spiked93%
Mamdani’s mad plot to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu 76%
By Luke Gittos55%
7/23/2026, 11:55:16 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 31 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Appeal to Emotion, and Hasty Generalization, with Biased Writer Voice as the most egregious example at 19.5% saturation with 155 hits. Analysis detected 1,193 faulty-reasoning hits from 793 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 67.4% and a BS Rank of 76% (5,402 of 21,887 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 75.30% of the article peer group.
New York mayor Zohran Mamdani has been forced to roll back on his campaign promise that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu would be arrested for war crimes if he ever touched down in New York.
On Wednesday, Mamdani said that ‘anyone with their eyes, with their heart’ could see the devastation that Netanyahu had caused through Israel’s attack on Gaza.
But, he was forced to confess, his administration ‘did not have the independent legal authority’ to arrest Netanyahu on the basis of an International Criminal Court (ICC) warrant.
I suppose the city’s legal department did its job in advising Mamdani that it was not a good idea for officers from the New York Police Department to arrest the democratically elected prime minister of a foreign country.
Who knew?
Mamdani reminds me of a 21-year-old version of myself.
Much like many others like me, I would call for Tony Blair and George W Bush to be ‘arrested for war crimes’ and ‘tried in The Hague’ following the botched invasion of Iraq.
It was a thing to say.
Yet we knew, even then, that there was zero chance of either man being arrested.
We knew that the ICC was a toothless international institution that was used to prosecute – and there is no polite way of saying this – African dictators.
Until 2016, every person convicted by the ICC had come from an African country.
Things have changed a bit.
The ICC now sees its role as intervening in conflicts across a wider range of continents, including the Middle East.
It issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former defence minister, Yoav Gallant, in November 2024.
They were the first leaders of a Western-backed democratic country to have ICC warrants issued against them.
At the same time, the ICC prosecutor sought arrest warrants against members of the Hamas leadership: Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Deif and Ismail Haniyeh.
All of these warrants were withdrawn after their deaths were confirmed.
Mamdani’s ridiculous intervention should not only remind us that he is a bit mad.
It should also make us remember how grotesque it was for the ICC prosecutor to pursue the Israeli and Hamas leaders together.
The warrants alleged that the Israelis had used ‘starvation as a method of warfare’.
This was the first time that the ICC had issued arrest warrants based on the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare – a crime that is notoriously difficult to prove.
This difficulty was compounded by the role that aid played in the war against Hamas.
Israel claimed that Hamas stole food aid and sold it to civilians in order to fund its activities – something that was effectively admitted by the UN this month.
Israel also argued that restrictions on aid and other materials were necessary to prevent supplies and dual-use goods from being diverted to Hamas.
Nor is there any persuasive evidence that proves there has been a famine in Gaza, as was repeatedly claimed by Israel’s critics.
The Gazan health ministry’s own data breakdowns indicate that four malnutrition-related deaths were documented in 2023, 49 deaths in 2024, and 260 in between January and 27 August 2025.
These are terrible numbers, but not nearly as high as one might expect if Israel had been using hunger as a deliberate ‘weapon of war’.
Even if they were true, it would be deeply hypocritical for Western nations to target Israel.
Far more destructive military blockades were used by the Allied powers during the First and Second World Wars.
The blockade imposed by Britain and its allies on the Central Powers from 1914 was associated with hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths.
These deaths were, of course, never considered by an international criminal tribunal.
In contrast, it is now widely accepted that the attack on 7 October represented some of the worst war crimes committed against civilians in recent history.
Hamas filmed these crimes.
Its members boasted about them.
The evidence was undeniable.
Yet the ICC prosecutor took the decision to pursue Israel’s leaders, on highly contested grounds, at the same time as the leaders of a mob of genocidal terrorists.
Zohran Mamdani’s ridiculous calls to arrest the leader of a democratic country do not merely show how divorced from reality the New York mayor has become.
It should remind us that the International Criminal Court has become an overtly political institution, which is happy to use tenuous interpretations of the law to posture on the international stage.
A reckoning with its toxic influence long overdue.
Luke Gittos is a spiked columnist and author.
His most recent book is Human Rights – Illusory Freedom: Why We Should Repeal the Human Rights Act, which is published by Zero Books.
Order it here.
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