“Netanyahu accuses Mamdani of 'supporting' Hamas ahead of UN visit: 'Shame on you'”, 22 September 2026 (Photo via The Hill — the original report)
As it ran on the front
"Truth" was the word Netanyahu chose on Tuesday, days ahead of his own speech, promising the mayor he would tell it. Not a preview, not a scheduling note — a vow, posted to video, with "shame on you" attached, accusing Zohran Mamdani of "supporting" Hamas. Mamdani had already called for Netanyahu's arrest as a war criminal; the video reads, on its face, as the return volley. That's the frame I'm handed to defend, and I'll defend it: a head of state promising candor to a city's mayor is not aggression, it's transparency. It is — well. It is a threat. I said transparency. I meant threat. Leave both in the record; it can hold them.
By Thursday the promise had a stage. Netanyahu stood at the General Assembly, defended Israel's actions, worked the Mamdani line in from the podium, and delegates started leaving their seats mid-speech. He watched them go and called them moral cowards. That's the count that matters here — not what he said about the mayor two days earlier, but who was still in the chamber to hear him say it, and who wasn't.…
…(cont) I'm supposed to tell you the walkout was the overreaction and the speech was the candor, that's the job today, and for a paragraph I believed it. A prime minister accuses a sitting mayor of supporting a terrorist organization from the UN podium, and the people who leave the hall are the cowards. Say it slower. The people who left are the cowards. I can't get that sentence to stand up no matter how I prop it.
None of this landed in a vacuum outgoing Secretary-General Guterres had left empty. His farewell address, pleading for "a world built on interdependence," came earlier that same week, a different day, a different register entirely — and it did not survive contact with what followed it on the same floor.
Back home the speech is still being fought over on Israeli airwaves, which is its own verdict on whether "moral cowards" landed the way it was meant to. You don't get to call a room cowardly and then watch your own public split over whether you were the one in the wrong. That's not a judgment on the delegates who left. That's a judgment on the line that made them leave.
🍺
“He tells you what he's about to do and then does it on camera — threat, speech, insult, in that order, like it's a program. He drags a mayor's name through the UN floor over "supporting" Hamas, then calls the delegates who walk out cowards, and back home his own country can't agree on which part was worse. That's not a scandal, that's a mirror stuck at the podium.”
“He said he'd tell the truth and he told it — Mamdani "supports" Hamas, that's just the record, that's just — okay, "supporting" is carrying a lot of weight in that sentence for a video with no citation. The delegates who walked, they're the cowards, not the man calling a sitting mayor a terror sympathizer from the UN floor. I should stop talking now.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday accused New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) of "supporting" the terror group Hamas ahead of visiting the United Nations General Assembly in the city. "Shame on you, Mr. Mamdani," Netanyahu said in a video posted to the social platform X.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani renewed his call for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to be arrested for war crimes and accused him of visiting a “genocide” on Palestinians just days before the leader is to speak at the UN General Assembly.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defended Israel's actions in his speech at the United Nations General Assembly. He also called the delegates who walked out on his speech "moral cowards." CBS News' Dov Lieber has more on how people are reacting to the speech.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday slammed New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s positioning on Jews, warning he will target the mayor’s stance during his upcoming speech at the United Nations General Assembly. Netanyahu is traveling to New York City to give an address to the U.N. on Thursday, as his country becomes…
UNITED NATIONS secretary-general Antonio Guterres pleaded for “a world built on interdependence” yesterday as he made his final address to the general assembly gathering of world leaders. The UN chief has long called on leaders not to give up on co-operation and shared decision-making in the face of accelerating global challenges and…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.
