New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani wants New Yorkers to believe that he’s a man of principle. Asked whether he supports Israel as a Jewish state, the mayor struck a lofty pose: He “can’t support” any nation “that privileges one religion over another, whether it be Israel or Saudi Arabia or anywhere else.” Equality, he intoned, should be “enshrined in every country in the world.”
Nice line for a fundraiser. It falls apart the second you open a calculator.
Start with Mamdani’s basic lie: Despite his claims, Israel has no official state religion. None.
The 23 Muslim-majority countries that constitutionally enshrine Islam—Saudi Arabia, Iran, Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates and more—most certainly do. So, when Mamdani sneers at Israel and Saudi Arabia in the same breath, he isn’t holding Israel to a higher standard. He’s slandering the one country in the room that actually meets his supposed test.
Mamdani named Saudi Arabia himself, so let’s take him up on it: The Saudis ban the public practice of any faith but Islam. No synagogues. No churches. Not one non-Muslim house of worship in the kingdom. If Mamdani couldn’t stomach a state that privileges one religion, Riyadh would be his number-one target.
Here’s what the mayor won’t tell you: Roughly 1.8 million Muslims live in Israel as full citizens. They vote. They sit in the Knesset. They serve on the Supreme Court. They run their own religious courts. Moreover, the Muslim population of the Jewish state is larger than the total number of Jews residing in all Muslim-majority countries worldwide, which is fewer than 100,000.
This conspicuous lack of Jews is no accident. In 1948, some 850,000 Jews lived across the Arab and Muslim world. They were driven out. Iran now has about 9,000 Jews, the UAE perhaps 500, Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Libya have dozens or none. These are the countries Mamdani places on the same moral plane as Israel. Only one of them cleansed its Jews. It wasn’t Israel.
Want to talk about the territories his cheering section never shuts up about? The Gaza Strip, with more than 2 million people, has exactly zero Jews because Israel pulled out every settler in 2005. Judea and Samaria are 80% to 85% Sunni Muslim. If the test is pluralism, the Palestinian areas flunk it outright.
So why the free pass for everyone else?
Mamdani doesn’t withhold recognition of Pakistan. He doesn’t lecture Jordan, whose king claims descent from Muhammad and whose constitution names Islam the state religion. He doesn’t boycott the UAE; it serves as one of his own city’s trading partners. He’s singled out precisely one nation for a rule he enforces nowhere else. It’s the Jewish nation. It’s always the Jewish nation.
That’s the con. A “principle” aimed at a single target isn’t a principle. It’s a grudge in costume.
Mamdani can hold any view he likes on the Middle East. What he can’t do is dress up an obsession with the world’s only Jewish state as universalism while excusing the actual theocracies he name-checks.
Moreover, he is the mayor of a city with more Jews than anywhere outside Israel. When he tells more than a million constituents that their homeland is uniquely unfit for his support, he owes them more than a slogan that disintegrates under scrutiny.
Mr. Mayor, if you oppose states that privilege one religion, then you’ve got a long list to yell at. Israel, with its 1.8 million enfranchised Muslims, is dead last on it.
Do the math. Then apologize.
