New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani had a clean opportunity on Thursday to walk back the statement that infuriated much of the city’s Jewish community on the third anniversary of the October 7 attacks. He declined, repeatedly, and then went further.
Asked by a reporter whether he believed he had “made any missteps that inflamed tensions in this very difficult moment for a lot of New Yorkers,” the mayor restated the framing that caused the backlash in the first place, Fox News Digital reported.
“I believe that there must be room to mourn every single life,” Mamdani said. “There must be room to mourn the lives of the more than 1,100 that Hamas killed three years ago; there must be room to mourn the 74,000 Palestinians that the Israeli government has killed since.”
He went on to accuse the Israeli government of using the October 7 massacre as “a justification for a genocide,” and said the vigil he attended had highlighted testimony from those killed “either on the day or the genocide since.” Asked whether he would change anything about Wednesday’s statement or his appearance at the vigil, he would not. He defended the heavier emphasis on Palestinian deaths by arguing that “this is something that is ongoing, as opposed to something that simply happened three years ago.”
Wednesday’s statement set the fire. Mamdani condemned the Hamas attack as a “horrific war crime,” then pivoted in the next breath. “The suffering did not begin nor end that day,” he wrote. “It instead continued through the Israeli government’s devastating, ongoing genocide in Gaza in which it has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians — including more than 21,000 children.” Israel rejects the genocide accusation, saying its military targets Hamas and other terrorist groups while seeking to minimize civilian casualties.
The part that should worry City Hall: the sharpest rebuke did not come from Republicans. It came from a Democratic congressman from New York.
Rep. Dan Goldman, D-N.Y., who is Jewish, called the statement “egregious and insulting.”
“There are 364 days of the year to focus on that. This is a day that should just be focused on what was by all agreement a horrific terror attack,” Goldman told Politico. “What the mayor’s statement did today was to blame Israelis for the attack that they suffered three years ago. Regardless of what you actually think of the conflict and what’s happened either since or before, there’s no excuse for victim blaming.”
That is the trap Mamdani has built for himself. The activist coalition that carried him into City Hall expects the genocide language, and any softening of it would be read as a betrayal. The city he actually governs just heard its mayor mark a massacre by relitigating the war that followed it. There is no version of Thursday’s press availability that satisfies both, and he chose the coalition.
New York elected a mayor whose foreign-policy convictions now dictate how the city observes its own grief. The practical business of running the city — crime, transit, the budget — waits in line behind that. Voters were told this would be a mayoralty about affordability. Three years after October 7, the mayor spent his week defending a word.
Source: foxnews.com
