Why Mamdani Tries To Erase the Crimes of October 7

By Seth Mandel

Wednesday, July 22, 2026

 

The escalation of Zohran Mamdani’s campaign of incitement we witnessed yesterday may have set a record for the number of lies within a two-minute statement. It was an intifada lightning round.

 

But today is a new day, and a thus a new Mamdani attempt to draw anti-Semitic disorder out of the populace before Benjamin Netanyahu’s September visit to the UN General Assembly.

 

To recap yesterday’s incident: The mayor of New York City staged a brief Passion Play—the kind of deceitful retelling of evil Jewish behavior intended to make the audience believe that the Jews pose an existential threat to their way of life. Complete with somber background music, the mayor admitted that he did not have the power to arrest the Israeli prime minister but claimed Bibi deserved to be on trial for various crimes. He wrongly accused Netanyahu of being a genocidaire and a baby killer, closely following the historical blood-libel playbook.

 

He did not mention the October 7 Palestinian invasion and brutal slaughter of over a thousand Israelis that launched the war of Hamas’s choice.

 

Today, when asked why he didn’t mention October 7, Mamdani shrugged off the question. Then when asked if October 7 was a genocidal act—Hamas has made its genocidal intent explicit—Mamdani rejected the characterization, saying only that the attacks “should be deeply opposed with every single fiber of our being.”

 

It has been a 24-hour period of unprecedented and slickly produced taxpayer-funded Hamas propaganda and anti-Jewish incitement from the elected leader of the most Jewish American city. And his comments attempting to separate October 7 from the war that followed are just as dangerous as last night’s Jew-baiting.

 

That’s because there are two kinds of lies Mamdani leveled in his Two Minutes Hate. One includes the provably false accusations of specific behavior—for example, the long-debunked calumny that Israel engaged in the “targeting of neonatal hospitals and maternity care centers” and deliberately starved Palestinians.

 

The other category is of overall intent: that the Jewish state’s leaders intended to eradicate the Arab population of Gaza. The course of the war, in which the IDF was discovered to have caused among the lowest civilian-to-combatant casualty ratios in the history of urban warfare, demolishes such nonsense. But so do the events of October 7, which is why Mamdani leaves them out.

 

Israel was invaded, Gaza refused to surrender the war it started, and Hamas refused to return the hostages it took on that day. “Genocide” requires that there be only one reasonable interpretation of intent: ethnic eradication for its own sake. But what actually happened was that Gaza took hundreds of hostages and Israel went in to Gaza to get them back, then ended hostilities when the hostages (or their bodies) were returned. Since then, there has been no plausible way to argue that what Israel did was a genocide.

 

But what if you erased the invasion and the hostages? Well, then you have a tougher time explaining why the war happened, don’t you? You’ve still got the problem of Israel’s unprecedented care to avoid civilian casualties, but if you pretend there were no hostages and no Palestinian invasion and declaration of war on Israel, you can portray the Israelis in pretty harsh light.

 

That is why Mamdani erases October 7 from the picture.

 

Now, Mamdani happens to be a major figure in the progressive anti-Zionist movement that is filled with people who approve of October 7. This highlights one of the tensions of Mamdani’s position.

 

Being an elected American political executive, he can’t say “raping Jewish girls and lighting Israeli children on fire is good,” even if his followers and supporters believe that to be true. But Mamdani can suggest, as he has over the past 24 hours, that such rape and murder of Jews is immaterial to the actions of the Jewish state.

 

In doing so, Mamdani has dropped morality on its head. The truth is, no matter what you think Israel is guilty of, assaulting someone because they have a yarmulke on their head is indefensible. Mamdani turns it around: No matter what is done to Jews, the efforts of the Jews to continue existing are indefensible.

 

Anyone who wants to keep civilization from falling into this death-cult void must put October 7 at the center of every conversation about the war. The alternative is an unthinkable descent into societal self-degradation.