New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani told Theo Von he was stunned when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called him out by name during a United Nations General Assembly address.
Page A2From§Eachthe early evening edition — 2 October 2026
Netanyahu calls New York mayor a terrorist's buddy, mayor calls that strange
As it ran on the front
The word "strange" is doing a lot of work. That's what Zohran Mamdani called it, on a podcast, when asked how it felt to hear the Prime Minister of Israel say his name out loud to the whole United Nations General Assembly. Strange. Like finding a parking ticket on a car you don't own.
Here's the sequence, in order, because the order is the whole story. On September 17th, Israel's ambassador to the UN got out ahead of his boss's visit by demanding Mamdani be the one arrested, not Netanyahu. Five days later, on the 22nd, Mamdani renewed his own demand, the one he'd been making already, that Netanyahu answer for war crimes in Gaza. Two days after that, Netanyahu took the floor at the General Assembly and made sure the world heard that Hamas are the mayor's "buddies." The Guardian, reading the same transcript the rest of us did, noticed what the speech was actually for: a reelection pitch, dressed as foreign policy, starring an elected official in New York City who never agreed to run in anybody's primary but his own.…
…(cont) That's the trick. A head of state with an actual reelection to win picked a fight with a mayor who has no vote in it, because the fight itself is the product. Netanyahu doesn't have to debate Mamdani's record on rent or buses. He just has to say his name on the world's biggest stage and let Fox News and the New York Post carry the rest, which they did, gladly, stacking "war criminal" against "buddies of Hamas" until nobody's asking why a Gaza policy is being litigated in a five-borough mayoral race.
And Mamdani's answer to all of it is "strange" — not angry, not scared, just mildly bewildered, the way you'd describe finding your name in someone else's divorce filing. That's not nothing. The ambassador wanted him arrested. The Prime Minister wanted him dishonored by name, on camera, in front of the actual United Nations. The mayor's response was a shrug on a podcast.
“You get that this is a guy under his own corruption charges back home, picking a fight with a mayor in a city where he can't even vote, because a fight is easier to sell than a verdict. The ambassador wants Mamdani arrested, the boss wants him humiliated by name at the UN, and all Mamdani's got is "strange" — meanwhile everybody's talking about Gaza except the people whose rent actually just went up.”
“Look, the Prime Minister was simply responding to a sitting mayor calling him a war criminal — that's not a campaign strategy, that's self-defense, and frankly any leader would— okay, the ambassador asking for Mamdani's arrest a week earlier might complicate the self-defense framing a little. But the point stands that Israel didn't start this. Did I say "start"? There's no "starting," there's just... context.”
The receipts
· Netanyahu is using Mamdani as a foil in his re-election campaign from the morgue, 28 Sep 2026
· Mamdani again calls for Israel’s Netanyahu to be arrested when he comes to NY this week: ‘A war criminal’ from the morgue, 22 Sep 2026
· Netanyahu rips Mamdani and calls Hamas terrorists mayor’s ‘buddies’ from the morgue, 24 Sep 2026
· Israeli UN ambassador says Mamdani should be arrested instead of Netanyahu from the morgue, 17 Sep 2026
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.