Lies, damned lies, and Mamdani
Last week, Mayor Mamdani finally conceded publicly what he certainly knew privately before he began his recent torch-and-pitchfork charade about arresting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu under an ICC warrant: he does not have the authority to do so.
Legal scholars have been making this point since the mayoral campaign, when Mamdani used similar empty promises about arresting the prime minister to stoke a voter base turned on by such things. Nonetheless, Mamdani had to make his Parthian shot:
Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal, the architect of a horrific genocide against the Palestinian people. He is responsible for the killing of more than 73,000 people, for the maiming of tens of thousands of children as those who survive undergo amputation without anesthesia; for the targeting of neonatal hospitals and maternity care centers, denying newborns even the chance to live; for the countless people he starved as he blocked food and humanitarian aid from reaching them; for the gunning down of hundreds of aid workers and journalists.
These remarks are simply more of the loose, lazy approach we have seen over the past three years to casting on Israel all blame for the suffering in Gaza and according no accountability to the terrorists who control Gaza and started this war (with genuine genocidal intentions).
The problem is that the mayor’s repeated demonization of Israel and its underlying Zionist movement — indeed, his insistence that a “Jewish state” should not exist as a Jewish state — is dangerous. As the flames of Jew hatred conflagrate (thanks in large part to a dumbed down populace suckled at the hateful teat of social media), Mamdani’s charges lead in an obfuscated but nonetheless direct line to real world attacks on Jews and Jewish institutions.
Mamdani is a liar who misrepresents or omits critical facts in his Jewish-space-laser like focus on Israel and Netanyahu, on whom he seems to have a particular stalkerish crush. He has learned the value of a good buzzword, stripped of meaning or accurate application.
“Netanyahu is a war criminal.” Well, Netanyahu has been accused of war crimes, but there have been no proceedings to prove those charges.
The mayor would be unlikely to refer to an accused killer as a “murderer,” innocent until proven guilty and all that. He would probably just call in the social workers. But such niceties of a Western criminal justice system are shown the door when he is dealing with the leadership of the Jewish state.
Netanyahu is the “architect of the horrific genocide against the Palestinian people.” No, he’s not. The architects of the casualties in Gaza are the homicidal, kleptocratic, Islamic extremists who launched this war with an orgy of killing that left veteran journalists — the kind of people who cover wars for a living — watching Hamas’ footage in tears.
Mamdani’s comment is akin to calling Churchill and Roosevelt the “architects” of a “horrific genocide” of the people of Dresden or Tokyo while ignoring the fact that the Nazis and imperial Japan started and prosecuted the brutal war that led to those cities being effectively eradicated.
And regardless of the media zeitgeist, UN “independent bodies” (the mother of oxymorons) and the cyclical stream of pundits tripping over themselves to accuse the Jews of being the new Nazis, there is no genocide in Gaza.
There is suffering, certainly. There is a large number of dead and wounded, to be sure. There are indisputable hardships on a civilian population associated with prolonged, close urban combat. But if a genocide is going on, it is certainly a strange one.
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In order to minimize civilian casualties, Israel has sought to facilitate the evacuation of civilians from hot combat areas by, inter alia, dropping millions leaflets with evacuation instructions, making hundreds of thousands of individual phone calls to Gaza residents instructing them on the need to evacuate and the routes for doing so, delivering tens of millions of texts and SMS messages urging residents to relocate out of the combat zones, and providing escorts to facilitate such evacuation (while Hamas endeavored at every turn to prevent Gazans from leaving combat zones, blockading routes and even opening fire on residents seeking to evacuate).
In addition, at great risk to its own citizens, Israel deployed ground forces in Gaza. If its intentions were to simply destroy the people of Gaza, it could simply have continued to bomb Gaza from the air at little to no risk to Israeli soldiers. After all, Israel has the firepower to kill everything that walks or crawls in Gaza, it just doesn’t do so.
The casualty numbers touted by Hamas (the “73,000” Mamdani cites) do not distinguish between innocent Gazan residents and Hamas terrorists, or account for the many Gazan civilians almost certainly killed by the thousands of errant Hamas and Islamic Jihad rockets that have fallen short within Gaza.
