Zohran Mamdani (DSA-hole) said of Israel’s Prime Minister:
Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal. The architect of a horrific genocide against the Palestinian people. He is responsible for the killing of more than 73,000 people. For the maiming of tens of thousands of children, as those who survive undergo amputation without anesthesia. For the targeting of neonatal hospitals and maternity care centers, denying newborns even the chance to live. For the countless people he starved as he blocked food and humanitarian aid from reaching them. For the gunning down of hundreds of aid workers and journalists.
Sometimes Mayor Mamdani gets things mixed up. An earlier essay proves that he has acknowledged the Jews’ sovereignty over Jerusalem and Israel.
This essay demonstrates that Mamdani is also mixed up about Netanyahu. He simply attributed the stated actions to the wrong fella and religion.
Muhammad was the seventh-century founder of a quasi-religion and political-military project whose campaigns, doctrines of jihad, and legal traditions have been invoked across fourteen centuries. He was not a modern prime minister responding to a jihadist organization that initiated hostilities by massacring civilians, taking hostages, raping men and women, oven-roasting infants, and embedding among its own population.
Muhammad’s example and revelations underwrote centuries of conquest, subjugation, and punitive violence. Followers acting in the name of the system he established—that would be Islam—have been responsible for the deaths of tens of millions (some sources claim hundreds of millions) due to the early Islamic conquests, the later Ottoman and Mughal campaigns, the Arab slave trade, and myriad recurrent jihads. Precise totals remain contested because medieval demography is sparse, but the historical record of large-scale killing, enslavement, forced displacement, and demographic transformation is not.
Hudud punishments—that is, sharia-compliant punishments for a variety of sharia-defined crimes—illustrate another thread of continuity. Cross-amputation (one hand and the opposite foot) or “mere” hand amputation for theft and highway robbery was historically carried out in public, without anesthesia, by sword or other crude methods.
These punishments were integral to classical Islamic law and have reappeared in modern times under Iran, Sudan, parts of Nigeria operating under Sharia, the Taliban, ISIS, and jihadist groups across the Sahel. Victims have included thieves, alleged robbers, and political opponents.
Those subjected to amputation live with permanent disability, while the punishments remain authorized or actively enforced in several Muslim-majority jurisdictions. That Muslim physician butchers choose to amputate kids’ limbs without anesthesia is on them. By contrast, when Jewish docs in Israel and the territories claimed occupied by colonialist Arabs (i.e., Judaea, Samaria and Gaza) treat Muslim children and adults for actual illness and injury, they use anesthesia when needed.
Islam’s targeting of civilian populations, places of worship, and non-combatants likewise displays historical continuity. Early Islamic conquests were accompanied by massacres, forced conversions, and the destruction or conversion of churches and temples.
The Muslim conquest of Jerusalem placed the Church of the Holy Sepulcher under Islamic rule, and other Christian holy sites experienced varying periods of restriction, taxation, and vulnerability. Hagia Sophia, the great Byzantine cathedral, was converted into a mosque immediately after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, became a museum in 1934, and was reconverted into a functioning mosque by presidential decree (Trump’s “BFF” Erdogan) in 2020.
Deliberately selecting Jewish holy days for military attacks against Jews is a recurrent theme in modern Islam. Egypt and Syria launched the 1973 Yom Kippur War on Judaism’s holiest day. On October 7, 2023, Hamas troops, curious civilians, and allied organizations carried out mass murder, rape, kidnapping, and hostage-taking against Israeli citizens on Simchat Torah, which that year coincided with Shabbat (the Jewish Sabbath). Contemporary Islamist groups have likewise repeatedly attacked churches, synagogues, and other non-Muslim religious sites across Africa and the Middle East, continuing a pattern that extends back to the earliest conquests.
The Armenian Genocide remains one of the clearest twentieth-century examples of religiously infused mass violence, and it occurred under the late-stage Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Turks killed between one- and one-and-a-half-million Armenians through deportation, starvation, and systematic slaughter, accompanied by the destruction of Greek and Assyrian Christian communities.
In subsequent decades, similar patterns of persecution and demographic engineering affected remaining Christian minorities throughout parts of the Middle East. More recently, ISIS Muslims subjected the Yazidis to genocide through mass execution, systematic rape, enslavement, and forced conversion while ancient Christian communities in Iraq and Syria were nearly eliminated. Muslims in Nigeria are continuing this pattern against Christians.
