Mamdani Threatens Netanyahu While Secret NYPD Paperwork Exiles a Journalist—and a Convicted Bangladeshi War Criminal Lives Freely in Queens
LUTHMANN NOTE: Zohran Mamdani has mastered the politics of imaginary courage. He points across the Atlantic, threatens a foreign leader he cannot arrest, and collects applause from activists who confuse performance with power. Then he turns away from an NYPD system operating inside his own government. A secret I-Card has kept me outside New York for roughly a year without a warrant, charge, court date or publicly stated legal basis. I have missed reporting assignments, weddings, funerals, reunions, and civic events. Mamdani could demand answers today. He will not. The mayor is not powerless. He is selective—and selective courage is political fraud. These facts are true: Zohran Mamdani is a political cancer and Israeli doctors are some of the best in the world. Maybe my next trip to New York will be to report on a “Mossad Operation.” This piece is “The Mayor of Make-Believe.”
By M. Thomas Nast and Rick LaRivière with Richard Luthmann
The Arrest That Never Could Happen
(NEW YORK, NEW YORK) – Zohran Mamdani has discovered the cheapest trick in municipal politics: threaten a man 6,000 miles away while ignoring the abuses sitting inside his own police department.
For more than a year, Mamdani promised that Benjamin Netanyahu would be arrested if the Israeli prime minister entered New York City.
Then the lawyers arrived.
The United States is not a party to the Rome Statute, New York City has no independent authority to execute an International Criminal Court warrant, and a mayor cannot transform the NYPD into a freelance foreign-policy tribunal.
Mamdani finally admitted the city lacks that power, but not before recording another theatrical indictment of Netanyahu for the cameras.
Reuters, The Associated Press, USA Today, and The Washington Post all reported the same retreat: The arrest promise was legally impossible, so Mamdani shifted the burden to Washington while preserving the performance.
This was not law enforcement. It was content creation with a police badge in the background. The mayor wanted the imagery of handcuffs without the inconvenience of jurisdiction, due process, or constitutional limits.
That is the first hypocrisy. He rages against power he does not possess while refusing to use power he unquestionably does possess.
The mayor commands the NYPD. He appoints the police commissioner. His administration can order an audit of stale Investigation Cards, require written probable-cause reviews, impose expiration and renewal rules, and direct the department to purge entries that no longer have a lawful basis.
Yet Mamdani’s City Hall has shown no comparable urgency about these invisible, warrant-like restraints imposed on ordinary people.
Netanyahu gets a global video. New Yorkers trapped by secret police paperwork get silence.
The Mayor of Make-Believe: The Secret Warrant That Isn’t A Warrant
An NYPD I-Card is not a judicial warrant. It is an internal computerized notification identifying someone as a perpetrator, suspect, or witness. New York’s highest court has now emphasized the constitutional danger.
In People v. Cuencas, the Court of Appeals explained that I-Cards carry different classifications, including “probable cause to arrest,” “suspect only,” and “witness.”
In April 2026, People v. Palacios reversed a conviction because prosecutors failed to prove that arresting officers actually received and relied upon lawful probable-cause information transmitted through an I-Card.
The message is unmistakable: An electronic flag does not manufacture probable cause, and police bureaucracy cannot substitute for evidence.
Reporter Richard Luthmann, a contributor to this outlet, has lived under one of these shadows for roughly a year. According to his published account and related filings, the Staten Island I-Card has no accompanying warrant, pending charge, court date, or publicly articulated legal basis.
Yet its practical effect is exile. Returning to New York City risks detention by officers encountering a database entry that operates like a warrant while evading the safeguards of one.
During that year, Luthmann has been unable to report New York stories in person and has missed weddings, funerals, reunions and civic events.
On July 31, he will again be absent when the Italian-American Civil Rights League gathers in Little Italy ahead of the centennial Feast of San Gennaro—an event celebrating immigrant sacrifice, family and the right not to have one’s history erased. Luthmann is an IACRL member.
The irony is savage. New York City’s mayor lectures the world about justice while a journalist remains banished by an untested police notation.
The Mayor of Make-Believe: Mamdani’s Selected Courage
That silence becomes uglier when Staten Island politics enters the frame. Luthmann contends that the I-Card serves the interests of District Attorney Michael McMahon, a longtime establishment Democrat and political adversary whose office has repeatedly been the subject of Luthmann’s reporting.
