Zohran Mamdani’s Moral Obscenity
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Opinion Columnist
Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s mayor, set off a firestorm of criticism Wednesday morning with a social media post ostensibly intended to commemorate the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre of Israelis. It devoted a brief paragraph to condemning Hamas and commiserating with its victims. The rest was a much longer denunciation of Israel’s “ongoing genocide in Gaza,” a “world in which occupation and apartheid continue,” and a situation in which “our federal government continues its complicity with every arms shipment.”
In response, Ammiel Hirsch, the president of the New York Board of Rabbis, said the statement was “so offensive to so many Jews that it is hard to describe how offensive it is.” In fact, it’s a moral obscenity. Let me count the ways.
It is obscene in the same way it would have been obscene if the mayor had commemorated the 25th anniversary of Sept. 11 last month with a perfunctory nod to the victims of the day, followed by a much longer denunciation of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. What happened on both Sept. 11 and Oct. 7 was undiluted evil, each an unprovoked visit of deliberate and maximalist violence on people who had done nothing to invite that violence other than being at the wrong place at the wrong time.
It is obscene because many of the Jews murdered on Oct. 7, living in kibbutzim with conspicuously left-leaning politics, had been at the forefront of the peace movement, volunteering, for example, to drive sick Palestinians for treatment at nearby Israeli hospitals. Hamas wasn’t just killing and terrorizing the innocent, it was eliminating the good.
It is obscene because Hamas didn’t just kill its victims in pursuit of a strategic objective. It tormented and slaughtered them like an army of serial killers who delight in the suffering of their victims. Corpses of Israeli women were described by one coroner as “shot in the crotch, intimate parts, vagina, or were shot in the breast.” Others appeared to have been raped so violently that their pelvises were broken. Parents were killed in front of their children; children were murdered in their beds. A fieldworker was beheaded with a garden hoe. I know this because Hamas filmed itself doing this and I forced myself to watch the film. I know because that same month, I visited the bedrooms where the kids had been murdered, their mattresses still soaked in blood.
It is obscene because, whatever else you may think of the war in Gaza, on the eve of Oct. 7 the border of Israel and Gaza was governed by a cease-fire. It was Hamas that chose to kick off the violence, just as the Japanese did in 1941 with the attack on Pearl Harbor. Whether in fistfights between people or wars between states, whoever throws the first punch forfeits the right to throw the last.
It is obscene because Mamdani is being misleading when he speaks as if his prime objection to Israel is what it did after Oct. 7. In fact, the mayor has been an anti-Israel zealot at least since his college days, when, as a leader of Students for Justice in Palestine, he broke off collaboration with the left-leaning Jewish group J Street, which advocates a Palestinian state, because it also recognizes the rights of a Jewish state. He’s written a rap professing “love” for five men convicted in a U.S. court of funneling money to Hamas. The day after Oct. 7, he issued a brief statement that said nothing about Hamas but immediately denounced Israel. Put simply, this is a mayor who first condemned Israel as guilty and then went about collecting evidence.
It is obscene because, however much the genocide allegation against Israel is mindlessly repeated by people too lazy or prejudiced to understand the difference between war and genocide, that allegation is as false as it is sinister. False, because genocide is about killing whole classes of people for who they are rather than for what they did — and if Israel wanted to kill Palestinians as Palestinians it never would have bothered mobilizing hundreds of thousands of its own soldiers for the war, and losing hundreds in high-intensity urban warfare. Sinister, because the political purpose of the genocide allegation is to trivialize, if not erase, the attacks of Oct. 7 by making them seem minor in comparison to the Palestinian casualties that tragically, but all-but inevitably, followed.
It is obscene because Hamas’s intentions toward Israel really are genocidal. Its leaders have often and publicly vowed to perpetrate future Oct. 7s. Had the group not been stopped by force that day there’s no reason to think it wouldn’t have kept up its orgy of slaughter on its way to Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities. Yet one searches in vain for anything from the mayor except perfunctory, pro forma condemnations of Hamas.
It is obscene because there’s an even more wretched purpose to the genocide charge against Israel, which long predates the recent war in Gaza. It is a specimen of Holocaust erasure: Not the dumb kind, which seeks to deny Nazi Germany’s murder of six million Jews, but a more sophisticated version that accuses living Jews of genocide as a way of ending the historical Jewish claim to a long and ongoing history of persecution and near-annihilation that accounts for its need for a sovereign state capable of defending its people.
Finally, it is obscene because Mamdani is the mayor for about one million Jewish New Yorkers, many with close relatives in Israel, who deserve better on a day of grief than to be offered the equivalent of an “All Lives Matter” homily. This is yet another of the double standards through which modern-day Jew hatred manifests itself: Whenever antisemitism is mentioned in progressive circles, it is inevitably accompanied by nods about Islamophobia or other bigotries.
It would be better to have a mayor who, if only on Oct. 7, can say: Jewish Lives Matter. Israeli Lives Matter. Full stop. The lectures about Gaza can come some other day.
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Bret Stephens is an Opinion columnist for The Times, writing about foreign policy, domestic politics and cultural issues. Facebook
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