Photo: Getty Images North America
As soon as Zohran Mamdani had been elected mayor of New York City, people began to call out his campaign promises as pipe dreams. His promise to deliver free buses, for example, was shot down by Governor Kathy Hochul, who reminded everyone that she, not Mamdani, had control of the MTA. Another promise Mamdani made on the campaign trail was that he would arrest Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a war criminal if he ever set foot in New York. That statement caught the attention of New York City Councilwoman Inna Vernikov (R-48th). She appeared on 710 WOR’s Mendte in the Morning program to explain a proposition she made to put that campaign promise to the test.
Vernikov told host Larry Mendte that she invited Netanyahu to come to New York City on a date that Mamdani already has circled on his calendar: “Look, this radical Marxist, Zohran Mamdani, soon to be mayor of New York City, he’s very soon going to realize that money for free buses doesn’t grow on trees and that he can’t just arrest foreign diplomats. I decided to invite Bibi Netanyahu; he is the sitting prime minister of Israel. No matter whether people like him or not, he is democratically elected to be the prime minister, and the mayor of New York City has no authority or jurisdiction to arrest a sitting prime minister and so, I wanted to give Zohran Mamdani a little gift and invite Bibi on his first day in office, and to show him that he can’t just do anything he feels like.”
Vernikov says that Mamdani has been asked about the invitation- and backpedaled on his proclamation: “[A reporter] asked him about a councilmember inviting the prime minister to his inauguration, and his response was, ‘Any foreign leader is free to travel.’ So, what happened to his campaign promise?... As soon as he got elected, he got a memo from the DSA, listing all of the demands from the DSA, and guess what? The majority of those demands have to do with Israel. What does the sitting mayor of New York City have to do with Israel?”
Photo Credit: Getty Images