The terrorist murder and maiming of people at a Berlin Pride festival on Saturday should not be seen as separate from New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani‘s empty condemnation of a man who stabbed two people in Manhattan shortly before that while shouting “Allahu akbar” and “Justice for Islam.” It is also inextricably connected to Mamdani’s threats to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on trumped-up war crimes charges when he attends the U.N. General Assembly this autumn.
Each of these incidents is a thread in a broader tapestry of anti-American, anti-Israeli, and anti-Western terrorism. Its individual patterns may appear complex, but its overall design, revealed over the past 25 years, is clear: the overthrow of our civilization.
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Even the most obtuse and mendacious must now admit, if only to themselves, that there is a single overarching evil that has motivated the 48,000 jihadi attacks that have been committed in more than 70 countries since the 9/11 assault on America by al Qaeda a quarter of a century ago.
This is a global war waged against the high-functioning, successful, wealthy, and relatively orderly liberal-democratic civilizations of the world by a motley but deadly force from the “global south,” the latter term being a fashionable euphemism for places that are chronically dysfunctional, lawless, and violent — and poor because of that.
Abdul Ballout was a 21-year-old who, though born in Germany, could not properly be called German any more than, as has been aptly noted, a man can seriously be thought of as a horse simply because he sleeps in a stable. Ballout, a Lebanese Shiite, drove a van into a crowd on Saturday, killing one and injuring others. Later, he or an accomplice attacked more with a machete. Special forces shot him dead as he charged them with his knife.
His story is one of official madness and cultural suicide. After he’d served three months in prison in Lebanon for attempting to join the Islamic State terrorist group, Germany extradited Ballout to stand trial for a previous crime of planning a terrorist attack. He was duly convicted, but the judge suspended his sentence because, poor lamb, he’d already spent six months behind bars.
You read that right; he had been a thousand miles away from Germany, but German officials brought him back knowing he was a terrorist. They proved it at trial, but the judge released him into the public. He was meant to start mandatory anti-radicalization lessons — a culpably trivial official response to a real and deadly threat — but instead of taking his classes, he killed one person and injured 29 more.
Germany clearly hasn’t adapted to its existential conflict. Its leniency encouraged more terrorism. And there is no need for it; a British judge admirably demonstrated this last week by sentencing a jihadi plotter to life imprisonment.
Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s response was supposed to be reassuring but failed in this. “The crime will be investigated and pursued with the full force of the law,” he promised. But treating a case such as Ballout’s as just a crime rather than an ambush in a much wider cultural war is utterly inadequate and misses the point. The young Shiite terrorist was a small cog in a big machine geared for cultural destruction. There is a massive distinction between crimes and acts of war. Terrorism needs to be dealt with more like the latter than the former. Treating terrorism simply as crime allows the symptom to obscure the disease. The disease is the presence of hostile aliens. Those that can be removed should be.
Merz’s promise was akin to Mandami’s perfunctory incantation, after the stabbing of two New Yorkers last week, that “hateful and despicable attacks have no place in our city.” Everyone knows this is not true. Hateful and despicable attacks have a firm and expanding place in New York City, and this is partly because the city is run by a man whose sympathies with jihadism are clear. He does not say the Hamas pogrom in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, was acceptable, indeed he explicitly condemns it. But implicitly he always and everywhere encourages attacks on Jews by repeating the lie that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians.
He claims that the Palestinian cause is “central to his identity” even though its true character is jihadi — the terrorists themselves boast of this —masked in the fancy dress of national self-determination. Palestinian children are not brought up to fight for a Palestinian homeland but to kill Jews.
Mamdani is a hostile Muslim who takes every opportunity to attack both the country of his adoption, America, and Israel. His months boasting that he’d arrest Netanyahu to face genocide charges leveled against him by the International Criminal Court had no purpose other than to stir New Yorkers up against Jews and the ancient homeland that offers them the one place in the world where they are not hounded for being Jews.
Mamdani eventually admitted the obvious — that as a city mayor he has no authority to arrest the head of a foreign government. But, he said, that did not mean the war criminal should be accepted in his city. He encouraged New Yorkers to take to the streets to confront Netanyahu. Will they get to the Israeli leader? Not a chance. Will the street protests, however, be a danger to Jews? Yes, of course.
Mamdani, much more effectively than Ballout, is doing all he can to attack the West and its ally, to nullify Israel’s right to defend itself and its people, and to turn those moral imperatives into supposed crimes against humanity.
Netanyahu told Fox Business that he still intends to be at the United Nations this fall, and he will be in the United States this week, attending the funeral of a great champion of Israel, the late Sen. Lindsey Graham. He will also meet President Donald Trump at the White House today, July 28. He accused Mamdani of “fomenting hate,” which is no more than the truth.
New York City’s mayor will not lay a finger on him. But he has helped make sure that other Jews, American Jews, will not be so safe.
