Mamdani: Muslim Who Stabbed Two While Screaming ‘Allahu Akbar’ May Be Mentally Ill

What did you expect him to say?

A Muslim screaming “Allahu akbar” stabbed two people, including a yarmulke-wearing Jewish man who was leaving Tisha b’Av services, on Thursday evening. Since then, events have unfolded about the way you’d expect. New York City’s Marxist Muslim mayor, Zohran Mamdani issued a brief statement about the attack that was more forthright than many expected it to be, but that still fell far short of speaking honestly about the problem of Islamic terror, and of doing anything effective to stop it.

This attack came two days after New York City’s Marxist Muslim mayor, Zohran Mamdani declared: “Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal, the architect of a horrific genocide against the Palestinian people. He is responsible for the killing of more than 73,000 people. For the maiming of tens of thousands of children, as those who survive undergo amputation without anesthesia. For the targeting of neonatal hospitals and maternity care centers, denying newborns even the chance to live. For the countless people he starved as he blocked food and humanitarian aid from reaching them. For the gunning down of hundreds of aid workers and journalists.”

Heinous charges indeed, and all the more heinous because they were false. As West Point Professor John Spencer has established, there was and is no genocide in Gaza. Mamdani’s words, however, were highly incendiary, to the extent that it wasn’t surprising that a Muslim attacked a recognizably Jewish man so soon after he uttered them. What was surprising was that there weren’t more such attacks, but no one could fault Mamdani for failing to try to incite them.

After the attack, however, the boy mayor did his best to sound the appropriate notes of concern and competence:

I have been briefed on today’s horrifying stabbings on the Upper West Side, where an Asian man and a Jewish man were attacked. According to witness and victim statements, the perpetrator yelled “Allahu Akbar” during both attacks. I am relieved that both victims are in stable condition.

The NYPD responded immediately and arrested Raul Morales in connection with both assaults—and I am grateful to the officers for their swift response.

The NYPD’s initial investigation suggests that mental health may have been a factor. They are also evaluating these stabbings as potential hate crimes.

ADVERTISEMENT

These hateful and despicable attacks have no place in our city.

Of course they don’t, but what is Mamdani going to do in order to ensure that there isn’t another such attack soon?

You may think I am being ungrateful and too demanding. It is surprising enough that Mamdani admitted that the attacker screamed “Allahu akbar.” But he makes no effort to distance the jihadi’s actions from Islam. He knows that he doesn’t have to. That work has been done over the last 25 years, with an endless stream of propaganda assuring us that Islam is a religion of peace and that anyone who suggests otherwise is “Islamophobic.”

The mayor also has recourse to the ever-present dodge that non-Muslim authorities use frequently to deny or obfuscate the motivating ideology behind jihad attacks: it wasn’t jihad, it was mental illness. And so nothing realistic whatsoever will be done to prevent the next such attack, as the denial about the real cause of attacks of this kind will continue.

At some point, Western officials, and conceivably even Zohran Mamdani himself, are going to have to face the contents of Islamic teaching, and recognize that bringing large numbers of Muslims into the West is only going to increase the number of threats to kill Jews and murders of Jews, as the exhortations to kill and the hatred of Jews are both in Islamic texts. Mamdani is the last official who will willingly admit that, much less do anything about it, but he may become a victim of his own twisted success.

If Mamdani keeps on inciting hatred against Israel, there will be more Muslim attacks on Jews. And the more attacks on Jews there are in New York City, the more pressure there will be upon the mayor to do something realistic about it, or at least to give the appearance of doing so. Or will Mamdani just keep on playing the “mental illness” card?