SETH MANDEL: The Normalizing of Mamdani’s Creepy Bibi Obsession.

Mamdani should say that, were he an official of an ICC member country’s national government, he would support arresting a foreign politician he disagrees with. But as he’s the mayor of a city in a non-ICC country, he is about several dimensions removed from being able to make this threat without coming off like someone more deserving of a restraining order.

As so often happens, Democratic Sen. John Fetterman had the right response, which was to mock the mayor as a fake “tough guy” who is all talk. The key to this discussion, as far as I’m concerned, is to resist the temptation to pamper Mamdani’s fragile ego by pretending there is a real-world debate over arresting Netanyahu.

The serious question at hand isn’t whether Mamdani will arrest Netanyahu but whether we should be concerned by the insanity of the mayor’s behavior. Do foreign officials need police protection from the mayor of New York City? Does Mamdani have a list of global politicians he openly fantasizes about assaulting? Or is it just the guy governing the world’s only Jewish state?

We should be concerned about the baleful effects of normalizing this kind of nuttiness.

“The goal is always to denormalize normal things, and normalize abnormal things,” as Glenn just noted yesterday in a different context.