New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani delivered a message Oct. 7, the third anniversary of the bloody Hamas pogrom in Israel, the biggest assault on Jews since the Holocaust. But he focused not on that atrocity, but on slanders against Israel, charging it was carrying out an “ongoing genocide in Gaza.”
He paid lip service to “the horrific war crimes of October 7,” but said nothing about Hamas’ systematic slaughtering of 1,200 people, overwhelmingly Jewish civilians; wounding thousands more; taking more than 250 hostages, many it held for months; and raping and mutilating dozens of women.
The mayor focused his remarks on blaming the Israeli government for “genocide,” killing “more than 74,000 Palestinians” as part of its “occupation and apartheid.”
An editorial the following day in the Wall Street Journal titled “Celebrating Hamas on Oct. 7,” notes, “Mr. Mamdani passes off the Hamas-supplied Gaza casualty figure as if all the dead were civilians, not bothering to mention that at least 25,000 are believed to have been terrorist combatants.”
And, of course, the pro-Hamas mayor failed to acknowledge the fact that Hamas’ death squads built a massive tunnel network for its military operations and set up command posts and weapons storage depots under schools, hospitals, homes, U.N. warehouses and mosques, hoping to maximize civilian deaths, creating “martyrs” of Israeli brutality. The fact is, Israeli forces tried to minimize civilian casualties, including sending messages to people’s cellphones who were in harm’s way.
Mamdani also participated in an Oct. 7 remembrance candlelight vigil in Union Square Park in Manhattan organized by Israelis for Peace. Speakers there read testimonies from families of some of those killed by Hamas, as well as testimonies about Palestinians killed by Israel Defense Forces in Gaza.
As the rally was about to begin, hundreds of pro-Hamas supporters swept in trying to disrupt the vigil. They yelled Jew-hating rants, including, “We don’t want peace with Israelis. We sent your people to hell on Oct. 7.” Organizers of the vigil were able to move it to another part of the park.
The mayor stood silent throughout all this. He did not speak at the vigil, nor address the protesters’ actions.
The mayor’s Oct. 7 statement was condemned by a number of Jewish organizations. “Not once” did he say the word “‘Jews,’” Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, told the media.
“The Jewish people should be afforded this one day to mourn the murdered, the raped and the children left orphaned, without having their grief reframed as an indictment of Israel,” Jack Simony, president of the Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation, wrote.
The following day at a news conference in Brooklyn, the mayor defended his message. “I was proud to attend last night’s vigil,” he claimed, but focused on repeating the charge that the Israeli government used the Oct. 7 attack as a “justification for an ongoing genocide against Palestinians.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had answered this charge in a speech at the U.N. General Assembly two weeks earlier. “Accusing Israel of genocide is the greatest lie of the century,” he said. On Oct. 7, he noted, “there wasn’t a single Israeli then in Gaza, not a civilian, not a soldier, not one.”
“What genocidal regime gives a million polio vaccinations to the enemy’s population? What genocidal regime enables the distribution of 2 million tons of food into Gaza?”
“Israel didn’t commit genocide. Israel prevented genocide,” he said.
They prevented genocide aimed, as so many times in history, at the Jews. Hamas leaders have said over and over they will never cease their efforts to eliminate all the Jews.
“The lies you and other antisemites spread about the Jews and the Jewish state have real consequences,” Netanyahu said about Mamdani in his speech. “In New York, Jews are threatened on the way to synagogue. Jews have been stabbed in the streets. Jews are demonized. They’re targeted simply for being Jews. Jews have been murdered in Sydney, Manchester, Montreal, Boulder, Colorado.”