There are plenty of bad things happening in Kathy Hochul’s New York. But one thing that has become increasingly clear is how willing Hochul is to allow racism and bigotry to thrive in this city.

Last weekend the terrible news came through that another American citizen has been murdered by Hamas.

California-born Hersh Goldberg-Polin was held hostage in Gaza for almost a year. He was kidnapped from the Nova music festival in Israel on October 7th.

Last week, as the Israeli Defense Forces moved in to save him, Hamas executed Hersh and five other hostages.

A day after this news broke there was a huge pro-Hamas protest in New York. A bunch of sick keffiyeh-wearing psychos, banging drums and chanting, marched through the center of New York waving the Hamas flag.

The main flag-wavers all covered their faces of course. It seems in Hochul’s New York you can openly praise a designated terrorist group that just murdered an American.

Jewish New Yorkers have had to put up with a year of this. They have had to put up with routine intimidation, with anti-Jewish graffiti going up calling for the murder of Jews, and for posters of the hostages being ripped down wherever they are put up.

Then on Tuesday things moved to their next stage, as Jewish students from CUNY’s City College got barricaded into a Jewish deli on Broadway.

A group of racists from “Students for Justice in Palestine” and other hate-groups screamed abuse at the Jewish students.

“Go back to Brooklyn” was just one of the things these keffiyeh-wearing thugs shouted. Again it seems this is all acceptable.

Yesterday, I sat down with a couple of other New Yorkers. Ronen and Orna Neutra are the parents of Omer Neutra, 23.

Omer was born in New York and raised in Queens and Long Island. Like a lot of American Jews, he visited Israel in his gap year.

His grandparents are both Holocaust survivors and in Israel he realized a truth that many Jews realize. Which is that the world’s only Jewish state needs to defend itself. He decided he wanted to do his part and joined the IDF.

He had almost finished his three years and was meant to start at Binghamton University, New York, this year.

But he missed his enrollment. Because last October Hamas kidnapped him from near the Gaza border and dragged him into Gaza. There has been no word of him ever since.

He is one of several American hostages still being held in Gaza. They include 64-year old Keith Samuel Seigel from North Carolina and 20-year old Edan Alexander from New Jersey.

You might wonder why we have not heard about these kidnapped Americans. The Biden-Harris administration say they are doing everything they can to return them. But the silence is deafening.

Yesterday Omer’s mother said to me, “On October 7, not only 1,200 Israelis were murdered and slaughtered and raped but also 45 Americans. And 12 Americans were taken hostage. We don’t feel that the outcry is out there. We don’t feel that there is a sense of outrage.”

But why the lack of outrage about these kidnapped and murdered Americans? Omer’s mother again: “I think a lot of propaganda out there that’s twisting the events and telling the story all upside down. This lack of knowledge. And a lot of people are just buying into it.”

Orna was eight months pregnant with Omer when 9/11 happened. She was working in the city that day.

“There was no transportation that day. We lived in Queens, and I just remember getting to work and the news was out. I just remember thinking how am I getting home and making sure that my child is safe. Twenty-three years later, I can’t save him.”

Ronen finishes her thought. “We clearly remember all the pictures around New York City of missing people. It’s just unimaginable how 23 years later, we are in that spot.”

They show me photos of Omer — the all-American boy. There’s a photograph of him with his Long Island school’s volleyball team. He was the captain.

Ronen and Orna, who own a small business, learned about their son’s kidnapping while they were at their home in New York. And from that moment they have been in a hell no parent can imagine.

How do they feel that in their own city people have just this week been flying the flag of Hamas? The flag of the designated terrorist group who have held their son kidnapped for almost a year?

“We think they don’t know what they’re talking about,” says Orna. “I think there are opportunists that are taking advantage of people who just don’t know. There’s also purposeful manipulation going on. That is also clear. You have professors in universities that are propagating this propaganda. It is so dangerous. It’s scary. It’s dangerous for the whole Western world.”

New York is now a city where antisemitism is open and apparently tolerated. Earlier this year when there was a commemoration of the young people murdered and kidnapped at the Nova festival — like Hersh — a gang of Hamas supporters protested outside.

Did Ronen and Orna ever imagine this would happen in their city? The city in which they live?

With a look of the deepest sadness Orna says, “The city has changed so much. I think it’s been building up. I think antisemitism has been on the rise. I think people have been crying out for a few years now.”

How on earth do they keep hope alive, when there is all this hate?

Omer’s mother tells me: “You know, a few days before Omer was taken captive, he had some time off and he spent some time with a good friend and she reached out to us a short time after he was taken captive and she told us, ‘You know, we were just sitting on the beach, and we were talking about plans for the future, and somehow we got to speak about our families, and he told me that he knew that if anything happened to him that his parents would fight for him.’ And we’ve been charged with that. We have to. We have to keep up hope. And we have to keep on fighting.”

Every decent American should be fighting alongside them.