New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani released a video this week letting us know that he’d explored “every avenue available” to execute an International Criminal Court arrest warrant on Israeli Prime Minister and “war criminal” Benjamin Netanyahu during his upcoming visit to the United Nations, but it wouldn’t be happening.
Creating Hamastan might be at the top of Mamdani’s agenda, but mayors have no jurisdiction over foreign policy. He was never going to arrest a world leader, much less the prime minister of a close ally.
After all, the United States isn’t even a member of the International Criminal Court. We don’t recognize the kangaroo court’s jurisdiction over its citizens or government for good reasons.
It isn’t a surprise that the Islamo-Marxist mayor struggles to comprehend fundamental American ideas such as due process and national sovereignty. Let’s recall that Mamdani referred to the Trump administration’s arrest of Venezuela’s communist dictator Nicolas Maduro as an “act of war,” despite indictments issued by American courts for narco-terrorism.
Of course, there’s no ICC warrant out for Maduro or his predecessor, Hugo Chavez, or the Castros or Daniel Ortega, who recently suspended elections in Nicaragua. There’s no warrant for the arrest of Bashar al Assad, who used chemical weapons on his own people and is responsible for somewhere around 300,000 dead civilians. Nor is there one for any of the Chinese who operate concentration camps in western China.
To put the preposterous nature of the ICC in context, note that it hasn’t issued a warrant for any Iranian regime leader responsible for the murder and torture of tens of thousands of their own people.
Not that Mamdani would contemplate arresting Shia extremists. One of his lieutenants, International Affairs Commissioner Ana Maria Archila, was trying to set up a meeting with those butchers until the State Department stepped in.
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As Secretary of State Marco Rubio, now leading a worthy campaign to dismantle the ICC, has pointed out, the organization’s goal is to be a “world tribunal with near-unlimited reach, empowered to override the courts and constitutions of the U.S. and other sovereign states.” The United States has a responsibility not to act on the “findings” of prosecutors from random places like Gambia or Fiji or Senegal.
And to understand the institutional anti-Israel bias of the ICC, remember that arrest warrants issued by “prosecutor” Karim Khan — a man later suspended over sexual-assault allegations and reportedly the beneficiary of a Qatari who offered to “look after” him— concerned “the situation in the State of Palestine” and officials within the “territory of Israel.” (Emphasis mine.)
Israel is a state. Gaza is a territory. “Palestine” is a place that exists in the imagination of Mamdani.
In any event, virtually every word in Mamdani’s video is blatantly false. Most of his contentions go beyond ICC accusations and even beyond Hamas’s claims.
The mayor, for example, asserts that Netanyahu is responsible for the killing of “73,000 people.” Not once does Mamdani mention that a significant proportion of those casualties are members of Hamas, the organization that instigated the war by murdering, raping, and kidnapping over a thousand civilians.
Mamdani, in fact, doesn’t mention Hamas, at all.
Israel’s war against Hamas was conducted well within the norms of modern warfare. The number of casualties in Gaza is historically quite low, considering not only the urban nature of the conflict but Hamas’s objective of creating as many civilian martyrs as possible. Gaza is the first “genocide” in history where the alleged victim population grew since the war and has doubled in 25 years.
Mamdani also contends that Israel deliberately denies aid to hospitals, which is an outright lie. As is his claim that “countless people” have “starved” in Gaza. Unless, of course, by “countless” he means we can’t find any.
Mamdani makes no mention of Hamas’s tactic of pilfering international and Israeli aid to control the population. Even the Israel’s antagonists in the United Nations found that 88% of aid trucks slated to deliver aid in Gaza were looted by Hamas and others.
Hamas is great with missiles and tunnels and paragliders, but incapable of providing its people with water or electricity, which Israel supplies.
Mamdani’s contention that “hundreds” of aid workers and journalists have been massacred is another lie. Most “journalists” killed in the conflict turn out to be Hamas operatives, some of whom participated in the mass murder.
And “children” are never “deliberately” targeted by Israeli forces. If they were, the perpetrators would be punished, not celebrated, as they are in Gaza. One of the tragedies of Palestinian society is that it indoctrinates generations of children in hate and nihilism, perpetuating destitution and war.
All this, says Mamdani, is still going on despite the “so-called ceasefire.” Well, the second phase of the U.S.-brokered ceasefire plan—after returning the bodies of women, men, and toddlers that were kidnapped and sometimes murdered — entails Hamas laying down its weapons. It refuses to do it.
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If Mamdani were genuinely concerned about the Palestinian people, he would stop spreading blood libels and advocate to free Arabs from this death cult. But one gets the impression that, like his wife, he’s a fan.
Whatever Mamdani believes, there’s no evidence that Netanyahu is a war criminal. Indeed, in every conceivable way, from his moral outlook to his intellectual abilities to his championing of liberalism and even his admiration of the United States, Netanyahu is a better man than the mayor of New York.