Nabbing the “war criminal”: Yesterday, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani urged the federal government to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—whom Mamdani calls a “war criminal”—when he comes to Manhattan for diplomatic purposes in September.
The Reason Roundup Newsletter by Liz Wolfe Liz and Reason help you make sense of the day’s news every morning.
Mamdani has, per a video released yesterday and a New York Times podcast interview that went out this past weekend, spent his precious time exploring whether the New York City Police Department could legally arrest Netanyahu during his expected visit to the city in September. Apparently his lawyers said the city does not have “independent legal authority” to do so—much to his dismay. So now Mamdani is asking the feds to do it.
In 2024, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu as well as his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant. They stand accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza Strip following Hamas’ massive attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, in which the terrorist group entered Israel and slaughtered children, music festivalgoers, and families living in kibbutzes, killing roughly 1,200 and taking 251 hostages. Israel has subsequently waged war on Hamas, killing roughly 70,000 Palestinians in the Strip, though actual numbers are somewhat hard to verify at this stage (and the Gazan Ministry of Health is controlled by Hamas).
This ICC arrest warrant is mostly symbolic, not actionable. The ICC has no police force or real ability to make arrests, and the U.S. is not a member nation. “The ICC poses an intolerable threat to U.S. sovereignty—it claims the authority to prosecute and even imprison American servicemen and officials operating on behalf of America’s national interest,” reads a State Department release from earlier this month. “Americans never signed up for this, and all American presidents since the ICC’s ratification have maintained that the ICC does not have jurisdiction over Americans. The ICC previously opened an investigation into U.S. servicemen and intelligence officers and has since refused to close these cases.”
“I want to be equally clear: Benjamin Netanyahu is not welcome in New York City, nor is any other war criminal at large,” said Mamdani. “But we cannot end the genocide on our own. We can decide whether our silence will become another weapon.”
Setting aside all the precedent-setting problems that would ensue if the New York Police Department arrested Israel’s prime minister based on an arrest warrant issued by an organization the U.S. isn’t even a part of, I am just not interested in Mamdani’s performativeness. As unsexy as it may feel to him, I would rather my mayor figure out how to keep the streets clean, how to streamline permits for new housing, and how to make the subways run on time than waste energy and political will on stunts like this one.
Me at Model UN in high school: https://t.co/FRaTbnyUsZ pic.twitter.com/ZMRgBAC3nL
— Jesse Arm (@Jesse_Leg) July 22, 2026
Scenes from New York: This explains basically all of Brooklyn’s “commie corridor” (where I live, sadly):
Downwardly mobile elites are the bread-and-butter of the Dems. https://t.co/VxS3ETlpR4
— Tim Carney (@TPCarney) July 21, 2026
QUICK HITS
- “On Tuesday, a handful of oil tankers appeared to pause their journeys as they approached Yemeni waters heading into the Red Sea, while other ships laden with Saudi oil u-turned and sailed north towards the Suez Canal, after the Houthi rebel group sent an email to shipowners warning against calling at Saudi Arabia’s ports,” reports Bloomberg. “Still, other tankers continued to sail toward the area, according to vessel tracking data, and a number of buyers in Asia said earlier in the day they were still hoping to load cargoes there.”
- SEEMS BAD: “OpenAI said on Tuesday that two of its artificial intelligence models went rogue and successfully hacked into Hugging Face, a digital library of A.I. technology that is popular among developers,” reports The New York Times.
- Just an extraordinary headline from The Wall Street Journal: “A Locomotive Named Big Boy Is Making Grown Men Cry”
- “David Jolly, the Democratic front-runner in the Florida governor’s race, on Tuesday reiterated his push to pause data center construction statewide as the facilities’ impacts become an increasingly hot-button political issue nationwide,” reports Politico. “In a video posted to the social media site X, Jolly said he had proposed a moratorium on data centers and slammed Rep. Byron Donalds, the Trump-endorsed GOP front-runner, for his stance on regulating the industry. The comments also echo similar statements Jolly made in Lakeland last week, when he advocated for a pause and argued Florida lacked the necessary safeguards to protect workers and the environment from data centers.” Just to be clear: This is a pro–data center newsletter and ALWAYS WILL BE. (Recent polling from Politico shows just how out of step my priors are with the rest of the American public.)
