{"id":305626,"date":"2026-07-25T20:30:15","date_gmt":"2026-07-25T20:30:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/305626\/"},"modified":"2026-07-25T20:30:15","modified_gmt":"2026-07-25T20:30:15","slug":"mamdani-is-right-netanyahu-belongs-behind-bars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/305626\/","title":{"rendered":"Mamdani Is Right. Netanyahu Belongs Behind Bars."},"content":{"rendered":"

The Simon Wiesenthal Center issued a statement<\/a> saying that \u201cMayor Mamdani did not simply express a personal political opinion\u201d but rather \u201cused the authority, symbolism, and credibility of the mayor\u2019s office to issue what amounted to an official public address declaring that the democratically elected leader of the world\u2019s only Jewish state is a \u2018war criminal\u2019 who is \u2018not welcome in New York City.\u2019\u201d This, they said, was a \u201cprofound misuse of the office entrusted to [Mamdani] by all New Yorkers.\u201d<\/p>\n

Why Israel being the \u201conly\u201d Jewish state is supposed to be relevant is anyone\u2019s guess. (Were condemnations of South African president P. W. Botha in the 1980s objectionable because South Africa was the only country dominated by the Afrikaner ethnic group?) And the claim that Israeli elections are \u201cdemocratic\u201d is risible. Since 1967, Israel has not only controlled the West Bank but built many cities full of its own citizens there, and it treats those settlers as \u201cliving in Israel\u201d rather than \u201cliving abroad\u201d for every legal purpose. But the millions of Palestinian residents there have never been given Israeli citizenship, since doing so would mean there would be \u201ctoo many\u201d citizens of the wrong ethnicity. That\u2019s simply not a democracy.<\/p>\n

More importantly, though, you don\u2019t have to be ideologically opposed to Zionism, or have any particular opinion about the geopolitics of Israel\/Palestine, to agree with Zohran\u2019s call for the federal government to join the ICC and enforce the warrant against Netanyahu. You simply have to believe that international law should be applied equally to every nation on the planet.<\/p>\n

The widespread<\/a> claims<\/a> that Jewish New Yorkers (a great many of whom voted for Mamdani and agreed with every word of the video) are somehow \u201cendangered\u201d by his call to arrest a genocidal leader simply don\u2019t pass the smell test. The problem with Netanyahu isn\u2019t that he\u2019s Jewish, any more than the reason the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin is that Putin is a member of the Russian Orthodox Church. Rather, the belief of Mayor Mamdani, the ICC, and the multiple United Nations inquiries that have found that Netanyahu committed genocide in Gaza is that laws apply equally to everyone, and that no political office in any state should protect war criminals from being brought to justice.<\/p>\n

The reaction of ordinary people to the revelation that someone who mutilated tens of thousands of children is allowed to strut around New York without fear of arrest is likely to be shock and disgust.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s been nearly three years since the beginning of Netanyahu\u2019s campaign to systematically eliminate any possibility of normal Palestinian life resuming in Gaza. In that time, an estimated 90 percent of the civilian population have been displaced from their homes by the Israeli military. A few months after the operation commenced, South Africa\u2019s legal filing<\/a> at the ICC included twelve pages of quotes from Israeli officials expressing genocidal intent. On the ground, it has been one of the best-documented genocides in human history. Anyone around the world with access to social media could see a continual stream of photos and video clips of murdered and maimed men, women, children, and babies; of mass destruction rained down on civilian targets; and of war crimes being carried out face-to-face by Israeli soldiers. Some of those soldiers, apparently utterly indifferent to the world\u2019s reaction, filmed themselves<\/a> posing with the lingerie of Palestinian women who\u2019d been killed or fled for their lives, or playing with the toys of dead or mutilated children. And all this time, as the mayor noted in his address, \u201cwe, as Americans,\u201d continued to \u201cpay for the bombs that do the killing.\u201d<\/p>\n

After three years of steadfast American support for the genocide, the reaction of an overwhelming majority of people who left comments on Mamdani\u2019s video seemed to be shocked relief that a prominent elected official was willing to state the case this plainly and forcefully. While the mayor\u2019s critics may sneer that the city\u2019s lawyers wouldn\u2019t sign off on him ordering the NYPD to carry out the arrest themselves (\u201csee, he overpromised!\u201d), the reaction of ordinary people to the revelation that someone who mutilated tens of thousands of children is allowed to strut around New York without fear of arrest is more likely to be shock and disgust.<\/p>\n

As Mamdani emphasized, the federal government does have the power to bring Netanyahu to justice if the prime minister sets foot on American soil. Donald Trump, of course, has no interest in exercising that power. But every Democrat who runs for president in 2028 should be asked whether they plan to heed the mayor\u2019s call to enforce international law.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Simon Wiesenthal Center issued a statement saying that \u201cMayor Mamdani did not simply express a personal political…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":305627,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[9,56,63,65,64],"class_list":["post-305626","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-new-york","tag-ny","tag-nyc","tag-nyc-headlines","tag-nyc-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305626","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=305626"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305626\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/305627"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=305626"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=305626"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=305626"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}