Gary Williig is a veteran member of the Arutz Sheva news staff.
Antisemites just can’t help themselves. That’s what New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s disgraceful “message" for the anniversary of the October 7 massacre proves.
Instead of acknowledging the true horror of the atrocities committed, Mamdani belittled them and abused the anniversary to “contextualize" the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust and to attack Israel for daring to respond to barbaric monsters who slaughtered its civilians and for trying to get the 251 hostages back.
Even in his opening paragraph, the one cited by many as “starting off well," the Mayor of New York downplayed the scale of the massacre, rounding the number of victims down to “1,100" where most would say “about 1,200" to more accurately reflect the true number of victims, which is 1,195. Mamdani won’t say which of the 95 murdered souls do not count in his eyes, but it would hardly be the first or the last time he spat on the graves of the victims of October 7.
He immediately moved on to saying that “the suffering did not begin nor end that day," putting the genocidal butchery of Hamas in the same “context" antisemites have tried to use to justify Hamas’s crimes against humanity every day for the last three years. And not a word criticizing Hamas or acknowledging the actual victims of that day was to be found after the first paragraph. The final three were about how “evil" Israel is in his eyes for not rolling over and dying.
Mamdani cannot make a simple acknowledgement of the reality of what happened on October 7, he cannot make even one statement on the anniversary that is even mostly - let alone entirely - devoted to remembering the victims. Because to him, Israelis by definition are never victims. Hamas is always the victim.
In the upside-down world inhabited by Mamdani and his fellow antisemites, 9-month-old Kfir Bibas is not an innocent victim, but Yahya Sinwar, the “butcher of Khan Younis," is a "victim" of the fake “genocide." That is the message he was conveying in his brief mention of October 7 and the far more detail he devoted to spreading lies about the war that followed.
He could not be bothered to describe the families burned alive in their homes, the young concert-goers shot down, and their bodies burned in the hundreds at a music festival, the grenades thrown into roadside shelters to kill the civilians hiding inside. He could not be bothered to utter a word about the mass rapes, or to describe the horrors the hostages endured.
Acknowledging the reality of who the aggressors were, the scale and barbaric nature of the atrocities they committed, and the basic humanity of the victims, would put the war into a “context" Mamdani and those like him can never admit. He would much rather spit on all their graves for the sake of his fantasy of righteous Islamists "resisting" and fighting back against the evil Jews.
Mamdani ended with a call to “honor the dead." And yet he cannot and will not honor any dead except those from Hamas. He is incapable of doing the bare minimum to honor the victims of October 7, because he is incapable of seeing Jews as victims, let alone honoring Jews who don’t submit to Dhimmitude.
49 Americans were murdered on October 7, the exact number of words Mamdani used out of 211 to actually talk about October 7 instead of distracting from October 7. Not one of those words mentioned the American victims, because again, the victims of Hamas, even US citizens, are not real victims to him.
Is it any wonder that antisemitism has spiked in New York and Jewish citizens are increasingly unsafe? Is it any wonder that Jews are attacked outside synagogues on other days of mourning such as Tisha B’Av, or that antisemites felt no compunctions about going out to celebrate the slaughter of October 7 and the Hamas monsters who killed 1,200 people on the anniversary of the massacre, when this is the mayor?
The Jewish citizens of New York, a community which has done so much to make the city great for a century and a half, deserve better than this pitiful excuse for a mayor. The victims of October 7 deserve better than this pitiful excuse for a human being.