The backdrop is the notorious “Part N” controversy, in which Luthmann alleged that narcotics matters were steered into a prosecution-friendly courtroom connected to McMahon’s wife, Judge Judith McMahon. Public reporting has described those accusations and the claimed effort to route sensitive applications away from less accommodating judges.
“For me, the Part N saga shows that the McMahons and those like them hate Black and brown people,” Luthmann said. “That is who their justice scams overwhelmingly target. It makes sense. The Republicans are the party of Lincoln and liberty. The Establishment Democrats control the New York Courts and the prosecutors’ offices, and the DSA hates white people. They are all racists.”
Luthmann’s point is that the machinery deserves scrutiny precisely because narcotics enforcement, secret warrant practices and prosecutor-friendly judicial routing can fall hardest on Black and Latino defendants.
If Mamdani believes the system is structurally biased, here is a test requiring no foreign-policy cosplay: Order an independent review of Staten Island I-Cards. Publish their racial and geographic impact. Identify who requested each card. Require current probable cause. Delete every stale, unsupported, or retaliatory entry.
The hypocrisy is even more glaring because McMahon was not some distant political beneficiary of the Luthmann I-Card—he was personally the complainant on the NYPD report that set the machinery in motion.
According to the underlying records, McMahon claimed he feared for his safety after receiving a Substack email, described Luthmann as a “stranger,” and supplied the allegations used to justify a criminal-contempt investigation and the warrant-like police flag.
Luthmann says those assertions are materially false: McMahon had known of him for years, the email contained no threat against McMahon, and authorities have produced no proof that Luthmann was ever properly served with the order he supposedly violated. To the extent McMahon repeated those claims in sworn complaints, affidavits, or testimony, the contradictions raise serious questions of possible perjury and filing a false instrument—not merely political exaggeration.
“Mamdani does not need international jurisdiction to investigate the fact that the McMahons are liars and political hacks. He needs only the courage to ask the NYPD brass to examine whether a sitting district attorney used his personal influence and the NYPD database to turn false claims into an extrajudicial arrest trap,” Luthmann said.
Instead, Mamdani appears content to leave the McMahon machine undisturbed while staging confrontations with Netanyahu.
That is establishment pandering disguised as insurgent politics.
The socialist mayor who campaigned against entrenched power suddenly loses his voice when the entrenched power wears a Democratic Party label. He can denounce an Israeli leader before breakfast, but he cannot ask why a journalist and political opponent of the Staten Island district attorney remains effectively barred from the city by secret police paperwork.
Fraud is not always a lie. Sometimes it is selective courage.
The Mayor of Make-Believe: The Executioner in Queens
The hypocrisy does not stop there. There is the case of Ashrafuzzaman Khan, a Queens resident convicted in absentia by Bangladesh’s International Crimes Tribunal for crimes against humanity committed during the 1971 liberation war.
Khan is a longtime New York resident and former Queens imam who was sentenced to death for participating in the murders of 18 intellectuals. Other reporting documented his leadership ties to the Islamic Circle of North America and ICNA’s removal of references to him after the conviction became public.
The Bangladeshi judgment, the fairness of proceedings conducted in absentia, and any American immigration consequences are matters for federal authorities and courts—not the mayor.
That is exactly the point.
Mamdani’s standard should be consistent. If he wants to use his office as a moral megaphone against alleged or adjudicated war criminals, he must answer some hard questions:
- Why does his outrage appear almost exclusively calibrated toward Israel?
- Why no mayoral video demanding a renewed federal review of Khan’s citizenship, immigration history and alleged conduct?
- Why no insistence that due process be pursued wherever the accused comes from, whatever organization sheltered him and whichever constituency might become uncomfortable?
Mamdani cannot arrest Khan either. But he can request federal action, condemn the crimes and stand with the victims.
Instead, Netanyahu receives obsession while Khan receives obscurity.
New Yorkers notice selective prosecution—even rhetorical prosecution. A mayor who spends political capital pretending to command international criminal law while declining to clean up constitutionally dangerous police practices at home is not governing.
He is auditioning.
If Mamdani continues choosing ideological theater over municipal justice, “one-term mayor” will stop sounding like partisan wish-casting and start looking like the city’s verdict.
About The Author
Leave a Reply