New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani vowed again this week to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu should expose the weakness and dishonesty behind that threat by accepting the invitations of New York’s Jewish leaders to attend Mamdani’s inauguration. If Mamdani wants to open his term with an unlawful international incident, let him. The clarity would be invaluable.
Mamdani first pledged to use the New York City Police Department to arrest Netanyahu in September, two years after he said the NYPD “boot on your neck is laced by the IDF.” Mamdani, who has echoed Hamas’s call to “globalize the intifada,” said Netanyahu is a “war criminal” who has committed “genocide” in Gaza.
Last November, the International Criminal Court indicted Netanyahu for “starvation as a method of warfare,” “intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population,” and other “crimes against humanity” tied to his military response to Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre of Israelis.
“This is something that I intend to fulfill,” Mamdani said in September before his election. “It is my desire to ensure that this be a city that stands up for international law.”
In an interview this week with a local television station, Mamdani again pledged to try and enforce the ICC arrest warrants.
“I’ve said time and again that I believe this is a city of international law, and being a city of international law means looking to uphold international law,” he said. “And that means upholding the warrants from the International Criminal Court, whether they’re for Benjamin Netanyahu or Vladimir Putin.”
“We are a global city,” Mamdani continued, “and what New Yorkers are looking for is consistency in the way we talk about our values and follow through with them.”
Every utterance from Mamdani is a lie. New York is not a global city. It is an American city, under the jurisdiction of, first, the state of New York, but ultimately the United States. As such, New York has no authority whatsoever to enter into international agreements or enforce what its mayor deems to be international law.
To put it bluntly: International law does not exist outside of what the U.S. has chosen to be a party to. And the U.S. never signed on to the complete and total farce that is the ICC.
Adopted at a United Nations conference in 1998, the Rome Statute has 139 signatories, though neither the U.S. nor Israel is among them. Washington has long viewed the ICC as a risk to its ability to conduct national defense, a concern vindicated in 2020 when the court authorized an investigation of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. No indictments came, but the willingness to entertain such a case exposed the hazards of the court’s ambitions.
Far from an impartial tribunal, the ICC functions as a tool of a decadent international elite, one that turns a blind eye to butchers such as former Syrian President Bashar Assad, who is responsible for more than 300,000 civilian deaths, while pursuing nations acting in self-defense, as Israel did after Oct. 7.
THE SOCIALIST TAKEOVER OF DEMOCRATIC CITIES
Mamdani has no legal authority to enforce ICC warrants, and any attempt by him or the NYPD to obstruct Netanyahu’s movements in New York would constitute a direct violation of federal law. If Mamdani or anyone acting on his orders so much as lays a hand on Netanyahu, they would expose themselves to federal prosecution, and President Donald Trump would be fully justified in sending him to prison.
It is no surprise that New York’s Jewish community was alarmed to hear its mayor repeating the slogans of terrorists who want them annihilated. Netanyahu could expose Mamdani’s bluster for what it is by showing up at his inauguration and revealing how empty and cowardly his threats truly are.
