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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/09/opinion/zohran-mamdani-israel-gaza.html
Zohran Mamdani's Moral Obscenity
(New York Times) Bret Stephens - New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Wednesday offered a social media post ostensibly intended to commemorate the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre of Israelis. A brief paragraph condemning Hamas and commiserating with its victims was followed by a much longer denunciation of Israel's "ongoing genocide in Gaza," and a "world in which occupation and apartheid continue." His statement is obscene in the same way it would have been obscene if the mayor had commemorated the 25th anniversary of Sept. 11 with a perfunctory nod to the victims, followed by a much longer denunciation of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. What happened on both Sept. 11 and Oct. 7 was undiluted evil, each an unprovoked visit of deliberate and maximalist violence on people who had done nothing to invite that violence other than being at the wrong place at the wrong time. It is obscene because many of the Jews murdered on Oct. 7, living in kibbutzim, had been at the forefront of the peace movement, volunteering, for example, to drive sick Palestinians for treatment at Israeli hospitals. Hamas wasn't just killing and terrorizing the innocent; it was eliminating the good. Hamas didn't just kill its victims in pursuit of a strategic objective. It tormented and slaughtered them like an army of serial killers who delight in the suffering of their victims. Hamas filmed itself doing this and I forced myself to watch the film. That same month, I visited the bedrooms where the kids had been murdered, their mattresses still soaked in blood. It is obscene because on the eve of Oct. 7 the border of Israel and Gaza was governed by a ceasefire. It was Hamas that chose to kick off the violence, just as the Japanese did in 1941 with the attack on Pearl Harbor. Whoever throws the first punch forfeits the right to throw the last. However much the genocide allegation against Israel is mindlessly repeated by people too lazy or prejudiced to understand the difference between war and genocide, that allegation is as false as it is sinister: False, because genocide is about killing whole classes of people for who they are rather than for what they did.