Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries refused to answer for Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s Israel “genocide” charge even as a fellow New York Democrat called the remarks reprehensible.
Fox News reported that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani doubled down Thursday on a Wednesday post that turned the anniversary of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 attack into a broad attack on Israel.
Mamdani briefly noted the assault. He then spent most of the statement accusing the Israeli government of a “devastating, ongoing genocide in Gaza” and telling New Yorkers their tax dollars fund “war crimes.”
Rep. Dan Goldman, a New York Democrat, did not say much. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries issued their own Oct. 7 statements the same day as Mamdani’s post. Neither answered questions about the mayor’s language.
Hamas’s Oct. 7 blitz left more than 1,100 Israelis dead and more than 250 people captured and held hostage. Three years later, Mamdani framed that day as the start of a longer story of Israeli wrongdoing.
The mayor wrote on X:
"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,"
He kept going. Mamdani claimed more than 1,400 Palestinians have been killed “even since the so-called ceasefire.” He listed bombs on ambulances, drone strikes on residential buildings and journalists, and food aid turned away at border crossings.
He closed by tying the grief of “many New Yorkers” to American funding:
"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."
Those casualty figures and the “genocide” and “war crimes” labels are Mamdani’s claims. Goldman treated them as hotly disputed allegations, not settled fact.
Goldman answered on X. He did not treat the mayor’s wording as ordinary foreign-policy disagreement.
The congressman wrote:
"This is a reprehensible statement on the anniversary of the horrific terrorist attack by a Palestinian terrorist organization against innocent Israelis,"
He accused Mamdani of using grief as cover:
"In the guise of ‘grieving’ with those mourning that day, Mayor Mamdani asserts as fact hotly disputed allegations that he knows full well will offend and further upset those same people he pretends to grieve with."
Goldman is a New York Democrat. He still drew a hard line the party’s national leaders refused to touch in public.
Schumer, who is Jewish, put out a Wednesday statement on the attack. He called it the single deadliest day in Jewish history since the Holocaust and restated support for Israel’s security, aid for Palestinians, recovery in Gaza, and a two-state outcome.
His statement said:
"Today, we reaffirm our commitment to the security of the Israeli people, to the aid and wellbeing of the Palestinian people and the recovery of the devastation in Gaza that the ensuing conflict brought, and to doubling down on efforts for a lasting peace resulting in two states where Israelis and Palestinians can live side by side in equal measures of peace, security, dignity, and mutual recognition,"
Jeffries also posted Wednesday. He stressed the Jewish people’s long struggle for survival, condemned Palestinian civilian deaths and destruction in Gaza, and argued American policy must change toward an independent Palestinian state.
Jeffries wrote that “considerable suffering has plagued the Middle East” over the past three years and that the death of Palestinian civilians and devastation in Gaza “is reprehensible and can never be allowed to happen again.” He added that policy “must change dramatically” and that the country “must commit to the creation of an independent Palestinian state.”
Those statements stood alone. Fox News asked both leaders for comment on Mamdani’s remarks. Neither responded.
A 2023 study from the UJA-Federation of New York put the city’s Jewish population at nearly 1 million. Mamdani governs that city. He chose the anniversary of mass murder and hostage-taking to accuse Israel of genocide and to tell residents their taxes pay for war crimes.
Schumer’s long support for Israel has already become a wedge among some Senate Democrats over arms funding after three years of war in Gaza. The mayor’s language lands in that fight whether national leaders want to discuss it or not.
Goldman named the offense on the anniversary itself. Schumer and Jeffries described the horror of Oct. 7 and the suffering that followed, then declined to say whether New York’s mayor crossed a line.
Democratic leaders who will not confront a big-city mayor’s most extreme charges leave Jewish New Yorkers, and everyone else, to guess where the party’s red lines still are.
