“When I am speaking about AIPAC, I’m speaking about an organisation that has been supportive of the status quo, that has fought any attempt to actually deliver safety to people, not just in Palestine, but frankly, through much of the region, and it is a status quo for immorality,” Mamdani said on Monday at City Hall.
The mayor noted that more than 1,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed by Israeli forces since a US-brokered “ceasefire” was agreed last October to halt Israel’s genocidal war.
“And when it comes to the way in which they defend the status quo, oftentimes they defend it through direct contributions, as we are seeing right now in New York 13,” said Mamdani, New York City’s first Muslim mayor.
VIDEO: https://www.aljazeera.com/video/newsfeed/2026/6/23/mamdani-defends-aipac-monsters-comment
Generally, the chief objectives of a country are to maintain its borders, protect its people, enforce its monopoly on the use of force and maintain sovereignty over its external politics.
Protecting its people implies preventing them from death, but there is no direct implication about the death of other people in this purely utilitarian framing.
However, there is also no justification for attacking other countries and infringing on their borders, harming their people or threatening their sovereignty. In fact, considering that such a war may end up hurting your own people, it seems to me that starting and prosecuting one without necessity (e.g. the need to fulfil your other objectives in absence of less destructive implements of power) contradicts these objectives.
So basically, yeah, unless necessary to protect their constituents, it would be their job to prevent death. And that’s not even taking morals and human rights into account, nor the charge to represent the will of their constituents in democratic systems.
Mine was shorter.
Thanks!
Yours was a concise rhetorical question. Mine was a lengthy answer to support your point.