Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu directed the IDF to unleash “immediate and powerful strikes” across Gaza on Tuesday, responding to what Israel described as a brazen Hamas attack on its forces.
Reports from The Times of Israel said Hamas fighters opened fire on Israeli troops positioned in Rafah early in the day, setting off intense exchanges of gunfire and heavy shelling in the southern part of the Strip.
According to Netanyahu’s office, “The attack from Hamas was a clear violation of the peace-deal secured by President Trump earlier this month, which demanded an immediate cease-fire within Gaza.” The statement accused the terror group of undermining the fragile agreement and reigniting hostilities that had barely paused.
The prime minister convened an urgent meeting with military and security officials, during which he authorized the latest wave of air and ground responses. Officials said the decision came after “Hamas’ repeated violations,” including its “failure to release the bodies of the 13 remaining hostages in Gaza — including Israeli-Americans Itay Chen, 19, and Omer Neutra, 21.”
{Matzav.com}
A newly unearthed video has ignited controversy around New York City mayoral front-runner Zohran Mamdani, showing the Muslim socialist anti-Semite comparing the NYPD to the Israeli military in a speech laced with conspiracy rhetoric.
“We have to make clear that when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF,” declared Mamdani, a Queens assemblyman, during his address at the 2023 Democratic Socialists of America national convention, where he served as keynote speaker.
Watch the video here.
The footage captures Mamdani speaking passionately about connecting international struggles to local grievances. “We are in a country where those connections abound. Especially in New York City, you have so many opportunities to make clear the ways in which that struggle over there is tied to capitalist interests over here,” he said.
He went on to insist that people will only care about world issues if they’re tied to their everyday realities. “For anyone to care about these issues, we have to make them connected,” he said, before repeating his inflammatory claim. “We have to make clear that when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF.” He concluded, “We have to make it materially connected to their lives.”
The statements came during a panel discussion titled “Socialist Internationalism: The Solution to the Crisis of Capitalism,” where Mamdani outlined his vision of tying “hyperlocal” politics to broader global movements.
Since launching his mayoral campaign, Mamdani has been trying to downplay his record of radical statements and mend fences with the NYPD. He now insists that his views have evolved since 2020, when he labeled the department “racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety” and backed calls to “defund the police.”
In a bid to project moderation, Mamdani has even pledged that, if elected, he would retain current Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch — a move seen by many as a calculated attempt to reassure law enforcement supporters.
Yet, police leaders remain unconvinced. Veteran officers have dismissed his newfound friendliness toward the force as opportunistic. Among them is Ray Kelly, the longest-serving NYPD commissioner, who made headlines this week for endorsing ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo instead of Mamdani.
As Mamdani’s remarks continue to circulate, critics say the footage exposes his true ideology — one that paints New York’s police officers as villains trained by Israel’s army, and raises serious questions about what kind of leadership he would bring to City Hall.
{Matzav.com}By Jonathan S. Tobin
In electoral politics, as in war and sports, the best defense is always offense. And like any skillful politician, Zohran Mamdani has been on the offensive throughout the course of his run for mayor of New York City.
When faced with criticism of his longstanding affiliation with antisemitic groups like Students for Justice in Palestine and the Democratic Socialists of America as well as opposition to the existence of the one Jewish state on the planet, he has two standard responses.
One is to talk past the issue by blandly claiming that, as mayor, he would protect Jewish New Yorkers against antisemitism. The other is to question the morality and decency of anyone who dares to point out that his entire political career is rooted in support for Israel’s destruction and those working to achieve that genocidal goal.
The former is utterly disingenuous. He has been vocal in his encouragement of the mobs on college campuses and elsewhere who target Jews and chant for their genocide (“From the river to the sea”), as well as call for terrorism against Jews everywhere (“Globalize the intifada”), which he won’t disavow.
Breathtaking mendacity
Such breathtaking mendacity is enough to satisfy those who already support the Democratic Socialist candidate’s bid to lead the world’s largest Jewish city outside of Israel. The ploy is simple. Just accuse those who have the temerity to hold him accountable for his antisemitism of engaging in Islamophobia.
In a society founded on principles of equality, calling someone a bigot is a devastating attack. Doing so has become especially effective in an era when victimhood has become the greatest political prize. And few groups have been more skillful in claiming that status than American Muslims.
At the heart of this claim is a myth about the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Muslims have been speaking as if they, and not the nearly 3,000 persons murdered by Islamists on that awful day, were the real victims of Al Qaeda’s assault on America.
