leading democracy is the bigger villain.

The resurfaced posts are only the latest embarrassment for a candidate whose record reads like a catalog of far-left grievance. Avila Chevalier, 32, a Columbia-educated activist who helped lead the school’s anti-Israel encampment and cut her teeth as an organizing lead on Mamdani’s mayoral campaign, is running with the backing of the Democratic Socialists of America to topple Rep. Adriano Espaillat, the veteran chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, in a Harlem-to-Bronx district.

Her hostility toward Israel has been a recurring theme. On October 8, 2023, with the bodies of Hamas’s victims barely cold, Avila Chevalier turned up at a notorious Times Square rally where demonstrators cheered the slaughter and swastikas were on display, a spectacle so vile that even fellow DSA firebrand Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said she was “appalled and horrified.” Avila Chevalier has refused to apologize for attending, and at a March forum she would not bring herself to condemn the October 7 massacre outright, deflecting instead to “75 years of occupation.” Only as the primary drew closer did she manage a grudging “yes, I do condemn Hamas” on WNYC, before immediately pivoting back to attacking the Jewish state.

The rest of her social-media trail is no prettier. She also mocked Black and Arab men in 2019 for marrying white women, and pushed a crackpot theory that COVID-19 originated in France while citing a Chinese Communist propaganda outlet as proof.

What makes the episode more than a single candidate’s problem is the man who elevated her. Avila Chevalier is one piece of a slate of DSA radicals Mamdani has chosen to bankroll with his political capital since taking City Hall, often torching relationships with his own party to do it. He passed over Espaillat, whom he had once promised to support, to back Avila Chevalier. In Brooklyn and Queens, he snubbed retiring Rep. Nydia Velázquez’s chosen successor to endorse DSA Assembly member Claire Valdez, who rails against what she calls “genocide” in Gaza and a “fascist” Trump administration. He is also backing former Comptroller Brad Lander’s effort to unseat Rep. Dan Goldman.

The power play has not gone over well with the Democrats Mamdani is steamrolling. Velázquez, who endorsed him early in his mayoral run, publicly slapped him for the Valdez pick, warning that such primaries are “a distraction” that “opens up fights.” Backing a challenger against the chair of the Hispanic Caucus has likewise enraged Latino Democrats on Capitol Hill.

None of it has moved Mamdani. Confronted over the Avila Chevalier posts, he offered the convenient claim that he simply hadn’t seen them before lending her his name, while insisting her views have evolved. Avila Chevalier, for her part, says she has “grown considerably” and is “not interested in relitigating the politics of my tweets.” She and her campaign had no immediate comment on the 2021 remarks.

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)