If you’ve kept track of NYT Mayor Zohran Mamdani since he was elected less than a year ago, it’s not hard to conclude that, though he pretends to dislike bigotry, his statements and actions add up to a man who is not fond of Jews, and who wants Israel gone and replaced by a Palestinian state. His “official” statement on October 7 of this year, was thin on sympathy for Israel and touted the three Big Lies of antisemitism: Israeli apartheid, genocide, and colonialism. To top off the day, Mamdani had dinner at a Palestinian restaurant, showing that he not only lacks the empathy he pretends to have for murdered Israelis, but also a man who in effect spits in the face of his Jewish constituency.
Of course I can’t write about this stuff nearly as well as the NYT’s op-ed columnist Bret Stephens, who yesterday posted what I see as one of his best and most penetrating columns. It’s about Mamdani’s moral obtuseness, and you can read it by clicking the link below or seeing the archived version here. I couldn’t resist spouting off myself (flush left) after bits of Stephens’s text (indented):
I was going to give some quotes, but I found I quoted the entire column, and I hope Stephens and the NYT forgive me. It is, as Darwin described The Origin, “one long argument,” and the parts are inseparable. I’ve bolded my favorite parts:
Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s mayor, set off a firestorm of criticism Wednesday morning with a social media post ostensibly intended to commemorate the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre of Israelis. It devoted a brief paragraph to condemning Hamas and commiserating with its victims. The rest was a much longer denunciation of Israel’s “ongoing genocide in Gaza,” a “world in which occupation and apartheid continue” and a situation in which “our federal government continues its complicity with every arms shipment.”
In response, Ammiel Hirsch, the president of the New York Board of Rabbis, said the statement was “so offensive to so many Jews that it is hard to describe how offensive it is.” In fact, it’s a moral obscenity. Let me count the ways.
It is obscene in the same way it would have been obscene if the mayor had commemorated the 25th anniversary of Sept. 11 last month with a perfunctory nod to the victims of the day, followed by a much longer denunciation of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. What happened on both Sept. 11 and Oct. 7 was undiluted evil, each an unprovoked visit of deliberate and maximalist violence on people who had done nothing to invite that violence other than being at the wrong place at the wrong time.
The paragraph above shows not only the power of simile in calling out hypocrisy, but also how morally obtuse Mamdani really was, and how oblivious and/or insensitive he is to the feelings of people devastated by Hamas’s attacks on October 7. He couldn’t keep his gob shut for just one day without condemning Israel.
It is obscene because many of the Jews murdered on Oct. 7, living in kibbutzim with conspicuously left-leaning politics, had been at the forefront of the peace movement, volunteering, for example, to drive sick Palestinians for treatment at nearby Israeli hospitals. Hamas wasn’t just killing and terrorizing the innocent; it was eliminating the good.
It is obscene because Hamas didn’t just kill its victims in pursuit of a strategic objective. It tormented and slaughtered them like an army of serial killers who delight in the suffering of their victims. Corpses of Israeli women were described by one coroner as “shot in the crotch, intimate parts, vagina, or were shot in the breast.” Others appeared to have been raped so violently that their pelvises were broken. Parents were killed in front of their children; children were murdered in their beds. A fieldworker was beheaded with a garden hoe. I know this because Hamas filmed itself doing this and I forced myself to watch the film. I know because that same month, I visited the bedrooms where the kids had been murdered, their mattresses still soaked in blood.
Although Mamdani gives lip service to the horrors experienced by Israeli civilians on October 7, not once have I seen him blame Hamas for the “genocide”, nor, indeed, say anything about the fact that explicitly genocidal aims are espoused not by Israel but by Hamas. That organization is responsible for the devastation that followed their invasion of Israel, as are the Palestinians who enable and approve of Hamas’s actions.
Mamdani does not mention that the kind of warfare practiced by Hamas guaranteed more civilian deaths. Indeed, Hamas’s late leader, Yahya Sinwar, approved of the deaths of Gazan civilians, asserting that they were actually beneficial to Hamas. Read what he said and you’ll realize that Hamas didn’t value the lives of Gazan civilians nearly as much as did Israel. Israel tried to protect Gazan civilians; Sinwar’s attitude was “the more of our civilians die, the better for our cause.” While the movie “Naza” faults Israel for killing civilians as a necessary byproduct of eliminating Hamas, the IDF tried to prevent that, while, in contrast, the “necessary sacrifices” of Gazan civilians were something that Sinwar (and Hamas) wanted and facilitated (why else would they put military facilities in and under schools and hospitals?) Stephens continues:
It is obscene because, whatever else you may think of the war in Gaza, on the eve of Oct. 7 the border of Israel and Gaza was governed by a cease-fire. It was Hamas that chose to kick off the violence, just as the Japanese did in 1941 with the attack on Pearl Harbor. Whether in fistfights between people or wars between states, whoever throws the first punch forfeits the right to throw the last.