Israeli officials have repeatedly stated that the loss of civilian lives in Gaza is tragic (to all but Hamas). When the final tally is made, it is likely that the ratio of civilians to military killed in Israel's defensive war will rival, or more likely be lower than, the ratios seen in similar conflicts. Indeed, the low civilian-to-military casualty ratios in Israel's prior wars in Gaza have distinguished Israel's actions from even Western countries seeking to avoid civilian casualties in other wars, as John Spencer, the chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute, codirector of the Urban Warfare Project and host of the Urban Warfare Project Podcast at West Point, has written about extensively.
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Israel has facilitated the delivery of millions of tons of humanitarian aid to Gaza and endeavored to expand its facilities to hasten and increase that aid, precisely to lessen the human suffering wrought by Hamas's crimes. And, in an unprecedented gesture in the midst of a hot shooting war, Israel helped facilitate the inoculation from disease of approximately 1.5 million people from the population it is allegedly seeking to destroy.
Put simply, those are not the actions of a country seeking to commit "genocide" or, if it is trying to do so, then Israel, which excels at virtually everything it tries, simply sucks at “genocide.”
Mamdani accuses Israel of starving Gaza's population. Yet repeated predictions of mass famine have not materialized.
Newspaper stories depicting “starving” children in Gaza inevitably edited out pictures of clearly healthy, well-fed siblings and parents and omitted preexisting conditions of the children featured. Claims that 14,000 children were about to die of starvation in Gaza were shown to be demonstrably false.
Even periods when Israel paused aid deliveries into Gaza followed periods of aid delivery that included enough food to prevent any famine-like conditions in Gaza for months longer than the periods of aid interruption. Data released by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification system (IPC) famine monitoring organization demonstrated that actual malnutrition levels in Gaza fell below the IPC’s standards for declaring a famine.
All of these facts, as well as the fact that Hamas commandeered a large percentage of aid shipped into Gaza and resold aid on the black market, were simply too inconvenient or too threatening to the mayor’s pre-ordained narrative to get past his Israel-hating blinders.
Israel has “gunned down” hundreds of aid workers and journalists.
Certainly, some journalists and aid workers have been killed in the fighting. However, as the mayor likely knows, many of the people identified as “journalists” and “aid workers” were exposed as members of terror groups cynically donning the vests of journalists and aid workers (and thereby putting genuine aid workers and journalists under suspicion and in greater danger). Nor is there any specific evidence to support the mayor’s reckless claim that Israel is deliberately targeting such workers who are unaffiliated with terrorist groups.
The other allegations in Mamdani’s screed — including that thousands of children have had to undergo amputations without anesthesia, and that Israel has purposely targeted neonatal hospitals and maternity wards — are wholly without credible support. But they are driven by the mayor’s persistent effort to cram Israel’s round peg -- its legitimate military aim of routing Hamas out of its civilian command and control centers -- into the square hole of “genocide.” It’s intentionally inflammatory. It’s baseless. It’s, well, Mamdani.
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The mayor insists that there is “no place” for antisemitism in New York City — while simultaneously spouting the blatantly antisemitic notion that, while all peoples have a right to self-determination in their historic homelands, the Jews are the one exception. He vilifies the large majority of Jews who identify with and embrace Zionism, which itself is a core tenet of Jewish belief.
I guess he means he will protect Jewish New Yorkers as long as they reject their own nationhood and self-determination rights and agree to lesser status than other peoples. In other words, his operating philosophy is that we have a right to protection as long as we are dhimmi-nished.
Mark Twain, quoting Benjamin Disraeli, said that there are "lies, damned lies, and statistics," describing the persuasive power of data to mislead, manipulate or bolster weak arguments. We have lies, damned lies, and Mamdani.
Howard Bressler is a resident of West Hempstead. An attorney, he is author of “Wrong Conclusion, No Resolution: United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334’s Erroneous Conclusions on the Legality of Israeli Settlements in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem” and “The Layman’s Guide to Surviving Cancer: From Diagnosis Through Treatment and Beyond” (Langdon Street, 2014). His most recent previous column in The Jewish Star was "Jews Cogens: One rule for me, another for thee"
Write: Columnist@TheJewishStar.com
See also: Mamdani's speech
