Despite the gravitas that New York City’s Marxist Muslim Mayor Zohran Mamdani tried desperately to give to the occasion, his Tuesday speech was unmistakably an admission of defeat. After insisting for a year and a half that he would as mayor arrest Benjamin Netanyahu if the Israeli prime minister dared to venture into the Big Red/Green Apple, Mamdani admitted that he actually had no authority to throw a foreign head of government into the slammer. Now the young ideologue has become the object of a torrent of well-deserved ridicule. It’s all good fun, but unfortunately, it won’t stop him from pursuing his other radical and destructive goals.
“My administration,” Mamdani intoned Tuesday, “has reviewed every avenue available under applicable law to determine whether New York City could execute the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant if Benjamin Netanyahu came here. It is clear that we do not have the independent legal authority to enforce this warrant.”
Oh, this is embarrassing. You’d think that one of Mamdani’s handlers would have clued him into this fact long before it became a live possibility, with the prospect of Netanyahu actually visiting New York City on the horizon (he is planning to go there in September). After all, they’ve had plenty of time to look into the matter. As Intifada on the Hudson shows, it was back on Nov. 25, 2024 when Mehdi Hasan, the former MSNBC host who is, like Mamdani himself, a Muslim who is politically to the left of Stalin and Mao, asked the mayor-to-be if he would “welcome Prime Minister Netanyahu to New York City for the — for whatever he comes for, given the U.S. is not a signatory to the ICC, so he can travel to the U.S., unlike a lot of other countries? Would a Mayor Mamdani welcome Benjamin Netanyahu to this city?”
Hasan was referring to the fact that the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor, Karim Ahmad Khan, had issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu, despite the fact that neither the U.S. nor Israel accepts its jurisdiction. Nevertheless, Mamdani replied readily: “No. As mayor, New York City would arrest Benjamin Netanyahu. This is a city that our values are in line with international law. It’s time that our actions are also.”
This was pure political grandstanding, as the question of whether the mayor of New York City could execute a warrant for a court whose jurisdiction the United States does not accept was as clear then as it is now. Also, Netanyahu had not, in reality, violated any international laws or done anything to justify an arrest warrant; he had simply pursued an increasingly unpopular war, in which his enemies manipulated international public opinion with deceitful propaganda about civilian casualties.
Nonetheless, Mamdani doubled down on this stance in June 2025, when speaking at a synagogue: “My answer is the same whether we are speaking about Vladimir Putin or Netanyahu. We have seen other countries across the world that are signatories of the ICC that they would honor that same request, being Canada or other countries in Europe, and their honoring of it meant that Netanyahu did not travel there.”
After all that, however, it turns out that he can indeed do nothing, and now Mamdani is getting the criticism he so richly deserves. Sam Raus, David Boaz Resident Writing Fellow at Young Voices, hit the mayor’s pretensions of being an authority on international affairs: “I had a dead homeless body in front of my apartment, but the mayor’s focused on playing Model UN. What a joke.”
Indeed. Israel defender Eyal Yakoby observed: “Zohran Mamdani admitted tonight that he has zero legal right to arrest Netanyahu. Like everything that he does, it was all just an act for clicks on social media.”
Hellbound and Down 