There are days when basic decency demands that politics be put aside.

October 7 should be one of them.

It is the anniversary of the darkest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust — a day when Hamas terrorists invaded Israel, slaughtered families in their homes, murdered young people at a music festival, and dragged 251 people into Gaza as hostages.

For Jewish New Yorkers, including thousands with relatives and friends in Israel, October 7 is not an abstraction. It is a day of mourning.

Antisemite Mayor Zohran Mamdani could have simply acknowledged that.

Instead, he gave the victims of October 7 three sentences.

Then he turned their day of mourning into another opportunity to prosecute his political case against Israel.

The statement released Wednesday by Mamdani begins appropriately enough.

“This day is profoundly painful for so many New Yorkers. It marks three years since the horrific war crimes of October 7. On that day, Hamas killed more than 1,100 Israelis and abducted 251 others. We grieve alongside our many friends and neighbors who still carry that unthinkable loss.”

And then Mamdani pivots.

“The suffering did not begin nor end that day,” he declares.

What follows is vastly more extensive than his remembrance of the Israelis butchered and kidnapped on October 7: accusations that Israel is committing a “devastating, ongoing genocide,” dropping bombs on ambulances, targeting residential buildings and journalists, blocking food aid, practicing “apartheid,” committing “war crimes,” and doing so with American complicity.

Read the statement carefully and its priorities are impossible to miss.

Three sentences for October 7.

Three paragraphs attacking Israel.

On October 7.

That choice was not accidental. It was the message.

There are 364 other days of the year on which Mamdani can deliver his familiar denunciations of Israel. He has certainly never lacked opportunities to do so.

But on the one day Jews ask the world to remember what happened to them — to remember the families massacred, the communities destroyed, the young people hunted through fields and bomb shelters, and the hostages dragged into Gaza — New York City’s mayor could not allow even that day to remain about them.

He had to turn it into an indictment of the Jewish state.

That is not empathy. It is an insult.

And it is particularly galling coming from the mayor of the city with the largest Jewish population outside Israel.

Mamdani says he wants Jewish New Yorkers to feel safe. His administration has spoken about combating antisemitism and has acknowledged the horrifying prevalence of antisemitic hate crimes in New York.

Yet rhetoric matters.

A mayor cannot claim to be fighting antisemitism while repeatedly using the extraordinary platform of City Hall to portray the world’s only Jewish state as uniquely monstrous — and then choose the anniversary of the worst massacre of Jews in generations to do it again.

Mamdani is entitled to criticize Israel. He is entitled to despise Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s policies. He is entitled to advocate for Palestinians.

But there is something profoundly wrong when even October 7 cannot simply be October 7.

Imagine a mayor marking the anniversary of September 11 by devoting a few sentences to the nearly 3,000 people murdered and then spending most of his statement cataloguing America’s alleged crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq.

New Yorkers would immediately understand how grotesque that was.

Jewish New Yorkers should not be expected to accept a different standard.

This is also not some new or isolated lapse. Mamdani has repeatedly used moments when Jews are mourning Israeli victims to pivot toward his familiar accusations against Israel — “genocide,” “occupation,” “apartheid,” and American “complicity.”

There is a reason so many Jewish New Yorkers view Mamdani with deep alarm.

It is not because criticism of Israel is forbidden. It is because context matters. Timing matters. Language matters.

And when a mayor chooses the anniversary of the Hamas massacre to devote the overwhelming majority of his statement to accusing Israel of atrocities, Jewish New Yorkers are entitled to ask exactly whose grief he believes deserves center stage on October 7.

October 7 should not be difficult.

You mourn the dead.

You remember the murdered.

You condemn the terrorists who murdered them.

You stand with the survivors and the families whose lives were permanently shattered.

And for one day — one single day — you resist the urge to turn Jewish grief into a political weapon against Israel.

Zohran Mamdani could not manage even that.

New York’s Jews deserved better from their mayor.

Much better.

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)