New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani sparked outrage Wednesday with a statement that opened with a brief nod to the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack—then spent most of its length accusing Israel of genocide.
The statement began by acknowledging the 1,200 Israelis killed and 251 abducted in the Hamas terror attack three years ago. Then Mamdani pivoted to Israel-bashing: he accused Israel of waging an “ongoing genocide in Gaza,” claimed Israel has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians including 21,000 children, and charged that American tax dollars are financing Israeli “war crimes.” He closed by demanding an end to “occupation and apartheid.”
Mamdani never called the Hamas attack terrorism. He never once used the word “Jews.”
Israeli and American officials sharply condemned the statement. Israel’s UN ambassador, Danny Danon, said Mamdani was trying to “hijack” the day and compared the statement to “turning September 11 into a day of mourning for al-Qaeda terrorists.”
“Outrageous & disgusting rant on a day that ought to honor the over 1,200 civilians butchered by Hamas.”
U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee called it an “outrageous & disgusting rant” on a day that “ought to honor the over 1,200 civilians butchered by Hamas,” and wrote that New York had elected a “jihadist sympathizer.”
Israel’s ambassador to Washington, Yechiel Leiter—speaking from the hospital bedside of a son critically injured in a Palestinian car-ramming—said it was “hard to find a sentence in Mamdani’s post that isn’t a lie” and called him “a defender of Palestinian terrorism.”
The criticism wasn’t confined to Israelis or Republicans. Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz accused Mamdani of “desecrating the memory of murdered, innocent Jews.” Rep. Josh Gottheimer said he was “blam[ing] the victims.” Rep. Daniel Goldman, who represents parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn, called the message “reprehensible” and noted that Mamdani “asserts as fact hotly disputed allegations.”
This wasn’t a one-off. On the second anniversary last year, then-candidate Mamdani followed the same script, calling October 7 a “horrific war crime” before pivoting to accuse Israel of waging a “genocidal war.” Each year the “war crime” line is there, and each year Mamdani uses it to serve the same purpose: throat-clearing before an indictment of Israel.
Three years on, the facts of October 7 have not changed: Hamas and its allies carried out the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. Twelve hundred people were murdered in Israel. About 250 were taken hostage. Attackers filmed themselves targeting civilians at the Nova music festival and in the kibbutzim, burning families in their homes, and committing atrocities against women, children, and the elderly.
What has changed is how readily those facts are being pushed aside. Mamdani’s message shows how it’s done—acknowledge the atrocity in a single clause, then “contextualize” it until the victims become a preamble and Hamas disappears from the story.
“That is not a way to honor the victims of the October 7 massacre. It is revisionism, and it speaks with the authority of City Hall in the city with the largest Jewish population outside Israel.”
That is not a way to honor the victims of the October 7 massacre. It is revisionism, and it speaks with the authority of City Hall in the city with the largest Jewish population outside Israel. New York’s Jews deserved a mayor who could grieve with them for one day without an asterisk. On Wednesday, they learned they do not have one.
But Mamdani is not an outlier. He is a symptom. The October 7 massacre is being buried because it interferes with a long-standing liberal and radical narrative that casts Palestinians as innocent victims and Israelis as oppressors. That narrative cannot survive the record.
Palestinian leaders rejected or walked away from land-for-peace offers in 2000, 2001, and 2008, each of which would have created a Palestinian state. Israel withdrew every soldier and settler from Gaza in 2005; within two years Hamas had seized the territory and turned it into a launchpad for rockets and terror tunnels. Hamas’s founding charter calls for targeting Jews, and its leaders still pledge a Palestine “from the river to the sea”—a single state with no place for a Jewish state or the Jews who live there.
On October 7, Hamas showed the world exactly what that means.
A politics that cannot say plainly that Hamas committed genocidal terrorism, and that Israel had the right and the duty to defeat it, is not moving toward peace. It is moving toward the next excuse.
