We are being overwhelmed by a global tsunami of lies.
Flanked by U.S. and New York City flags, the mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, packed so many lies about Israel into a videoed two-minute hate that he sounded like the late Hassan Nasrallah on double speed.
Mamdani proclaimed that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was a war criminal, the architect of genocide, responsible for killing more than 73,000 in Gaza, for maiming tens of thousands of children, for targeting neonatal hospitals, for blocking food and aid, and for gunning down hundreds of aid workers and journalists.
The ostensible purpose of this farrago of falsehoods was to complain that when Netanyahu comes to the headquarters of the United Nations in September, the mayor would be unable to arrest him under the terms of the warrant issued by the International Criminal Court.
But there was never any prospect of Mamdani doing so because only a federal government has that power; moreover, the United States has no standing to make such an arrest since it isn’t a signatory to the ICC.
Mamdani would have known that. The point of his video was libelous incitement.
His call upon federal authorities to arrest Netanyahu was a dog whistle to his supporters to attack the Israeli leader when he visits.
In the current pre-pogrom atmosphere, it was also a dog whistle to attack the city’s Jews—to whom, on the very same day, he nauseatingly sent good wishes for the fast of Tisha B’Av, when Jews mourn over the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and of ancient Israel, in addition to genocidal attacks on the Jewish people through the centuries.
Accusing Mamdani of abusing his duty as mayor of New York misses the point.
He’s not an ordinary, left-wing politician. He’s a rabid Islamic extremist. He was rabble-rousing in the streets accusing Israel of genocide a few days after the Hamas-led attacks against Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023, before the Israel Defense Forces had even gone to war in Gaza.
The charge is clearly deranged. How can the lowest ratio of civilians to combatants ever killed in any war be classified as “genocide”? Yet this and other eminently disprovable charges against Israel have now been adopted by millions in the West as unchallengeable facts. How could this have happened?
As noted in a Free Press article by the historian Sir Niall Ferguson and AI expert John-Clark Levin, it’s been made possible by the enormous followings that have been built on social media through granting permission to break all social norms.
This has grown into the movement on the right led by the white supremacist Nick Fuentes. He showcases brazen and gleeful bigotry against blacks, Muslims, gays, transsexuals and others, in which Holocaust denial, Hitler fandom and calls for American Jews to be rounded up and deported are part of the mix.
But the lies have also become normative among leftists to whom Palestinianism is the cause of causes. The “genocide” libel has been used routinely by Palestinian Arabs for decades, along with calling the Israelis Nazis and accusing them of perpetrating a “holocaust.”
Such projection onto the Israelis of behavior of which they are, in fact, the victims is a key weapon to destroy Israel and Zionism. And this was taught to the Palestinian Arabs by the Soviet Union, which itself used anti-Zionism as a weapon to persecute Jews.
That’s why the world seems to have gone through the looking glass. The Soviet insight was that if a lie—however preposterous—is repeated often enough, it becomes over time an unchallengeable reality.
But there’s another crucial stage in this poisonous process. Far from calling out these falsehoods and placing the truth in the public domain, Western politicians are actually parroting the same lies themselves.
Two days into his new job as Britain’s defense secretary, Wes Streeting, who previously claimed that Israel was “committing war crimes before our eyes,” accused it this week of “falling short” of British military standards.
Yet the very opposite is the case. Gen. Sir John McColl, NATO’s former Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe, said after visiting Israel that the IDF’s procedures under the law of armed conflict “are as strong as ours.”
The High Level Military Group, whose members include senior officers from Britain, Germany, America, Australia, Spain and France, concluded that Israel’s conduct even exceeded the standards Western armies set for themselves.
Under the new Prime Minister Andy Burnham, Britain’s Labour Party government looks like becoming even more hostile to Israel than it was under Keir Starmer. That’s partly because it’s dancing to the increasingly powerful Muslim tune in Britain. It’s also because it worships at the feet of the global human rights and humanitarian establishment, centered in the United Nations, which is hell-bent on destroying Israel.
The U.N.’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, whose unprecedented open-ended task is to defame and delegitimize Israel, recently claimed obscenely that children in Gaza “continue to be deliberately targeted and killed by Israeli forces.”
The United Nations works hand in glove with viciously anti-Israel NGOs that constantly peddle the genocide lie and other blood libels painting Israelis as monsters. Western politicians continue to use these propaganda sources as fonts of truth and justice. Yet the corruption of these sources is increasingly being exposed.
The ICC has suspended its chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, who has been accused of sex offenses by a young Muslim ICC staffer who has now bravely identified herself. Since the ICC itself was blindsided by Khan’s issuing his arrest warrant against Netanyahu, it appears that he did so just to divert attention from his own scandal.
As for Mamdani’s charge that Israel has been “gunning down hundreds of aid workers and journalists,” Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad have themselves been confirming that many “healthcare workers” who were killed were in fact their military commanders.
And the Committee to Protect Journalists has descended into chaos and infighting over revelations that dozens of Gaza “journalists” who were killed were military operatives for Hamas and other jihadist groups.
The threat posed by Mamdani needs to be identified correctly. He’s using far-left populism to advance the destruction of America. But he doesn’t want to replace it with a rainbow-hued nirvana. He wants to replace it with Islam.
Despite his adherence to Shia Islam, Mamdani’s behavior corresponds to the strategy of the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood, which has set out how it will conquer America by infiltrating democratic institutions and using them to push the Islamist agenda.
Mamdani constantly makes references to Islam. He has cheered the growth of Islam in the city, repeatedly visits mosques and Islamic centers including ones linked to the Iranian regime, and said that America should follow the example of Islam and Mohammed’s teaching on migration and sanctuary.
Not only does the mayor need to be called out as an Islamist plant; action needs to be taken against him as a danger to America.
Pointing out that Mamdani could be denaturalized and deported, the head of UN Watch, Hillel Neuer, has said that the U.S. Department of Justice should investigate evidence that before becoming an American citizen in 2018 he “knowingly provided funds or services to Hamas or another terrorist group—and concealed this from immigration authorities.”
The monumental onslaught on truth and facts about Israel has knocked the West off its moral compass. A despairing Ferguson wrote that, as a teacher, his aim was to ensure that people learned the lessons of history, including the vital lesson that antisemitic rhetoric can be translated into genocidal reality if it’s adopted by a modern state. “Yet today,” he laments, “I see this hatred normalized, the Holocaust trivialized.”
Ferguson implies that reason itself has been defeated. Such demoralization, while entirely understandable, risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Truth is being defeated because none of the custodians of the public sphere is standing up for it. People need to start calling out the agents of this contagion and holding their feet to the fire. And that includes Jews calling out Jewish anti-Zionists, too.
