Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York, used Oct. 7, 2026, the same way he used Oct. 7, 2023: as another opportunity to libel Israel. After his perfunctory mention Wednesday of the Hamas massacre came a stream of propaganda, much longer, about Israel's "ongoing genocide," "so-called ceasefire," "apartheid" and "war crimes" -- with Hamas disappearing from the picture as if to its hostage tunnels.
Basic dishonesty is a feature of all such harangues. Mr. Mamdani passes off the Hamas-supplied Gaza casualty figure as if all the dead were civilians, not bothering to mention that at least 25,000 are believed to have been terrorist combatants.
To do so would be to admit that Israel waged a war, not a genocide, with a civilian-to-combatant casualty ratio well within historical precedents for difficult urban warfare. For the same reason, he also has to omit that Hamas fought from hospitals, schools and mosques, posed as journalists, and built an unprecedented military tunnel system under Gaza's cities.
It betrays a particular ugliness to smear Israel to mark Oct. 7, the day Hamas started the war by deliberately massacring Jews. It killed nearly 1,200 of all ages in scenes reminiscent of Nazi death squads. The terrorists even took a baby hostage, among 250 others.
Yet it is for the Hamas attack alone that Mr. Mamdani insists on context. "The suffering did not begin nor end that day," he wrote Wednesday. So even Oct. 7 is Israel's fault.
That's also how Mr. Mamdani responded in 2023 to the Hamas attack. At the time, his wife was celebrating the massacre and his political party, New York's Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), was promoting a rally in solidarity. Three years on, the party's youth wing endorsed another such protest for this Oct. 7. "Glory to the martyrs, victory to the resistance," reads its flier.
Wednesday's protests typically praised the Hamas massacre while also denouncing Israel as the aggressor. "Three years of genocide, three years of resistance," proclaimed Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). On Oct. 8, 2023, the same national SJP told its chapters to celebrate the "historic win for the Palestinian resistance."
During a walkout at Columbia on Wednesday, students chanted, "Resistance is justified when people are occupied." They mean the day's massacre of Jews was justified, even while Hamas ruled all of Gaza. In London, protesters outside the office of the main communal organization of British Jews called for "intifada."
A Haverford professor was arrested Tuesday for allegedly stalking and threatening a Jewish colleague -- as well as his infant child -- in antisemitic terms for months via anonymous online accounts. The professor, a Columbia anthropology Ph.D. (what else?), previously wrote on behalf of the Haverford Faculty for Justice in Palestine to denounce efforts against campus antisemitism as "Zionist witch hunts."
Israel fought back after Oct. 7 to lift existential threats -- Hezbollah is devastated and Iran's nuclear program is in rubble. But the antisemitism unleashed again three years ago is still with us. Defeating it remains the West's duty.
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