And that’s why the recent dustup between Vice President JD Vance and Mamdani about 9/11 victimhood is not a meaningless kerfuffle or, as many Democrats and liberal journalists seem to be asserting, one more piece of evidence of the Trump administration’s racism and insensitivity. To the contrary, it betrays exactly how Mamdani and other supporters or fellow travelers of Islamist extremism and antisemitism have been able to mainstream their particular form of hate by accusing their critics of being prejudiced.
Vance is being bashed in the legacy media for a post on X in which he pointed out that a recent speech by Mamdani centered on calling his critics Islamophobes rested on a particularly deceitful reference to 9/11. As Vance put it, “According to Zohran, the real victim of 9/11 was his auntie who got some (allegedly) bad looks.”
Mamdani said Vance’s comment was inappropriate. “This is all the Republican Party has to offer,” he retorted. Cheap jokes about Islamophobia so as to not have to recognize what people are living through, attempts to pit peoples’ humanity against each other.”
But Vance was exactly right.
For more than two decades, Muslim extremists and their apologists like Mamdani have been alleging that America was swept by a wave of Islamophobia after 9/11. That theme was enabled in part by a laudable concern on the part of then-President George W. Bush that the response to Islamic extremism should not turn into unfair targeting of American Muslims. Unfortunately, his attempts to claim that those Muslims who hate the West and support Islamists were a small minority that misrepresented their religion—and repeated insistence that “Islam is a religion of peace”—were inaccurate.
No evidence to back it up
But while people like Mamdani continue to float unverifiable allegations of prejudice against Muslims, the plain fact of the matter is that there has never been any empirical evidence of such a backlash against American Muslims. On the contrary, FBI hate-crime statistics over the last 24 years have consistently shown that anti-Muslim crimes have been relatively few and overwhelmingly outnumbered by those committed against Jews. Indeed, in the FBI’s latest report, nearly 70% of religion-based hate crimes committed in the United States were against Jews, despite the fact that they make up less than two percent of the population.
But that has never stopped those who purportedly represent Muslims, whether the openly antisemitic Council on America Islamic Relations (CAIR) or politicians like Mamdani, from asserting that Muslims are suffering disproportionate and widespread discrimination in the United States.
This started out as an attempt to flip the narrative about 9/11, such as when opposition to an attempt to build a mosque in the footprint of one of the buildings in the shadow of the World Trade Center that was destroyed by the attack was falsely portrayed as prejudice against Muslims. By claiming that Arabs and Muslims were suffering discrimination because of anger about the Islamist assault on America, the entire discussion shifted.
Rather than seeing the issue of the religion-based hatred of jihadist Muslims for the West, America and the Jews not as mere unkindness, but one that resulted in mass murder, liberal journalists—and apologists like CAIR, obsessed with anecdotal evidence of anti-Muslim discrimination—deemed anyone with a justified fear of Islamic terrorism after 9/11 to be a narrow-minded bigot.
In the last decade, Islamophobia also became a talking point for those who sought to silence criticism of the way in which CAIR and other members of the red-green alliance of Marxists and Islamists engaged in open antisemitism in the course of their agitation against Israel. Jewish groups and individuals, as well as non-Jewish supporters of Israel and the Jews, were targeted and denounced as Islamophobes. But in almost every case, all they were actually guilty of was pointing out that Israel-bashers were engaged in Jew-hatred, as they advocated for Israel’s eradication, denied Jewish history and rights and appropriated the memory of the Holocaust in order to falsely demonize Jews.
Post-Oct. 7 tactics
This dishonesty became even more blatant after the Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Many Muslims and their left-wing allies celebrated what was the largest mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust because they hated Israel. Echoing the language of toxic leftist ideas about race, falsely branded Jews as “white” oppressors and the Jewish state as a nation that had no right to exist.
It is no exaggeration to say that this fraudulent and hateful stand is at the core of Mamdani’s political identity. When he spreads blood libels about Jews committing “genocide”—as he did just last week in the final mayoral candidate debate— while opposing the right of the Jewish people to their own state in their historic homeland and won’t condemn calls for genocide and terrorism against Jews, he’s engaging in behavior that is intrinsically antisemitic. But instead of owning up to his prejudice and that of those who share his views, he bemoans the way Muslims are treated and says that anyone who notices his antisemitism is an Islamophobe.
