Zohran can’t Arrest Bibi. Shocker.
Zohran Mamdani spent basically his entire mayoral campaign promising he would personally arrest Benjamin Netanyahu if the man dared set foot in New York City. Not “I support the ICC.” Not “I’ll ask the feds to look into it.” Arrest him. City of international law, uphold our values, all of it. It was a great applause line. Crowds loved it. Then this week, roughly eight months into actually being mayor, his own Law Department apparently sat him down and explained a thing every international law professor already said out loud back in 2024: the city has no legal authority to enforce an ICC warrant, the US isn’t a member of the court, and there’s a whole federal statute specifically banning the extradition of anyone to The Hague. None of this was new information. It just took a city lawyer to make it his problem.
His statement on it was suitably lawyerly: the city “does not have the independent legal authority to enforce this warrant.” Cool. Now the request is that the federal government join the ICC and do it for him. Never mind that we’re talking about a government currently run by a guy who already went on record saying Netanyahu is not getting arrested “in any way, shape, or form” while on American soil. Great plan, Zohran. Really thought that one through.
Yeah.
Here’s the thing that keeps not getting said out loud, though, and it’s the part I actually want to talk about. The ICC prosecutor didn’t only ask for a warrant against Netanyahu back in May 2024. He asked for five, in the same filing, same day: Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant on one side, and Mohammed Deif, Yahya Sinwar, and Ismail Haniyeh on the other. Deif ran the al-Qassam Brigades. Sinwar ran Gaza. Haniyeh ran the political bureau. According to the Pre-Trial Chamber’s own findings, the three of them jointly planned October 7th together. Murder. Hostage-taking. Rape and sexual violence. The whole enchilada, jefe.
Judges only actually got around to issuing one of those three, against Deif, in November 2024. The applications for Sinwar and Haniyeh got withdrawn months earlier, not because anyone decided the allegations were shaky, but because Israel had already killed them, and you can’t very well serve a warrant on a dead terrorist. Funny how that works. The ICC found reasonable grounds to believe these men orchestrated a massacre, and the paperwork just never quite caught up to the body count.
And here’s the part that should be obvious but somehow never gets said: if a mere war crimes warrant is what makes a man a “war criminal” in Mamdani’s own framework, then that logic doesn’t stop with three guys who happen to be dead. It runs straight through the rest of Hamas’s leadership too, the ones still comfortably parked in Doha and Istanbul, never charged only because the prosecutor hasn’t gotten around to the paperwork yet. By Mamdani’s own stated standard, the entire surviving leadership of Hamas is exactly what he calls Netanyahu. He just never says so.
If you’re the guy who built a campaign, and now apparently a mayoralty, around “New York is a city that upholds international law,” where’s the video where you say Deif’s name? Where’s the press conference where you call Sinwar what the ICC’s own findings call him? I went looking. I couldn’t find one. Funny how that works too.
And I don’t buy for a second that this is an oversight. Reporters have asked him directly, repeatedly, about Hamas, and the man who cannot stop talking about Netanyahu somehow always finds a way to get vague fast. That’s not an accident. That’s a choice, made over and over, in front of cameras. And then there’s his household. It’s not a rumor at this point. It’s been reported by Jewish Insider, then the Free Press, then everybody else, and nobody’s denied the substance of it: his wife spent the days right after October 7th liking Instagram posts calling the massacre “breaking the walls” of apartheid, and later liked one dismissing the entire Times investigation into the sexual violence that day as a “fabricated hoax.” Mamdani’s response, when asked, was that his wife “doesn’t speak for him” and is “a private person.”
That doesn’t hold up. You don’t get to invoke the ICC’s moral authority with one hand while the household you built your entire public identity around spent the actual raw hours after the actual massacre liking posts that called it “liberation.”
And it’s not just the household. Follow the money and the endorsements for five minutes, and the pattern just keeps repeating. The single largest institutional donor to the main pro-Mamdani super PAC, New Yorkers for Lower Costs, was a CAIR-linked PAC called the Unity and Justice Fund. A hundred grand. CAIR’s own co-founder and executive director, Nihad Awad, stood up at a conference six weeks after October 7th and said, out loud, on stage, that he was “happy to see” Gazans break the siege that day. Not “I understand the anger.” Happy. That’s the organization bankrolling the super PAC boosting Mamdani’s mayoral run, and nobody handed the check back or asked “what about the torture, rape, kidnapping and murder of civilians and children?”
Then there’s his actual party. Mamdani is a card carrying member of the Democratic Socialists of America, and DSA’s national leadership put out its own statement on October 7th itself, hours into the massacre, while people were still being hunted through kibbutzim and dragged into Gaza. It found room to write “today’s events are a direct result of Israel’s apartheid regime.” It did not find room to write the words “Hamas war crimes.” Not once. That’s the national organization. Not some rogue chapter, not a random member tweeting too fast. The national leadership of the party Mamdani belongs to.
The NYC chapter, his actual local base, did its own version the next day. It co-sponsored the “All Out for Palestine” rally in Times Square on October 8th, the one where the crowd was celebrating what had happened less than twenty four hours earlier, not mourning it. This year Mamdani turned around and endorsed Darializa Avila Chevalier for Congress, a candidate who was at that same rally and has defended having been there. Same DSA machine he leaned on to push her past a sitting congressman’s own endorsed pick.
And then just last month, defending himself over a comment where he’d called AIPAC “monsters who move dark money,” a line that spooked even some fellow Democrats worried it was inciting something, Mamdani reached for a fresh example of Israeli cruelty: an Al Jazeera cameraman named Ahmed Wishah, killed in a Gaza strike that same weekend. Tragic, sympathetic, exactly the kind of name a mayor reaches for on instinct. Except within days the IDF released what it says is Wishah’s internal Hamas ID card, plus photo and video of him carrying a sniper rifle, and claimed he’d spent recent months advancing sniper attack plans alongside a brother it says ran weapons production under the same press badge. Al Jazeera denies every bit of it and calls it a “smear campaign.” Fair enough. That’s a live dispute, not a settled fact, and I’m not pretending otherwise. But notice the reflex. Mamdani didn’t wait even a second to find out who Wishah actually was before deploying his death as evidence of Israeli monstrousness. He’s never once extended that same instant, unhesitating energy to naming what the ICC itself found reasonable grounds to believe about Deif and the rest of Hamas’s entire leadership.
Now just add it up. A wife liking the greatest-hits reel of October 7th apologia. A super PAC’s top donor run by a man who said the word “happy” about it on a stage. His own party’s national leadership, on the day itself, unable to type the word Hamas. An endorsed congressional candidate who showed up to the party the morning after. A dead cameraman he rushed to canonize before anyone checked whether he was carrying a camera or a rifle. That’s not one unfortunate data point you wave away as guilt by association. That’s the whole ecosystem, and Mamdani is standing in the middle of it holding a microphone about international law.
I keep hearing this framed as principle. International law is international law, nobody’s above the process, very high-minded stuff. But principle doesn’t apply itself selectively and then act confused when people notice. A guy operating from genuine, evenly distributed moral conviction about the ICC doesn’t need me, some rando blogger in Jerusalem, to point out that his own cited court tried to indict the men who planned October 7th in the very same filing. He’d have said it himself. First interview. Unprompted. But he never has.
So no, Zohran, I don’t think this was ever really about international law. I think “international law” is just the outfit “I only apply this standard to Jews” wears when it wants to be taken seriously on MSNBC.
Anyway. Enjoy the federal government telling you no.
― Tom Robbins
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