Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s planned trip to New York for this month’s UN General Assembly is likely to provide another reminder that Mayor Zohran Mamdani is more focused on attacking Israel than on the needs of New Yorkers.
Mamdani has at last conceded that he lacks the authority to direct NYPD officers to arrest Netanyahu. Yet he quickly followed that admission with an unmistakable appeal for major protests against the visiting Israeli leader — disruptions New York hardly needs amid the upheaval the annual United Nations gathering already creates.
The timing is particularly fraught. City police will have just devoted extensive resources to security for both 9/11 commemorations and Rosh Hashana, occasions when concerns over Islamist and antisemitic violence are also heightened.
Mamdani, who was seen laughing with fellow socialist AOC during Friday’s 9/11 ceremonies, has criticized Israel throughout his life, well before adopting the broader far-left agenda. He absorbed that ideology from his father and later co-founded a Students for Justice in Palestine chapter as an undergraduate at Bowdoin.
Enforcing the International Criminal Court’s legally baseless arrest warrant for Netanyahu was a defining Mamdani campaign pledge. He reinforced that position during the opening months of his mayoralty, even publicizing efforts to explore every legal route with the NYPD to carry it out.
President Donald Trump then humiliated Mamdani over the proposal, declaring that Netanyahu would not be arrested in any “way, shape, or form.” Mamdani was forced to acknowledge that he had no authority to deliver on his promise.
Still, he turned the admission into a campaign-style video and then pointedly declared: “One of the bedrocks of our city is protesting. It is something that’s been a part of what makes our city so special that New Yorkers can express themselves whether they are in support or in opposition no matter what.”
Nudge, nudge, wink, wink: The message appears to be that street mobs should continue his witch hunt against the world’s most famous Jew.
It fits into his broader fixation on Israel — and his hostility toward Jews unwilling to engage in self-hatred.
Take his first response to the July stabbing of Moshe Yezhak Grunhaus by a man yelling “Allahu Akbar.” After hours of silence, Mamdani posted on X without describing the attack as a hate crime.
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Or his response as mayor-elect to November’s mini-pogrom outside the Park East Synagogue, organized nominally because of an Israeli real estate event being held there: Mamdani blamed the victims for being in “violation of international law.”
On the morning after the Hamas butcheries of Oct. 7, 2023, then-Assemblyman Mamdani drew a moral equivalence between aggressor and victim, expressing sadness for “the hundreds of people killed across Israel and Palestine in the last 36 hours.”
Two months earlier, he said at a DSA convention: “We have to make clear that when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF.”
He, and a good chunk of his base, plainly care more about slamming Israel than serving New York City’s far more urgent needs.
The math and reading ability of Big Apple kids is in utter collapse even as the city spends ever-more on its public schools.
Revolving-door “justice” keeps recidivist felons on Gotham’s streets.
The city budget faces huge out-year gaps; the “replace Rikers” project is an ongoing farce; homeless encampments continue to fester across the city as deranged vagrants regularly wound and kill innocents in the streets and subways . . .
Those issues should consume the mayor’s attention and resources; that the UN visit by the head of a foreign government occupies more than a microsecond of the mayor’s attention is obscene.
Worse, Mamdani’s personal obsession with Jews and Israel foments hatred and division — putting the city he leads at risk.
Please, Mr. Mayor: Let it go, at least until you find another job.