Bill Maher said New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani was “not all that sympathetic” on the third anniversary of the October 7 attack and quickly pivoted to blaming Israel.
On Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” host Bill Maher opened his monologue by tying New York’s problems to the anniversary of the Hamas massacre in Israel and then turned directly to the city’s Democratic mayor.
Breitbart reported Maher’s characterization of Mamdani’s public remarks: the mayor offered some condemnation, then shifted the blame.
Maher put it this way in his opening monologue:
“New York, also, they have problems, too. It was the third anniversary of the horrible attack in Israel on October 7, three years ago, and Mayor Mamdani, not all that sympathetic to this stuff, but he did make some nice remarks about it, he’s against it, but then he pivoted right to, but Israel made them do it.”
That sequence is the whole story in miniature. A brief nod that the attack was wrong, followed by the familiar progressive dodge that the Jewish state somehow forced the killers’ hand.
Maher did not leave the point as a soft aside. He framed Mamdani as unwilling to meet the anniversary with plain moral clarity, even while claiming the mayor was “against it.”
The same mayor has already drawn heavy criticism for an Oct. 7 statement that accused Israel of genocide, so the pattern Maher described fits a longer record of one-sided rhetoric from City Hall.
Maher then landed a sharper joke about the mayor’s political ear.
“He used to be a rapper, his rap name was Tone Deaf.”
The line was comedy. The substance underneath it was not. Three years after the slaughter of civilians in Israel, New York’s mayor still found a way to center Israel’s alleged culpability instead of the attackers’ choice to murder.
Voters who wanted a mayor focused on crime, housing, and basic competence keep getting foreign-policy lectures that track the activist left. That includes Mamdani’s push for the United States to join the ICC and enforce a Netanyahu arrest warrant, another signal that international score-settling ranks higher than local delivery.
Maher’s monologue matters because it came from a liberal host, not a conservative critic. When even that corner of the media hears the pivot to “Israel made them do it,” the excuse has worn thin.
City leaders do not have to turn every anniversary into a rally. They do have to avoid laundering terror through the language of root causes. Mamdani’s reported framing did the opposite.
The same tone-deaf streak shows up in domestic policy. Maher has already dismantled the mayor’s government grocery store plan as a taxpayer-funded fantasy, and the price tag on that scheme only heightens the sense that City Hall is chasing ideology over results.
New Yorkers living with disorder, high costs, and strained services hear their mayor explain away a massacre anniversary with a blame-Israel coda. That is not moral seriousness. It is political habit.
Federal officials have also warned that Mamdani’s rhetoric carries real-world heat, including after the Bronx ICE shooting when DHS leadership said his words incite hostility. Words from the mayor’s office travel.
Maher’s summary was blunt: some nice remarks, then the pivot. Against the attack, yet quick to say Israel made them do it. That is the record he put on air.
If a big-city mayor cannot mark October 7 without recycling the aggressor’s favorite excuse, taxpayers should not expect clearer judgment on the harder calls at home.