The dhimmi system institutionalized legal inequality for non-Muslims through discriminatory taxation, legal disabilities, and social subordination. Combined with centuries of slave raiding and the Arab slave trade, it formed part of a broader system in which religious identity determined legal status.
The trans-Saharan, Red Sea, and Indian Ocean slave trades persisted for well over a millennium and involved tens of millions of enslaved Africans and others. Mortality was substantial during raids, forced marches, transport, and the widespread practice of castrating males destined for the eunuch market.
Since the late 1970s, the revival of explicit political Islam has produced a concentrated record of death, displacement, and institutional destruction. Movements claiming fidelity to jihad, sharia, and Islam generally have driven wars and insurgencies across Afghanistan, Algeria, Iraq, Syria, Nigeria, Somalia, Yemen, the Sahel, and elsewhere, producing civilian and combatant death tolls that collectively reach into the low millions.
Entire religious communities have been uprooted, millions have become refugees or internally displaced persons, and Yazidis and Christians have suffered genocide, mass murder, enslavement, and forced displacement. Journalists, humanitarian aid workers, and religious minorities have likewise been deliberately targeted and murdered by Islamist organizations including ISIS, Boko Haram, Al-Shabaab, Hamas, and others. Hudud punishments—including amputations, floggings, and stonings—remain in use under regimes and movements claiming fidelity to classical Islamic law.
Fondation pour l’innovation politique (Fondapol) documents nearly 67,000 Islamist terrorist attacks and approximately 250,000 deaths between 1979 and 2024.
Muslim movements have promoted blasphemy and apostasy norms that threaten converts and suppress dissent, while encouraging parallel legal and social structures in some Western societies. Measurable effects include honor-based violence, organized grooming scandals, rising antisemitic attacks, sustained pressure on freedom of expression, and significant security expenditures devoted to counterterrorism.
Read more Why voting is not a right but privilege
These outcomes are not simply the random excesses of isolated “extremists.” They reflect the persistence of a political and legal tradition whose adherents (garden-variety Muslims) explicitly cite the Qur’an, hadith, early biographies of Muhammad, and the classical jurisprudence of jihad and hudud as authoritative.
Any honest historical accounting must therefore begin with those foundational texts and the conduct they inspired: the conquests of the early caliphates, the institutionalization of dhimmi status, centuries of slave trading, the conversion of churches such as Hagia Sophia, the persecution of religious minorities, the recurring use of hudud punishments, the targeting of Jewish holy days for major assaults, and the repeated invocation of Muhammad’s example by modern jihadist organizations.
Compared with Zohran Mamdani’s accusations against Benjamin Netanyahu—even assuming, for the sake of argument, that they were true (which they are not)—they represent only a tiny fraction of the historical record associated with the religion whose Führer and formative example Mamdani does not similarly condemn.
Scène des massacres de Scio (The massacre at Chios) by Eugène Delacroix, portraying Greek civilians after an Ottoman attack during the Greek War of Independence. Public domain. You can read about the 1822 massacre here. It resulted in the Ottoman Turks killing or enslaving an estimated 100,000 Greek Christians.
Endnotes
1. On the early Islamic conquests and Muhammad’s military campaigns, see Fred M. Donner, The Early Islamic Conquests (Princeton University Press, 1981); Hugh Kennedy, The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In (Da Capo Press, 2007); Robert G. Hoyland, In God’s Path: The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire (Oxford University Press, 2015). For primary Islamic sources concerning Muhammad’s campaigns, see The Qur’an (especially 2:190–193, 8:39, 9:5, 9:29, 47:4); Muhammad ibn Ishaq, Sirat Rasul Allah, trans. A. Guillaume (Oxford University Press, 1955); Sahih al-Bukhari; and Sahih Muslim.
2. Estimates of deaths associated with the medieval Islamic conquests remain disputed because of fragmentary demographic evidence. For the Ottoman Empire and the conquest of Constantinople, see Halil İnalcık, The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age, 1300–1600 (Phoenix Press, 2000); Caroline Finkel, Osman’s Dream (Basic Books, 2005). For medieval India, see K. S. Lal, Growth of Muslim Population in Medieval India (Research Publications, 1973); Richard M. Eaton, Temple Desecration and Muslim States in Medieval India (Oxford University Press, 2004); Peter Jackson, The Delhi Sultanate (Cambridge University Press, 1999). Lal’s demographic conclusions remain controversial, while Eaton and others argue for lower estimates.