This is enormously popular among Muslims and also appeals to the left-wing intersectional base of the Democratic Party—and its journalist cheerleaders—who believe the war that Islamists are waging against the West is a function of a racial conflict in which victimized people of color are “resisting” white oppressors. In this way, Islamist terrorism is justified, while Jewish and American victims are erased.
No one should be targeted for his or her religious faith or ethnic identity. And the only people who should be blamed for Islamist terrorism are those who commit and support it. But the idea that American Muslims are in the crosshairs of a vicious backlash based on religious prejudice is still a myth. And those “pro-Palestinian” activists like Mamdani who support a war against the Jews deserve to be identified and held accountable for it.
Gaslighting the Jews
The purpose of promoting the dubious claim that Islamophobia is spreading is clear. It is a perfect example of gaslighting, as it is almost only used when it concerns efforts to identify the hate for Jews that is mainstream in the Arab and Muslim communities. Through this endeavor, the real hatemongers get to play the victims of prejudice, while the victims of their hatred are wrongly accused of being bigots.
The phenomenon is particularly egregious as Jews confront the likelihood of Mamdani—whose public career has revolved around antisemitism—becoming the mayor of New York City. The message they are getting from media outlets like The New York Times that are promoting this false narrative about Mamdani is that to raise the question of Muslim antisemitism is to be an Islamophobe.
If New York is to elect an antisemite as the city’s mayor, let’s be clear about what those seeking to clear the path for such an outcome are doing. Their goal is much like the tone that has characterized coverage of the post-Oct. 7 war against Hamas, in which terrorist propaganda and lies are treated as truth, and the truth about the genocidal goals of Israel’s opponents is sent down the Orwellian “memory hole.”
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate).
As reported earlier, Israeli authorities revealed on Tuesday morning that the remains handed over overnight by Hamas were not those of a new hostage, but rather the already-buried body of Ofir Tzarfati, an Israeli abducted and murdered during the October 7 attacks.
“After the completion of the identification process this morning, it was determined that last night remains belonging to the fallen hostage Ofir Tzarfati were returned — remains that had already been brought back from Gaza in a military operation about two years ago. The family has been notified,” the Prime Minister’s Office confirmed.
Officials said the handover violated the agreement with Hamas, and Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu quickly called an emergency consultation with Israel’s defense leadership to determine the next course of action. “This constitutes a clear violation of the agreement by the terrorist organization Hamas. Prime Minister Netanyahu will hold a security consultation with the heads of the defense establishment to discuss Israel’s response to these violations,” the statement continued.
The casket had crossed into Israel under IDF supervision around midnight and was taken to the National Institute for Forensic Medicine in Abu Kabir. Hours later, the grim realization emerged that Hamas had handed over remains already buried in Israel.
Ofir Tzarfati had been kidnapped from the Nova Festival and murdered on October 7, 2023. His body was recovered by Israeli forces in November 2023, and additional remains were later returned in March 2024.
An Israeli official described the handover as a deliberate act of psychological warfare. “This cannot go without a response,” the source told The Jerusalem Post.
Netanyahu, who was en route to give court testimony when the discovery became public, immediately cut his appearance short to convene the security cabinet. Military officials are expected to present three potential responses — restricting humanitarian aid into Gaza, expanding ground operations, and carrying out additional targeted eliminations of Hamas leaders.
However, one senior security source warned, “Much depends on receiving a green light from the United States for imposing sanctions on Hamas. It is not certain that the U.S. will approve.”
According to Army Radio, IDF reservists claimed Hamas may have staged the discovery of the remains. The soldiers reported seeing a Hamas tractor digging near the “Yellow Line” ceasefire area in Shejaiya. They described how operatives appeared to bury remains taken from a nearby building, then summoned Red Cross personnel to “discover” them — an act caught by an IDF drone. “According to the fighters who spoke with us, the entire incident is documented by an IDF drone,” said Army Radio’s military correspondent Doron Kadosh.
Whether those remains were the same ones later returned to Israel has not yet been confirmed.
The shocking incident has left hostage families reeling. Bar, the daughter of Manny Godard, whose body remains in Gaza, said on Army Radio, “I’m thinking about the family – a family has to reopen the grave, and reopen the wound. It’s unimaginable. This abuse must stop. The mediators must use every leverage they can.”