It is obscene because Mamdani is being misleading when he speaks as if his prime objection to Israel is what it did after Oct. 7. In fact, the mayor has been an anti-Israel zealot at least since his college days, when, as a leader of Students for Justice in Palestine, he broke off collaboration with the left-leaning Jewish group J Street, which advocates a Palestinian state, because it also recognizes the rights of a Jewish state. He’s written a rap professing “love” for five men convicted in a U.S. court of funneling money to Hamas. The day after Oct. 7, he issued a brief statement that said nothing about Hamas but immediately denounced Israel. Put simply, this is a mayor who first condemned Israel as guilty and then went about collecting evidence.
It is obscene because, however much the genocide allegation against Israel is mindlessly repeated by people too lazy or prejudiced to understand the difference between war and genocide, that allegation is as false as it is sinister. False, because genocide is about killing whole classes of people for who they are rather than for what they did — and if Israel wanted to kill Palestinians as Palestinians it never would have bothered mobilizing hundreds of thousands of its own soldiers for the war, and losing hundreds in high-intensity urban warfare. Sinister, because the political purpose of the genocide allegation is to trivialize, if not erase, the attacks of Oct. 7 by making them seem minor in comparison to the Palestinian casualties that tragically, but all-but inevitably, followed.
It is obscene because Hamas’s intentions toward Israel really are genocidal. Its leaders have often and publicly vowed to perpetrate future Oct. 7s. Had the group not been stopped by force that day, there’s no reason to think it wouldn’t have kept up its orgy of slaughter on its way to Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities. Yet one searches in vain for anything from the mayor except perfunctory, pro forma condemnations of Hamas.
I often ask those who accuse Israel of killing too many Palestinians what they would do were they in charge of Israel or of the IDF. Would they stop after killing, say, 3,000 Hamas members (and about 6,000 civilians assuming a 2:1 ratio)? Given that Hamas said they’d continue slaughter and kidnapping, why would Israel stop short of wholesale elimination of the terrorists? I’ve never heard a critic explicitly say what they think Israel would have done other than what it did to eliminate the existential threat that Hamas posed.
It is obscene because there’s an even more wretched purpose to the genocide charge against Israel, which long predates the recent war in Gaza. It is a specimen of Holocaust erasure: not the dumb kind, which seeks to deny Nazi Germany’s murder of six million Jews, but a more sophisticated version that accuses living Jews of genocide as a way of ending the historical Jewish claim to a long and ongoing history of persecution and near-annihilation that accounts for its need for a sovereign state capable of defending its people.
In my view, people like Mamdani, and other Jew haters, dislike the Jews even more because of the Holocaust, which of course arouses sympathies for what Jews experienced. That’s why they either deny the Holocaust or accuse Jews of enacting the same thing in Gaza—a bit of lunacy that many have bought into. The next paragraph is sheer brilliance:
Finally, it is obscene because Mamdani is the mayor for about one million Jewish New Yorkers, many with close relatives in Israel, who deserve better on a day of grief than to be offered the equivalent of an “All Lives Matter” homily. This is yet another of the double standards through which modern-day Jew hatred manifests itself: Whenever antisemitism is mentioned in progressive circles, it is inevitably accompanied by nods about Islamophobia or other bigotries.
It would be better to have a mayor who, if only on Oct. 7, can say: Jewish Lives Matter. Israeli Lives Matter. Full stop. The lectures about Gaza can come some other day.
אָמֵן
Excellent piece by Stephens, thanks for posting by this no-longer-a-NYT-subscriber.
YES. I’m also a former subscriber Loretta.
D.A.
NYC
Gift link. I assume it includes reader comments.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/09/opinion/zohran-mamdani-israel-gaza.html?unlocked_article_code=1.HlE.7ChB.B2UIZozEmCpe&smid=url-share
Great column by Stephens. Do yourselves a favor and don’t read the comments.
Wow you were not kidding about the comments 🙁
Bret Stephens has become one of the most important journalists writing about, well, just about anything these days. Back in the Obama era I sometimes found him a bit too conservative on some topics, but in the Trump era he seems perpetually spot on. Hands down he is the best and most clear-sighted MSM commentator on Israel/Gaza.
