The victims of October 7 and their families received 49 words at the start of Zohran Mamdani’s anniversary statement.
New York’s mayor acknowledged that Hamas had committed “horrific war crimes.” Then came the sentence that explained where he was taking this: “The suffering did not begin nor end that day.” Most of what followed concerned Israeli genocide, as he called it, and American complicity.
Imagine a Holocaust Memorial Day message that briefly remembered the six million murdered Jews, then devoted most of its space to condemning the Allied bombing of Dresden. German civilians, including children, suffered terribly. Their deaths deserve remembrance. Choosing that occasion to put the Allies on trial would be an insult to the families you had supposedly come to comfort. They would be entitled to ask why you had bothered mentioning their dead at all.
There is another problem with Mamdani’s account. The Gaza death toll he cites includes Hamas and other terrorists killed in the war. The Health Ministry’s totals do not separate them from civilians. The number of terrorists among the dead remains disputed, but their inclusion is well established. Mamdani makes no effort to acknowledge it.
Thousands of terrorists invaded Israel on October 7, according to the IDF. The invading force included killers and rapists; a UN mission found reasonable grounds to believe rape and gang rape occurred at several attack sites. Palestinian children killed in Gaza deserve to be mourned. Folding the terrorists’ deaths into the same indictment, without a word about who they were or what they did, is a serious omission in a statement marking their victims’ murder.
Mamdani handled October 7 anniversary very differently than September 11
Mamdani knows how to deliver a memorial address. He did it last month. Speaking at St. Nicholas church in Manhattan on September 11, he described firefighters approaching the towers, boats evacuating people and strangers helping one another escape. He stayed with those people and their stories. He managed the entire address without turning to American conduct in Afghanistan or Iraq.
I would like to hear him explain why the families of October 7 deserved a different approach. He had already found the words to condemn Hamas. He could have continued with the survivors and the bereaved.
For Jewish New Yorkers with family and friends in Israel, this is familiar and exhausting. Even on the anniversary of the massacre, their mayor makes room for only a brief acknowledgment before returning to his case against the Jewish state.
They can disagree fiercely with an Israeli government and still want their mayor to show some decency toward the people murdered there. They should hardly have to explain this to him.
Majority of New York hate crimes targeted Jews
At the city’s October 6 crime briefing, officials reported that Jews were the targets of 53% of confirmed hate crimes through September. Major crime overall has fallen. His new antisemitism strategy gives me little confidence that he will confront anti-Jewish hatred honestly. It declines to adopt a single definition, arguing that doing so is neither “necessary” nor “useful.” More than 25 New York organizations have challenged its failure to address anti-Jewish harassment and exclusion carried out in the name of anti-Zionism.
Their objections are harder to dismiss after his October 7 statement. I have little faith in an antisemitism campaign led by a mayor who uses even that anniversary to denounce Israel. He asks Jewish residents to trust his administration while showing scant respect for their attachment to the Jewish state. Until he is prepared to confront the hostility directed at Jews over that attachment, his security grants and cultural programs will leave a central part of the problem untouched.
The city controller’s September report recorded an average of 83,360 people in shelters in August and citywide rents 5.6% higher than a year earlier. Those problems will occupy any serious mayor. Mamdani nevertheless found time to explore arresting Benjamin Netanyahu, before acknowledging in July that his administration lacked the authority.
Presumably someone at City Hall could have checked that earlier.
New York’s mayor will inevitably speak about events abroad. He governs a city whose residents have families all over the world, and October 7 concerns many of them directly. A mayor who understood that would have addressed the bereaved with more care. Mamdani owes them an apology, and an explanation of why he could show that care on September 11 and abandon it less than a month later.