New York City Council member Jim Gennaro blasted his city's Mayor Zohran Mamdani over his threats to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
In a statement, Gennaro warned that "Mamdani’s continuing fixation on arresting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he sets foot in New York for the United Nations General Assembly is not serious governance. It is political theater dressed up as a moral cause for his political base. And the hypocrisy is staggering."
"While the Mayor and his team obsess over an International Criminal Court warrant that the United States does not recognize and that no local official has the power to enforce, his administration has shown a disturbing eagerness to engage the Islamic Republic of Iran," Gennaro added.
"A senior official in the Mayor’s Office for International Affairs scheduled a meeting with Iran’s permanent representative to the United Nations. Only after the State Department intervened was the meeting canceled. That is the regime whose security forces have slaughtered their own citizens in the streets. Most recently in the brutal crackdown on nationwide protests, where credible reports put the death toll in the thousands, including women, children, and peaceful demonstrators. This is the same regime that systematically executes political prisoners, tortures dissenters, and treats half its population as second-class under compulsory veiling laws enforced with violence.
"Iran’s record does not stop at repressing its own people. For years Tehran poured blood and treasure into propping up Bashar al-Assad’s regime as it murdered hundreds of thousands of Syrians. Iranian officers, Revolutionary Guard forces, and proxy militias were essential to that slaughter. The same regime arms and bankrolls Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. These are groups whose charters and actions are explicit about destroying the Jewish state and who deliberately target civilians."
Gennaro emphasized, "Against this backdrop, the Mayor’s threat to arrest a democratically elected head of government of a US ally is not only selective; it is legally hollow on its face. The United States is not a party to the Rome Statute. Federal law explicitly bars state and local governments from cooperating with the ICC. Sitting heads of state enjoy immunity under long-settled principles of international law recognized by the International Court of Justice. The conduct of foreign relations belongs to the federal government, not City Hall. New York’s own governor has stated plainly that the mayor lacks this power. Legal experts across the spectrum have called the idea baseless. Any attempt would be blocked instantly by federal authority."
"That is why this entire episode reinforces what so many New Yorkers already see: performative politics. The Mayor knows he cannot deliver on the arrest. He says as much when pressed, that he will only do what the law allows and will not 'write his own laws.' Yet he keeps the threat alive for the cameras and for his political base. At the same time, his administration reaches out to a regime that actually murders its citizens, props up mass killers, and sponsors terrorism. The contrast could not be clearer.
"New York City is home to the largest Jewish community outside of Israel," Gennaro noted. "Jewish New Yorkers have every right to expect their mayor to reject selective outrage, reject engagement with a regime that chants for their destruction, and reject empty stunts that poison our civic life. Real leadership does not consist of threatening allies while courting their enemies. It consists of protecting the safety, dignity, and equal standing of all New Yorkers."