New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s video about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu contains only one admission of fact: City Hall has no independent legal authority to execute the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant for Netanyahu.
Most officials would stop there. Mamdani did the opposite. Having acknowledged the legal authority he lacks, he spent the rest of the video portraying himself as a moral authority with no limits. He called Netanyahu a war criminal, held him responsible for “genocide” and declared him unwelcome in New York.
However, an arrest warrant is not a conviction. No trial has been held and no verdict rendered. But law was not really Mamdani’s focus. The verdict is delivered in his speech, and the viewer was required only to ratify it.
To achieve this, Mamdani’s video erased anything that might complicate its claims. There was no Oct. 7, no hostages, no Hamas who started the war—nothing. There was only the alleged “aggressor” and “victim.”
Then, Mamdani conscripted the American viewer. “We as Americans pay for the bombs,” he said. Thus, the citizen is no longer observing foreign policy. He is financing a crime.
Then came the decisive move: Anyone with “eyes,” “a heart” and “a conscience,” Mamdani said, should reach the same personal conclusions as he has. In effect, the mayor claimed that there can be no disagreement between two points of view. There are only the moral human being and someone whose eyes are closed, heart is shut and conscience has failed. Silence offers no exit. It may become “another weapon.” Anyone who refuses to repeat the message is not neutral but complicit.
The result is a closed rhetorical system: erase context, assign personal guilt, turn assent into a test of humanity and classify abstention as complicity in violence.
The question is not who drafted the speech. It is why this vocabulary works so well, and why Islamist strategists recognized its value long ago.
For example, the Muslim Brotherhood’s leading theologian, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, once predicted in a televised interview that Islam would return to Europe as a conqueror, not by the sword but through da’wa (proselytism) and ideology.
More consequential was al-Qaradawi’s 1990 book, Priorities of the Islamic Movement in the Coming Phase, in which he calls on the Islamist movement to reach every class of society through planned, organized outreach and media work; to make use of modern communications technology; to adapt from West and East whatever tools serve its mission; and to enlist psychology, sociology and politics in the service of the movement’s goals and the message of Islam. Islamism, al-Qaradawi stated, must plan to train preachers and media professionals who can convey that message in the language of their age with the logic of science.
An institution is not always defeated when it is captured from outside. It can be more profoundly defeated when it begins to speak in a language that serves an idea. Al-Qaradawi’s goal was never, for example, to make an American mayor sound like an Islamist. It was to make a Western institution use its own vocabulary of human rights, conscience and international law to draw the moral map that Israel’s enemies want to be drawn.
The intended product of the video was conscience recast as an instrument of political coercion.
Slain Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei spoke of this from a different direction. In May 2024, he addressed American students whose “awakened consciences” had moved them to defend Palestinians and declared that they had become part of the “resistance front.” He did not exercise control over them but rhetorically annexed them without conditioning their inclusion on conversion or formal allegiance. To own their consciences was enough.
Hamas sees the same phenomenon in terms of its utility. The group’s spokesman Bassem Naim stated to Newsweek that popular movements advocating for an end to the war with Israel were beneficial to and supportive of Hamas’s cause and effectively counter the Zionist narrative. Naim’s concern was not loyalty or ideology but output and usefulness.
There is not much daylight between these three men and their statements. Al-Qaradawi and Hamas belong to the Muslim Brotherhood family. Al-Qaradawi supplies the method; Hamas measures the yield. Khamenei came from revolutionary Shiite Islam and identified American conscience as a resource that could be leveraged. These are two ideological camps with three angles on the same Western weakness.
This brings us back to Mamdani’s video. It did not contain a single religious word or overt Islamist symbol. It was built from the most Western register: an international court, the United Nations, human rights, conscience, humanity and dignity.
This does not prove that al-Qaradawi, Khamenei or Hamas are right in what they seek. It proves they are right in their assessment of the West and its weaknesses.
Their narrative is clear: Israel is the only guilty party, Palestinians the only victims, Americans the paymasters, silence a form of complicity and exclusion a duty of conscience. This narrative is no longer disseminated only by a terrorist organization, a propaganda channel or a student encampment. It now bears the seal of one of the world’s most influential mayor’s offices.
Mamdani acknowledged that City Hall cannot execute the ICC warrant. But arrest was not what the video was intended to produce. The intended product was a mayor’s office recast as a moral tribunal, an American public recast as accomplices and conscience recast as an instrument of political coercion.
The question is not what Mamdani really believes. It is what his speech does. It takes a vocabulary built to protect people from power and uses it to foreclose scrutiny, erase context and turn a political argument into a test of humanity.
Al-Qaradawi understood that Western institutions could be coopted through their own tools and language. Khamenei understood that American conscience could be claimed without formal allegiance. Hamas understood that loyalty is unnecessary once utility is delivered.
Those understandings have no mutual command structure and no shared identity. They meet by producing the same result. The narrative no longer stands outside the institution asking to be let in. It speaks from within.
