OPINION:
Zohran Mamdanı, newly elected mayor of New York City, says he will uphold an International Criminal Court warrant and arrest Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu for war crimes should the prime minister ever set foot in the Big Apple.
So no more in-person U.N. headquarters meetings for Bibi?
Netanyahu ought to go out of his way to attend Mamdani’s swearing-in ceremony on Jan. 1, 2026. Just to see. Just to flip his middle finger in the face of the brash Muslim leader and let him know Israel doesn’t bow down to city mayors — and America doesn’t bend its Constitution to international law.
In November of 2024, the ICC’s judges said Netanyahu was guilty of “the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare,” as well as of “the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution and other inhumane acts.” Arrest him! — they said. What a crock. The ICC also condemned the Hamas commander and issued an arrest warrant for him, as well.
That’s nice.
But the ICC has no authority in the United States.
ICC determinations do not apply to America.
The anti-Israel, antisemitic ICC powers-that-be can rule all they want against Israel, make all the judgments they want against the IDF and Israeli leaders, and issue all the arrest warrants they want against Netanyahu. But here in America, the ICC has zero standing, zero authority, zero influence. The United States may have signed the Rome Statute that established the court decades ago. But the U.S. Senate never ratified the statute.
The ICC is meaningless on American soil, and to American citizens.
For Mamdani to take a stand to uphold the ICC’s issuance of a warrant for Bibi’s arrest, based on ridiculous ICC findings of his so-called human rights’ abuses during war against Hamas — war that Hamas started; war that came in response to brutal, savage aggressions from Hamas — is not only a bold display of antisemitism. It’s an equally astonishingly arrogant show of anti-Americanism.
“I’ve said time and again that I believe this is a city of international law,” Mamdani said on “Up Close” on ABC7, Fox News reported, “and being a city of international law means looking to uphold international law. And that means upholding the warrants from the International Criminal Court, whether they’re for Benjamin Netanyahu or Vladimir Putin. We are a global city, but what New Yorkers are looking for is consistency in the way we talk about our values and follow through with them. That’s why these warrants from the International Criminal Court are worth fully exploring — every legal possibility to actually follow through on.”
No. Here in America, political officials swear the oath to the Constitution of the United States — to defend and protect the Constitution from enemies both foreign and domestic. The ICC is not the Constitution. The ICC is antithetical to the sovereignty of America’s judicial system and constitutional concept of law and order.
And the more Mamdani doubles down on the idea of the Big Apple as a city of international law, the more he shows himself as an enemy of the Constitution.
Maybe President Donald Trump should make a guest appearance, alongside Netanyahu, for communist Mamdani’s swearing-in ceremony.
Two middle fingers are better than one.
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