This is obscene. The historical illiteracy. The airbrushing of critical context. The absence of the word "Jew" or "Jewish" -- without which, there is no October 7.
He should be ashamed, but one imagines he feels just the opposite -- the smugness, the sanctimony, the blinding self-assuredness of the radical who believes he has it all figured out and, in fact, knows less than zero.
All that was to be expected.
More important, now, is making sense of it: the antisemitism.
It's not exactly an obsession, although it has an obsessive quality.
It's the kerosene with which he powers his movement. It's an unvarnished hate that wraps itself in the fake smile, the fake warmth, which pretends to be one thing while being its exact opposite.
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.
The suffering did not begin nor end that day. It instead continued through the Israeli government’s devastating, ongoing genocide in Gaza, in which it has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians—including more than 21,000 children. Even since the so-called ceasefire, more than 1,400 Palestinians have been killed. That suffering has intensified with every Israeli bomb dropped on ambulances waiting outside hospitals, every drone strike targeting a residential building or journalist, and every shipment of food aid turned away at a border crossing. Many New Yorkers are reckoning with this unbearable grief, and we mourn alongside them – all while knowing that our tax dollars fund these war crimes.
Three years later, we must refuse to accept a world in which occupation and apartheid continue, where war crimes are met with impunity, and our federal government continues its complicity with every arms shipment.
To honor the dead, we must fight for a world in which every person can live with freedom, safety, and dignity.