The revelation triggered widespread outrage among Israeli politicians. “Hamas’s violations cannot remain without a harsh response – otherwise, we have done nothing and returned to October 6, [2023],” wrote Benny Gantz on . National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir declared, “The fact that Hamas continues to play games and not immediately hand over all the bodies of our fallen is in itself evidence that the terrorist organization is still standing on its feet. The time has come to break those legs once and for all.”
He continued, “Now we do not need to ‘exact a price from Hamas’ for the violations. We need to take its very existence and destroy it completely – in accordance with the central goal defined for the War of Redemption. Mr. Prime Minister, enough hesitation – give the order!”
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called for an immediate cabinet meeting “to formulate a firm and decisive package of responses and to ensure we stand by the main objective of the war: the destruction of Hamas and the removal of the threat posed by Gaza to the citizens of Israel.” He added, “We cannot allow Hamas to mock Israeli citizens and cynically play with the emotions of the families of the fallen hostages.”
The overnight handover was the first in nearly a week, coming just before a 48-hour deadline set by President Trump expired. “Hamas is going to have to start returning the bodies of the deceased hostages, including two Americans, quickly,” he said. “Let’s see what they do over the next 48 hours. I am watching this very closely.”
Meanwhile, Israeli officials are considering several possible retaliatory measures, including retaking ground in Gaza, resuming targeted assassinations, retrieving hostage remains by force, increasing diplomatic pressure, or fully ending the ceasefire agreement.
For the Tzarfati family — and for all of Israel — Hamas’s cruel deception has reopened wounds that never healed, turning what was meant to be a moment of closure into another chapter of torment.
WATCH:
Muslim socialist New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is facing a storm of criticism over a story he shared about a relative who stopped wearing her hijab and taking the subway after the September 11 attacks. After widespread scrutiny, Mamdani revealed Monday that the “aunt” in his story was actually his father’s cousin, the NY Post reports.
“I was speaking about Zehra fuhi, my father’s cousin, who passed away a few years ago,” Mamdani explained at a press conference, noting that he referred to her as his aunt because of cultural custom. In Urdu and Hindi, “fuhi” means paternal aunt.
His campaign declined to provide the cousin’s full name when pressed by reporters. The clarification came after social media users posted photos of a woman they identified as Mamdani’s biological aunt, who appeared without a hijab, questioning the accuracy of his account.
The controversy began after Mamdani’s emotional remarks on Friday outside the Islamic Cultural Center in The Bronx, where he recalled how his “aunt” made the painful decision to stop riding the subway due to fear of anti-Muslim hostility. “I want to speak to the memory of my aunt, who stopped taking the subway after September 11th because she did not feel safe in her hijab,” he said during the speech.
During the same address, Mamdani also accused opponents Andrew Cuomo, Curtis Sliwa, and Mayor Eric Adams of stoking Islamophobia. “In an era of ever-diminishing bipartisanship, it seems that Islamophobia has emerged as one of the few areas of agreement,” he said.
The comments drew widespread backlash, including from Vice President JD Vance, who mocked Mamdani on X: “According to Zohran the real victim of 9/11 was his auntie who got some (allegedly) bad looks.”
Online speculation intensified after users identified public health consultant Masuma Mamdani—who lives in Tanzania and was photographed without a hijab—as his only known aunt. That prompted Mamdani’s clarification that he had been referring to a cousin, not an aunt by blood.
“For the takeaway from my more than 10-minute address about Islamophobia in this race and in this city, to be the question of my aunt, tells you everything you need to know about Cuomo and his inability to reckon with a crisis of his own making,” Mamdani said on Monday, blaming his rival for fueling the controversy.
As early voting continues ahead of the November 4 election, Cuomo—now running as an independent—has escalated his attacks on the socialist candidate. While he avoided direct reference to the “aunt” story, Cuomo condemned Mamdani for hosting left-wing Twitch personality Hasan Piker at his “New York is Not For Sale” rally in Forest Hills. “I think that is insulting to all New Yorkers,” Cuomo said. “Hasan Piker is the person who said, ‘America deserved 9/11.’”
Piker was seen at Sunday’s rally live-streaming interviews and was granted a “new media” press pass for the event, which also featured appearances by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Mamdani had previously faced criticism for appearing on Piker’s show in April, months before the Democratic primary, with opponents calling out Piker’s remarks that “America deserved 9/11.” Two weeks ago, during the first mayoral debate, Mamdani publicly distanced himself from those statements, saying, “I find the comments that Hasan made on 9/11 to be objectionable and reprehensible.”
{Matzav.com}
