New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani launched an intellectually dishonest attack on Israel that wouldn’t survive five minutes of scrutiny. Asked ...
New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani launched an intellectually dishonest attack on Israel that wouldn’t survive five minutes of scrutiny.
Asked point-blank whether he supports Israel as a Jewish state, he waffled, hedged, and retreated into a fog of false equivalence. Don’t be fooled. This wasn’t principle. It was pandering dressed up as philosophy.
Mamdani had the nerve to lump Israel in with Saudi Arabia as states that “privilege one religion” at the expense of others. Never mind that Israel’s own Declaration of Independence — its founding charter — explicitly guarantees “complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex” and promises to safeguard the holy places of every faith. Saudi Arabia? It bans churches. Israel has them built. The comparison is an insult to anyone paying attention.
And Israel doesn’t just make promises on paper. Arab citizens — Muslim and Christian — make up 20% of the population. They vote, they sit in the Knesset, they serve on the Supreme Court. Jerusalem’s holiest sites, including Al-Aqsa Mosque, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and the Western Wall, are all protected and accessible under Israeli rule. Muslim authorities even retain administrative control of the Temple Mount, the holiest site in all of Judaism.
Where else in the Middle East does that kind of religious pluralism exist? Nowhere Mamdani seems interested in talking about.
Now look at his beloved Palestinian cause. Under Palestinian Authority control in the West Bank, Israeli civilians — read: Jews — are flatly banned from entering Area A. Banned. Not discouraged. Not warned. Barred outright. This in a territory containing some of Judaism’s most sacred ground: the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, the Tomb of Rachel, the Tomb of Joseph — sites of Jewish worship for thousands of years. If Mamdani spent even a fraction of his outrage on that exclusion, maybe his “equal rights for all faiths” routine would be worth taking seriously — but he doesn’t.
And then there’s the silence that truly damns him. Mamdani tossed out Saudi Arabia as a rhetorical fig leaf, but couldn’t bring himself to utter the name of Israel’s most bloodthirsty enemy: Iran. The mullahs in Tehran — who arm Hamas, fund Hezbollah, and openly call for Israel’s destruction — run a regime that the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom describes as one of the worst on earth. Baha’is are persecuted. Christians are imprisoned. Jews are terrorized. Sunni Muslims are suppressed. Women are arrested for showing their hair. This is the regime that backs the very forces Mamdani’s allies romanticize as freedom fighters. His failure to mention Iran isn’t an oversight. It’s a tell.
Mamdani wants to play the high-minded equality warrior while giving a pass to Palestinian exclusion and Iranian theocratic brutality.
Israel deserves better than this kind of drive-by slander from a man who can’t be bothered to get his facts straight.
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