3. On hudud punishments, including amputation, see Rudolph Peters, Crime and Punishment in Islamic Law (Cambridge University Press, 2005); Frank E. Vogel, Islamic Law and Legal System (Brill, 2000). Contemporary documentation appears in Amnesty International reports, Iran Human Rights documentation, U.S. Department of State Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, UNAMA reports on Afghanistan, Human Rights Watch, and reports of the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Syria.
4. On the legal status of non-Muslims under classical Islamic law, see Antoine Fattal, Le statut légal des non-musulmans en pays d’Islam (1958); Milka Levy-Rubin, Non-Muslims in the Early Islamic Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2011); Mark R. Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross (Princeton University Press, 1994); Bernard Lewis, The Jews of Islam (Princeton University Press, 1984). Primary legal discussions appear in Abu Yusuf’s Kitab al-Kharaj and al-Mawardi’s Al-Ahkam al-Sultaniyyah.
5. On Jerusalem and Christian holy places under Islamic rule, see Moshe Gil, A History of Palestine, 634–1099 (Cambridge University Press, 1992); Oleg Grabar, The Shape of the Holy (Princeton University Press, 1996); Eutychius of Alexandria, Annals; and A. S. Tritton, The Caliphs and Their Non-Muslim Subjects (Frank Cass, 1970).
6. On Hagia Sophia, see Steven Runciman, The Fall of Constantinople 1453 (Cambridge University Press, 1965); Halil İnalcık, The Ottoman Empire; and the July 10, 2020 judgment of the Turkish Council of State, followed by Presidential Decree No. 2729 restoring the building’s status as a mosque.
7. On the Armenian Genocide and the destruction of Greek and Assyrian Christian communities, see Raymond Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide (I.B. Tauris, 2011); Taner Akçam, A Shameful Act (Metropolitan Books, 2006); Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide (Oxford University Press, 2005); and the International Association of Genocide Scholars’ recognition of the Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian genocides.
8. On ISIS’s genocide against the Yazidis and the decline of Christian communities in Iraq and Syria, see United Nations Human Rights Council, They Came to Destroy: ISIS Crimes Against the Yazidis (A/HRC/32/CRP.2, 2016); reports of the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Syria; Human Rights Watch; Amnesty International; U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom annual reports; and Open Doors’ World Watch List.
9. On the Arab and Islamic slave trades, see Bernard Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East (Oxford University Press, 1990); Murray Gordon, Slavery in the Arab World (New Amsterdam Books, 1989); and Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery (Cambridge University Press, 2012). While precise totals remain uncertain, historians agree that the trade lasted more than a millennium and involved millions of enslaved persons across North Africa, the Middle East, East Africa, and parts of Europe and Asia.
10. Fondation pour l’innovation politique (Fondapol), Islamist Terrorist Attacks in the World, 1979–2024 (October 2024 edition), documenting 66,872 Islamist terrorist attacks and at least 249,941 deaths through April 2024. Approximately 91 percent of attacks and 89 percent of fatalities occurred in Muslim-majority countries, with Muslims constituting the majority of victims.
11. Aggregate conflict mortality for Afghanistan, Algeria, Iraq, Syria, Nigeria, Somalia, Yemen, the Sahel, and related conflicts is derived from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP), Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), Global Terrorism Database (START, University of Maryland), Brown University Costs of War Project, United Nations casualty reporting, and the Institute for Economics and Peace’s Global Terrorism Index. Depending on methodology, combined deaths attributable to these conflicts are generally estimated in the low millions.
12. On forced displacement associated with Islamist movements and regimes, see the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Global Trends reports; International Organization for Migration (IOM), World Migration Report; Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), Global Report on Internal Displacement; and United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA).
13. On honor-based violence, organized child sexual exploitation (“grooming gangs”), antisemitic incidents, and public opinion concerning sharia in Western countries, see the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly Resolution 1681 (2009); the United Kingdom Home Office; the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA); the Jay Report, Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham (1997–2013) (2014); the Anti-Defamation League (ADL); Community Security Trust; the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights; and Pew Research Center, The World’s Muslims: Religion, Politics and Society (2013).
Read more ‘The science’ speaks for itself — until it’s subpoenaed