Photograph Source: the official YouTube channel of the NYC Major’s Office – CC BY 4.0

On October 9, New York Times published opinion writer Bret Stephens Zohran Mamdani’s Moral Obscenity. In it he noted that Mamdani:

“[S]et off a firestorm of criticism Wednesday morning with a social media post ostensibly intended to commemorate the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre of Israelis. It devoted a brief paragraph to condemning Hamas and commiserating with its victims. The rest was a much longer denunciation of Israel’s “ongoing genocide in Gaza,” a “world in which occupation and apartheid continue” and a situation in which “our federal government continues its complicity with every arms shipment.”

In response, Ammiel Hirsch, the president of the New York Board of Rabbis, said the statement was “so offensive to so many Jews that it is hard to describe how offensive it is.” Stephens stepped in to assist Rabbi Hirsch, claiming that Mamdani’s statement was in fact, “a moral obscenity.” He then proceeded to “count the ways.” Stephens tells us:

It is obscene in the same way it would have been obscene if the mayor had commemorated the 25th anniversary of Sept. 11 last month with a perfunctory nod to the victims of the day, followed by a much longer denunciation of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. What happened on both Sept. 11 and Oct. 7 was undiluted evil, each an unprovoked visit of deliberate and maximalist violence on people who had done nothing to invite that violence other than being at the wrong place at the wrong time.

Undiluted evil. The term is often used interchangeably with “pure,” or “unadulterated evil.” It implies committing a harmful act solely for the sake of causing destruction or suffering. It is characterized by purely sadistic intent or terrorizing others for the sake of terror. But was this really the case here? Hamas told us their reasons for the October 7th attacks in a pamphlet entitled Our Narrative… Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. In Hamas’ view, the Palestinian people have been in a “battle against occupation and colonialism” since 1918. This included thirty years of British occupation and then seventy five years of “Zionist occupation.” Hamas points out that even as the British occupation was coming to an end, in part because British occupation forces were being attacked by Jewish paramilitary organizations like the Irgun, Lehi (aka the “Stern Gang”), and the Haganah, Jewish settlers still occupied only about 6% of the territory of Palestine and constituted........

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