In an editorial, Hoboken resident Joshua Sotomayor Einstein thanks Mayor-elect Emily Jabbour for calling out Mayor Ravi Bhalla over the Palestinian flag being raised at City Hall on Tuesday.
Hoboken Mayor-Elect Emily Jabbour should be celebrated by all those of goodwill.
Her straightforward shutdown of Mayor Bhalla’s unilateral abuse of taxpayer-funded resources on a day seemingly chosen because of its connection to terrorism is the dose of common sense the doctor ordered for Hoboken.
In November 2024 Mayor Bhalla, whom many consider to be an absentee mayor, first hoisted the flag of the PLO. This year (2025) it took Mayor Bhalla until December 9th, the anniversary of the First Intifada.
The Intifada was a period of terrorism against Israeli civilians that ended when the PLO promised to renounce violence in the future and was followed by the Oslo Accords which created the Palestinian Authority.
Of course to Mayor Bhalla facts are secondary to image. As he stated at the November 2024 PLO flag raising “I would never cancel the people of Palestine,” something no one had asked him to do.
Yet while posturing as hero, he was forced to require the out-of-town agitators he was posing with to leave their banners calling for the genocide of Israeli’s out of the group picture.
The reality is that Bhalla’s mugging for the camera is not about his asleep-at-the-wheel performance as mayor, nor his new gig as Assemblyman-to-be – it’s about his future rematch for Congress in the Dem primary election against U.S. Rep. Rob Menendez.
If Mayor Bhalla was the humanitarian he so desperately wants to be seen as, would he not raise a flag for the two million Uyghur Muslims in concentration camps run by the Chinese Communist regime?
Would he not attempt to use City Hall or his new position to advocate for the over 400,000 civilians ethnically cleansed in Sudan?
For Mayor Bhalla it’s not about “Palestine,” it’s not about his new legislative district to be, and it was never about Hoboken – it’s about the Bhalla show and we are forced to watch.
Here’s to Mayor-Elect Jabbour for rightfully changing the channel and shutting it down.