That's clearly the NYTs intent in writing this article.

Do you think New Yorkers will buy the "radical Muslim antisemite" line?

Smear? Fuck that makes me want to vote for him more.

The antisemitism accusstions no longer works we all see the genocide live

The majority of NYC residents would like to see Netanyahu get fucked last I checked. Anti-Israel stuff is immensely popular among democrats in general.

On the other hand, this has been a tactic of the right, and it’s somewhat successful: Keep showing new avenues of attack, and you put your adversaries constantly on the defensive.

What’s sad is, many voters don’t care about the merits of an issue; just the optics of power and assertion. Person X is on the defensive, criticizing a bold statement and thinking they should walk back on it, Person Y is already spouting a new message.

I think it's a tactical error to let the right-wing fascists dictate your policies before there's even a chance they get enacted.

He doesn't even need to focus on it, he just need to tangentially allude to it and suddenly a bunch of these hack rags will end up treating it like its the capstone of his policy agenda.

It's a bad position to take. Not because it's the wrong thing to do. Netanyahu is undeniably a war criminal and should face justice. It's a bad position because only the federal government should be making foreign relations decisions. NYC can and should make itself a very uncomfortable place for Netanyahu but actually arresting him is something that the FBI should do. From that standpoint this isn't different from Texas putting the barriers in the Rio Grande. SCOTUS should have smacked them down hard for that because it usurps authority that the Constitution gives exclusively to the federal government. Of course, the court didn't smack Texas down on that and it was objectively wrong both constitutionally and morally so maybe the constitution and the rule of law in general don't really apply anymore.

The nypd would treat him like royalty and hand him to the feds to Spirit him out of there. NYPD are fucking Nazis. Maybe not all of the rank and file but the leadership. I forget if there are like 40, 60,000 of them. They're bigger than a lot of countries' armies.

The genocide convention

Mamdani has to get elected first, once that's achieved he can worry about such trivialities as reality.

Kathy Hochul?

No one has ever been a nation leader and arrested in another country on charges before

No Ugandan-born Muslim anti-zionist Democratic Socialist has ever been mayor of New York before either. A lack of precedent doesn't make either impossible no matter how many people used to think so.

The fact that the leaders in question knows damn well which countries they will be arrested in probably have something to do with it. If Netanyahu is told he will be arrested if he comes to NY there's a really good chance that he will not come to NY.