“Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal, the architect of a horrific genocide against the Palestinian people,” New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said in his much-discussed speech this week.
We’ve gotten so used to hearing such calumnies from the socialist mayor we’ve almost come to expect them.
When we try to fight back, we mostly yell and complain.
“We are tired of the Mayor employing rhetoric that repeatedly ignores reality and incorrectly places one-sided blame for the current conflict on Israel,” the American Jewish Committee said in a typical communal response. “His words carry consequences…they legitimize the unique demonization of Israel that has resulted in real violence against the Jewish community…we again implore you to stop putting a target on the back of the Jewish community.”
Powerful words, yes, but not very effective.
Mamdani has been escalating his attacks against Israel precisely because he knows there’s no price to pay. If anything, it helps him politically.
It is the Jews who are paying the biggest price.
So, why are we letting Mamdani off the hook? Why are we not suing him for slander and defamation?
A sharp lawyer can nail him on just this one lie: Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal. He might even show malicious intent by arguing Mamdani knew it was a lie, given that the mayor kept referring in his speech to the International Criminal Court, which only accused Netanyahu of war crimes.
In Mamdani’s own world of justice, he knows there’s a galaxy of difference between “you’re a criminal” and “you’re accused of a crime.”
In his all-day deposition of Mamdani, I would imagine the lawyer would have a field day with other Mamdani lies, such as Israel “starving Palestinians” and “targeting neonatal hospitals and maternity care centers.”
The mother of all lies, of course, is genocide, which, legally, revolves around intent.
As Seth Mandel writes in Commentary, “The course of the war, in which the IDF was discovered to have caused among the lowest civilian-to-combatant casualty ratios in the history of urban warfare, demolishes such nonsense.”
“There was never a genocide in Gaza,” war expert John Spencer writes on X. “The opposite actually, one side (Israel) vaccinating, feeding, helping with all services (medical, drinking water, power) while taking extraordinary steps to protect civilians in the worst urban warfare scenario arguably ever seen and the other side (Hamas) doing everything it can to get civilians killed, stealing food, targeting civilians that do not do their demands.”
I’m not saying we can win the case; defamation cases are notoriously hard to prosecute.
But just as Mamdani has become expert at tormenting Jews with his sinister bashing of Israel, I’m sure we can find a few killer lawyers who can torment him right back.
At the very least, the case would provide a global stage to debunk the genocide lie that is devastating world Jewry.
As we enter the somber hours of Tisha b’Av and begin mourning our ancient losses, it’s as good a time as any to say “enough” to our losses.
If not us, who?