And no, I never read the comments to any article by Stephens on this topic. Gaza seems to provoke a blinkered but unhinged fury in the progressive wing, and anyone saying anything sympathetic about Israel or even in any way balanced about the conflict will be hysterically excoriated. I sometimes wonder how much longer the NYT will still publish his pieces. It would be an almost criminal act of journalistic depravity, but at this point I wouldn’t be surprised if they cut him loose.
אָמֵן
Indeed.
Thank you for sharing Bret Stephen’s article, I’m a big fan of his.
I think we all know what our mayor here is made of.
We’re the greatest city with the worst mayor.
D.A.
NYC
“Aman” indeed.
I’m politically to the left of Stephens, but I always find him worth reading and he challenges my previously held positions. I missed this one, glad you shared it. It is spot-on. I made the mistake of skimming the comments. They were as expected. Glad NYT publishes him.
I wonder what Palestinian restaurant food is like.
If Palestinian restaurant food is really really good, I would happily and repeatedly eat at a Palestinian restaurant. Unfortunately, here in the mountains there are no Palestinian restaurants, so I can’t test any. But hey, I care nothing about whatever ghastly medieval southwest Asiatic grudges are motivating those folk at present; I just like good food.
Thank you for this article. A clear and devastating critique of the moral insanity and inversion that prevails today.
For some reason, the fact that Mamdami chose to eat at Palestinian restaurant outrages me almost as much as his remarks. He could have eaten at a thousand different restaurants. The fact he made that choice, on that day, was a crystal clear message that he supports the people who murder Jews and was a gratuitous slap in the face of the victims. He’s appalling.
Thank you, Brooke. Off and on for several hours this afternoon, I have been toying with how to respond to Mamdani’s outrageous behavior and here you have nailed it. Even had he only written the first and last paragraph without the anti-Israel finger wagging of the middle two, he was still well short of showing an understanding of Oct 7 as he writes “killed” as if that describes Hamas-led actions that were really fully obscene and brutally depraved MURDERS.
And yes, let’s poke the Jews in the eye last time on this horrible day by enjoying a meal at a pali restaurant. I would like to think he was just tone deaf but I sense it was an intentional action. What a fucking asshole.
I do love Bret Stephens’ cadence of repeated “it’s obscene because”.
I strongly suspect that Mamdani is a superficially charming, smiling psychopath who is entirely devoid of empathy. Unfortunately, some people find that sort of personality appealing. He has previously said that the only reason he got into politics was to promote the elimination of the world’s only Jewish state. Thus whatever other causes he espouses is likely just a smokescreen. He is an Islamist and antisemite, as is his despicable wife.
Someone above speculated about “Palestinian food”. There is no such distinct cuisine, just the usual Middle Eastern fare of falafels and lamb kebabs etc. In my experience the best falafels can be found at Israeli-run restaurants, at least here in Oz.
As far as my googling goes, Mamdani has never said that “the only reason he got into politics was to promote the elimination of the world’s only Jewish state.” Can you give a ref. for this?
Not trying to defend Mamdani, just trying to call balls and strikes.
Ok a quick Google yielded this:
https://www.jpost.com/american-politics/article-871839
I was aware of Mamdani’s pre-Mayoral statements, his connection to Students for Justice in Palestine, and some of his ambiguous rhetoric. But when he became Mayor of one of the world’s great cities—perhaps the greatest of cities—and the home to a million Jews, many of whom voted for him, I was willing to give him a chance to rise to the occasion and govern.
On his first day in office, he revoked all of former Mayor Eric Adam’s executive orders, including ones on Israel, antisemitism, and BDS (https://www.jta.org/2026/01/02/ny/mamdanis-first-act-revoking-eric-adams-executive-orders-including-on-israel-antisemitism-and-bds). This was not a good start, but since he rescinded all of Adams’s executive orders and didn’t single out those relating to Israel and the Jews, I was still willing to give him a chance to govern.
On the other side of the ledger, Mamdani kept Jessica Tisch on board as New York City Police Commissioner—a clever move—so yet again I was willing to give him a chance to govern. (I read recently that there are voices on the far left in the city who want Mamdani to fire Commissioner Tisch, so I’ve been keeping my eye on that.)
But when Mamdani had the gall to walk among the mourners on October 7 and release that appalling statement criticizing Israel for defending its citizens from Hamas and the Gazan “civilians” that joined Hamas in the killing spree that day, I lost all tolerance for Mamdani. As I wrote twice before, he might as well have just spit on the mourners directly.
