Even This Leftist Outlet Is Calling Out Radical NYC Mayor for Threatening to Arrest Netanyahu

You know New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani messed up when even the New York Times is calling him out.

Opinion columnist Thomas L. Friedman wrote a piece slamming Mamdani over his recent stunt involving Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The mayor threatened to have the prime minister arrested for war crimes if he showed up in New York City.

“I don’t know what kind of New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani will turn out to be, but he’s already proved to be a real disappointment as a statesman,” Friedman began. “New York is the only city in the world in which at least 750,000 Jews and Muslims apiece live side by side. Rather than being a constructive bridge builder between them, Mamdani, the city’s first Muslim mayor, has chosen to be a bridge destroyer — using the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as his ax. It is such a waste of a truly charismatic political talent.”

The author took aim at Netanyahu, saying he “does not recognize the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination in their national homeland and believes only Israel should govern the territory stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River.”

But then he turns back to Mamdani, noting that he also “does not call for a two-state solution, either.”

He argues that Jews are not entitled to self-determination in a state of their own — a Jewish state in their biblical homeland in that same region stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River. But more than seven million Jews also live in that space, and they, too, are not going away or relinquishing their right to a Jewish state — no matter what Mamdani and other democratic socialists say. So, they are also effectively promoting a forever war.

Friedman further calls out Mamdani for failing to be a uniter, saying that if he truly desired to build bridges between Israelis and Palestinians. He said the mayor would have convened a conference between “Israeli, Palestinian, Arab, Muslim and Jewish experts to discuss the only just and stable solution: how to forge two separate states for two peoples living in that area between the river and the sea.”

Imagine if Mamdani, instead of engaging in a useless stunt of publicly mulling the arrest of Netanyahu, convened all these Israeli, Palestinian, Arab and American advocates of two states for two peoples and then invited Netanyahu to address them. Let Bibi be the one to say: “No, I don’t want to have anything to do with Israeli, Palestinian, Arab and American advocates of two states for two peoples.”

Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal. pic.twitter.com/YRezmW6YVx

— Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@NYCMayor) July 22, 2026

The kerfuffle started when Netanyahu was set to visit New York City to attend a conference at the United Nations headquarters. Mamdani had promised during his campaign to arrest the prime minister to enforce a 2024 International Criminal Court warrant over alleged war crimes in Gaza.

However, Mamdani released a video statement last week admitting that the city lacked the authority to make the arrest.  “It is clear that we do not have the independent legal authority to enforce this warrant,” he said, also noting that “The federal government, however, does, and I call on them to join the ICC and execute this warrant.”

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