There are a lot of things people claim they didn’t mean on social media.

A poorly worded tweet. An article they didn’t read closely. A meme they thought was ironic.

Sometimes, the mistake is legit.

But “liking” posts celebrating October 7 and claiming the violence Hamas perpetuated against women and even filmed is a hoax is not one of those things.

And it becomes especially troubling when the person doing it is the spouse of a public official — in this case, the wife of Zohran Mamdani, Rama Duwaji.

When the issue surfaced, Mamdani’s response was predictable: his wife is a private person, her views are separate from his, and she does not represent his administration.

Legally speaking, that may be true.

Morally speaking, it misses the point entirely.

Because October 7 is not a policy disagreement.

It is not a matter of tax rates or zoning laws or even the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in its endless complexity.

It was the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

Families were burned alive in their homes. Children were executed. Women were raped and paraded through the streets. Young people at a music festival were hunted down like animals.

This was not resistance.

It was a pogrom broadcast in real time.

And while Israelis were still burying their dead, a disturbing number of people around the world responded not with horror — but with celebration.

Some handed out candy in the streets. Some marched. Some posted slogans about “resistance.”

Others simply clicked “like.”

Let’s be honest about what a “like” means.

It is not neutral. It is not passive.

It is the smallest unit of public endorsement our social media culture has invented.

No one accidentally “likes” posts celebrating mass murder.

Which is why the “she’s a private person” defense rings hollow.

Because the real issue here is not political representation.

It is moral recognition.

If the victims had been anyone else — Muslims, People of Color, LGBTQ concertgoers — no one would accept this explanation.

No one would shrug and say, Well, technically the mayor’s spouse is a private citizen.

There would be outrage. There would be apologies. There would be consequences.

Because in those cases, everyone would instinctively understand something simple:

Those victims are human.

But when the victims are Jews, something strange happens.

The moral clarity dissolves. The standards soften. The excuses begin.

Suddenly we are told to consider the “context.” Suddenly the massacre becomes part of a “conversation.” Suddenly people who pride themselves on human-rights advocacy cannot quite bring themselves to say the simplest sentence in the world:

This is the hypocrisy.

We are constantly lectured about empathy, justice, and the sanctity of civilian life.

And yet when Jewish civilians are butchered, the same moral standards somehow evaporate.

A “like” may seem small.

But it reveals something enormous.

It reveals that Jewish blood still does not trigger the same moral alarm.

That Jews are still not treated as fully human in the moral imagination of far too many people.

And that is the real scandal here — far bigger than one politician’s attempt to hide behind the technicalities of who is or isn’t a private citizen.

Because the problem is not merely what someone clicked.

It is what that click says about whose lives matter — and whose deaths can still be explained away.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)