New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani’s (D.) Department of Health and Mental Hygiene staffers have created a “Global Oppression Working Group” that accuses Israel of genocide, the New York Post reported.
The “Global Oppression and Public Health Working Group” met for the first time on Tuesday at the department’s headquarters in Long Island City and online.
“We really developed in response to the ongoing genocide in Palestine,” one presenter said at the outset of the meeting, according to video obtained by the Post.
The more than hour-long presentation focused on Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and the concept of “global oppression,” but made no mention of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack that sparked the war in Gaza, according to a transcript of the meeting and a department employee who attended.
“If these NYC Health Department staffers truly believe Israel is committing genocide, will they now boycott Israeli pharmaceutical companies that make lifesaving drugs New Yorkers depend on?” said Mark Botnick, a former aide to ex–New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg. “Or is this just performative politics that has no place in a taxpayer-funded public health agency?”
The group’s mission statement says it aims to educate staff about “current and ongoing global oppression in its many forms” and its impact on health equity. Critics said the initiative veers far beyond the agency’s core responsibilities, which include inspecting restaurants, tracking infectious diseases, and safeguarding the health of more than 8 million New Yorkers.
Mamdani, a longtime critic of Israel, supports the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement and has himself accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza.
Mamdani has faced criticism for the controversial figures he’s hired in his administration. In November, he tapped Tamika Mallory to serve on his Committee on Community Safety. She was fired from the Women’s March for anti-Semitism. Mallory reportedly “asserted that Jewish people bore a special collective responsibility as exploiters of black and brown people—and even, according to a secondhand source, claimed that Jews were proved to have been leaders of the American slave trade,” Tablet reported in 2018.
A Jewish health department employee told the Post the one-sided programming in the working group has caused internal friction and hurt morale. “We just want to do our jobs to help New Yorkers,” the staffer said. “They talk about suffering—but they never mention Hamas.”
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