On a call to arrest Iran’s president in New York, and the law it will not apply beyond him
On 22 September, as delegations gathered for the General Assembly, Masih Alinejad posted an open challenge to the mayor of New York on her Facebook page. Zohran Mamdani, she wrote, had said that war criminals who set foot in the city should be arrested, and here was one: the president of the Islamic Republic, sleeping ‘five miles from your office’. She closed on a question meant to sting: are you willing to act, Mayor, or do Iranian lives not count? The day before, Mamdani had told CNN that the International Criminal Court’s warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu should still be honoured, while conceding again that the city has no power to execute it. Netanyahu addresses the Assembly on Thursday. Both men, then, are in the same city in the same week, and she has named only one of them.
I wrote about her in July and have no wish to do so at length again. The post matters only for the habit of mind it displays, which is far wider than one broadcaster. It demands consistency from Mamdani. That is a fair demand. The difficulty is that it comes from someone who refuses, on the public record, the very consistency she asks of him, and the refusal falls each time at the same place, the state of Israel.
What She Gets Right
Let me grant what is true, because it is a great deal. In January the security forces fired on crowds across Iran, and Pezeshkian’s own government has put the official toll at 3,117; in August he called those who cite higher figures ‘dishonorable and traitors’. The plot against her life is real, and in March 2025 a Manhattan jury convicted two men of a murder-for-hire scheme financed by Tehran. I would welcome the day on which Pezeshkian, and whoever gave the order for live fire in January, answered for it before a competent court. The regime’s defenders may quote that sentence against me as often as they like.
One Warrant, One Opinion
Here the two cases part company, and everything turns on where they part. Mamdani’s complaint against Netanyahu rests on a document. In November 2024 the judges of the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his former defence minister over alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. Israel rejects the court’s jurisdiction, and a reader is free to think the court mistaken; yet a warrant is a judicial act, issued by judges on an application that set out evidence, and it can be contested before the same bench. No court has issued anything of the kind against Pezeshkian. So when she calls him a war criminal, she reports no legal fact; she pronounces a verdict. Mamdani, for his part, uses the phrase loosely too, but his loose phrase at least stands on a warrant.
What authority does a journalist have to pronounce it? She is entitled to opinions, sharp ones, and I hold a few of my own. ‘War criminal’, however, is a legal category, the finding of a court reached after evidence has been tested and a defence heard, and a writer who hands it down herself has moved from the newsroom to the bench without passing through the courtroom. Nor can the mayor do what she asks; nor, it turns out, can Washington, whose State Department, speaking for a government at war with Iran, confirmed on 17 September that the Iranian delegation would be admitted ‘consistent with our host country obligations’. The arrest was never on offer. The target of the post is Mamdani, and through him the warrant.
The Test She Will Not Sit
Her own question supplies the test. On 28 February, the first day of the American and Israeli campaign, missiles struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, and some hundred and seventy people died, most of them children. Human Rights Watch asked in April whether it was a war crime; this month Amnesty International found that American and Israeli strikes on three Tehran neighbourhoods may amount to war crimes, having already asked in March that Iran’s missile strike on Beit Shemesh, which killed nine Israeli civilians, be investigated too. That is what one law looks like. It follows the evidence to Tehran, to Washington and to Jerusalem alike.
Her record on that war runs the other way. On its first day she told Mamdani to stop lecturing Iranians about peace, and in March, before the Spanish Congress, she said the American president had done the right thing. I have looked for a sentence of hers asking that Minab be investigated, as she now asks that Pezeshkian be arrested, and I have not found one. If it exists I will link to it here and correct this paragraph. Until then her question deserves an answer in kind. Do Iranian lives count? The children of Minab were Iranian, and so were their teachers, and no court has yet examined their deaths.
Where the Habit Comes From
The logic under the post is not hers alone, which is the only reason it merits taking apart. First a state is declared illegitimate. Then anyone associated with it can be named a criminal, and the naming serves as the proof, because the verdict came first. We did not first see this method in the opposition. It is how the Islamic Republic has treated its own dissidents for four decades, through a court that decides before it charges and answers to nobody outside itself, as I argued in August about the Revolutionary Court. The habit began inside the country and has since spread, like a virus, into the language of an opposition abroad that now hands down its own verdicts from its own studios.
One more fact belongs in the record, stated without embroidery. Her first international human rights prize, in 2015, came from the Geneva Summit organised by UN Watch, and in February this year she received its Courage Award. Despite its name, UN Watch is a private Geneva organisation with no office in the United Nations, and on its thirtieth anniversary it called itself, in its own headline, ‘Defenders of Israel and Human Rights’. I make no claim about motives. I note only its effect, which is that in this week of all weeks attention moves from the leader in New York whom a court wants arrested to the leader whom no court has named.
Iranian lives count, on the streets of January and in a classroom in Minab alike. Whoever wants the law for Pezeshkian should want it for those responsible for that classroom, and say so in the same breath, in the same city and in the same week. That is all consistency asks, and it is what she asks of the mayor.
Image: The United Nations Headquarters from the East River, New York. Credit: Jakub Hałun, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0).
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