Three years ago today, Hamas and its allied terror groups crossed into Israel and carried out the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. They murdered approximately 1,200 people, the great majority of them civilians. They burned families in their homes, gang-raped women and set them ablaze, slaughtered young people at the Nova music festival, and abducted 251 hostages into Gaza. Those are not contested interpretations. They are the facts of October 7, documented by the perpetrators themselves.
It is the day the terrorists chose mass murder.
Yet across this city, organizations are treating the anniversary as an opportunity to protest Israel. Students for Justice in Palestine, Within Our Lifetime, Pal-Awda, and allied campus groups have called a “resistance" rally outside City Hall, with walkouts at Columbia, NYU, and CUNY. Their materials do not mourn the murdered. They declare “glory to the martyrs" and “victory to the resistance." They mark “three years of genocide, three years of resistance." They date the grievance to 1948, the year Israel was founded. An inverted red triangle, a symbol of Hamas propaganda, appears on the flyers. The massacre is erased, then rewritten as liberation. The victims disappear. The killers are recast as martyrs.
This is the danger of moral relativism, applied to soldiers who are defending a country against terrorism. A soldier sent to destroy a force that burns civilians, rapes, and holds hostages is not the moral equal of the terrorist who did those things. Self-defense after a campaign of extermination is not the same act as the extermination. To collapse that distinction is to tell every democracy that fighting back is the crime, and that the next massacre will be excused in advance as “context." Relativism of that kind does not restrain violence. It licenses it.
The Mayor’s statement today is the official version of that moral inversion.
Mamdani allows but one clause in his statement for the dead. Hamas, he says, killed more than 1,100 Israelis and abducted 251 others. Then the pivot arrives, almost in the same breath: the suffering “did not begin nor end that day." It “instead continued" through what he calls the Israeli government’s “devastating, ongoing genocide," a toll he states as more than 74,000 Palestinians, including more than 21,000 children. He adds that even after a ceasefire he dismisses as “so-called," more than 1,400 Palestinians have been killed. He describes bombs dropped on ambulances, drones aimed at journalists, food turned away at crossings, and American tax dollars funding “war crimes." He closes on occupation, apartheid, and impunity.
Read how he proportions his statement. The massacre that this date exists to commemorate occupies a mere fraction of the statement. The indictment of the country that was attacked occupies the rest. Grief is the pretext. The argument is the point.
That is a failure of fact, a total absence of morality, and a failure of office -- the Mayor of New York City is using his office to proclaim and legitimize jihadist propaganda.
It is also a failure of sequence, in a manner of speaking . A government that answers a massacre is not the author of the massacre. October 7 is not an ambiguous middle chapter in a longer tale of equivalent suffering. It is the day Hamas chose, planned, and filmed the murder of civilians. To write “it instead continued" is to launder a chosen atrocity into a weather pattern, so to speak. The Mayor does not say Hamas is still holding the moral consequences of that day. He says Israel inherited them.
It is a failure of distinction. The figures he recites are not separated into the terrorist who planned the invasion and the Palestinian civilian caught in the war that followed. They are not accompanied by any accounting of Hamas embedding among civilians, diverting Israeli aid, or refusing the release of hostages that would have shortened the war. A mayor is free to mourn the terrible tragedy of innocent Palestinian deaths. He is not free to hand the public a single undifferentiated number and call the result a genocide. That word is not emphasis. It is a legal and moral accusation of exterminationist intent. He applies it to the army that went in after the massacre, and he withholds anything like it from the army that committed the massacre.
It is a failure of proportion inside his own city. New York is home to the largest Jewish community outside Israel. Queens families buried people after October 7. On the day set aside for those families, the Mayor of their city tells them that honoring the dead requires a fight against the state those dead were killed for belonging to. He tells students that their tax dollars are financing war crimes. He tells a generation about “glory to the martyrs," and that the true version of October 7 is his statement available on nyc.gov.
This is the same Mayor who came into office promising to arrest the Israeli prime minister, who revoked the city’s acceptance of the standard definition of antisemitism, and who has treated the language of the eliminationist left as a governing dialect. The groups rallying at City Hall today are not satisfied with him. They say he has capitulated. That is the final absurdity. A statement that calls the response to October 7 an ongoing genocide is, in their view, too restrained. The Mayor's daily-expressed hate of Jews and Israel has metastasized into the minds and the very bone marrow of impressionable young people to the extent that these kids have become wanna-be jihadis. But the Mayor has not drawn a line against them. He has instead negotiated the vocabulary.
This is unforgivable -- targeting the young people of this city. They are handed a cleaned-up history in which October 7 barely happened, Israel’s existence is the original sin, and anyone in uniform on the Israeli side is a criminal by definition. The Mayor does not have to attend the walkout to supply its thesis. He has published it. Emotional manipulation dressed as mourning is still manipulation. Convenient misrepresentation from City Hall does not clarify a hard war. It hands a script to students who are already being told that Jewish self-defense is the offense.
A soldier defending civilians against terrorists is not the terrorist. A massacre is not the start of a genocide by the people who were massacred. And a Mayor who cannot say that, on this day, without burying it under an indictment, has failed the dead, failed the families, and failed the young people he is supposed to protect from exactly this lie.
October 7 was a massacre. Remembering it truthfully is the minimum this city owes the dead. Rewriting it, and aiming that rewrite at the young, is to inculcate our youth with the jihadi mindset. This is an unforgivable atrocity.