What good can come of this? The only thing I can say is that American Jews—who have for decades made their political homes on the political left that abandoned them after October 7–need to take this opportunity to rethink the company they keep. Mamdani may be among the most extreme of the Jew haters in government, but he is not alone. When leaders tell the Jews that they don’t want us, we should believe them.
I wonder how long Tisch will last in her post. She may be fired, but I imagine that she may quit, given the crime-friendly policies of NYC. She may just think that she is prevented from doing a reasonable job of policing.
Mamdani ran, and was elected on, a socialist platform. Rents would be frozen, groceries would be cheaper, transportation would be free, and the rich would be taxed. New Yorkers will see how that works out for them.
In addition, Mamdani ran on a foreign policy issue: the right of the Jewish people to have a State of our own. He had been working on this issue throughout his college years, and his father had crusaded (pardon the term) on that issue.
Most of the Jews in the world would call that antisemitism. Most of us feel the we need a state of our own, as a shelter when antisemitism rises—as is currently happening.
I have no idea of what percentage of the NYers who voted for Mamdani did so because they agree with his socialistic platform, or his antisemitic platform, or both. (And given the of the DSA platform on Zionism, I would say that it no longer matters.) Those who voted for Mamdani knew exactly what they would get.
The DSA has risen in popularity not because of solutions, or ideas. It has risen because of slogans, which need no ideas or data to support them—only mobs. But politicians cannot govern by slogans, and mobs are unlikely to be satisfied by failure to live up to the slogans, which are always extreme. I don’t doubt that the mobs will turn on the politicians that fail to live up to their slogans.
I have no idea of how many NYers voted for Mamdani becu
Same here in Germany. Elif Eralp, leading candidate for The Left during 2026 Berlin state election tries to sell the people of Berlin all sorts of socialist ideas, foremost among them the expropriation of private housing companies. What she failed to mention was that it was the Left Party’s predecessor, as a coalition partner of the SPD more than 20 years ago, that had decided to sell its Berlins municipal housing company to a corporate conglomerate.
The Left Party also ran on a foreign policy platform and supports the Palestinians, while at the same time launching sharp—and in some cases anti-Semitic—attacks against Israel and Jewish people.
I don’t know much about economic theory. I spent my life as an experimental scientist. We like to do empirical comparisons. It seems to me that post-WW2 Germany was a pretty good place for an empirical comparison of two economic systems: East vs. West Germany. And the results were pretty clear. Given any choice, most people preferred the West German model.
that being the case, it amazes me that people in Germany, of all places, would begin to see a socialist party strengthening. I would have thought that young Germans would have learned the recent history of their country.
But of course, the same could be said for countries worldwide. There was no large migration from capitalist to socialist countries, even though people were free to leave those capitalist countries—without exception. On the other hand, many socialist countries had to prevent mass emigration by force. Hmm, one might think that that would be cause for thought…..
Those young people were present even back then, when the Eastern bloc (and the GDR) still existed. As someone from an Eastern European country (that was even worse than the GDR) who emigrated to Western Germany in early ’89, this was by far the most puzzling thing to me.
West Berlin in particular was a haven for them (tankies, ‘better-red-than-dead’ types, and other hard leftists) because its special status allowed them to dodge the draft.
Exit polls revealed that 51% of young women (16…25) cast their ballot for the Left party. Coincidentally, the party received the exact same share of the Muslim vote (51%).
Well, they also had Mamdani’s campaign advisor, Morris Katz, for their own campaign.
NY Mayor Mam-Damn-He
“the Israelis have gone too far”. I heard that a lot during the war. When I asked where they should have stopped, I was met with silence and then a repeat. Because I condemned hamas and their role in this and supported the right of the Iraelis to fight this war I lost a lot of so called friends. I do not regret my support. By the way, I am not Jewish.
Bret Stephens is wrong. Mamdani is not obscene, he’s consistent. Why would we expect anything else from the mayor?
Why can’t you be consistently obscene, which I think Stephens is implying, though in this case he’s especially obscene. But I see no contradiction between someone being obscene and doing so regularly.
Israeli “apartheidt” and “genocide” are mimes, or vibes, exactly like the global Left’s devotion to “democracy” and to the distribution of free goodies. The GDR exemplified Leftist “democracy”, and the kommunalkas of the late lamented USSR exemplified the free goodies. Outsiders learn all about these phenomena by
reading accounts of them; but many (most?) followers of the global Left receive their conceptions merely by word of mouth—i.e., as memes/vibes. No wonder they never learn, generation after generation, what happened when the vibes led to realities which were then described in writing.