ICAN Issues Correction to Raman’s Genocide Lie in LA Mayor’s Race

The Israeli-American Civic Action Network (ICAN) issued the following statement:

On August 30, 2026, at the Islamic Center of Southern California, the Muslim Public Affairs Council held a Los Angeles mayoral candidate forum presented as a voter-education event. During that forum, Councilwoman Nithya Raman stated that American tax dollars are “funding a genocide” in Gaza, calling that accusation “truth.”

It is not truth. It is a politically useful accusation and a convenient distraction from the mass death, government failure, and fiscal disorder occurring in the city Raman helps govern.

By Raman’s standard, the government she helps run presents a devastating case: officials know that thousands of unhoused Angelenos are dying; they know the policies and service systems are failing many of the people they purport to protect; and they continue those policies while billions of dollars pass through systems auditors cannot reliably track.

The only genocidal assault occurred on October 7, 2023, when Hamas-led terrorists deliberately massacred, raped, mutilated, and abducted Israelis while pursuing the destruction of the Jewish state.

In response, Israel is eliminating a genocidal terrorist organization while warning civilians, establishing evacuation routes and humanitarian corridors, facilitating aid, and taking operational precautions that are obvious evidence against such an intent.

Urban-warfare scholar John Spencer concludes that Israel has adopted extraordinary civilian-protection measures and that the genocide accusation misrepresents both the law and the realities of fighting Hamas in a densely populated urban environment.

In March 2026, the United States government formally declared “in the strongest terms possible” that the genocide allegations against Israel are false, reaffirming the United States’ longstanding official rejection of the accusation. A bipartisan group of Members of Congress rejected the genocide accusations against Israel as “grossly unfounded” and condemned the allegations as “false and dangerous.”

Meanwhile, in Los Angeles County, 2,208 unhoused people died during 2024, more than six people every day. Their mortality rate was 4.2 times that of the county’s general population, and drug and alcohol overdoses caused 40 percent of those deaths. In 2024 alone, the department recorded 49,391 emergency-medical incidents involving unhoused patients, likely an undercount.

A court-ordered review identified approximately $2.3 billion in homelessness-program funding but found fragmented records that prevented auditors from fully quantifying spending by program, reconciling reported services, or consistently verifying outcomes.

This mass suffering is occurring in California—the world’s fourth-largest economy—and in a city where Raman can summon unlimited moral certainty about Israel while struggling to provide basic safety, shelter, treatment, sanitation, and accountable government at home.

Raman cannot distance herself from the city’s homelessness record. She was one of only three councilmembers who voted against prohibiting encampments within 500 feet of schools and daycare centers. She chaired the City Council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee from 2023, making her one of the city’s most influential officials on the crisis. She was ultimately removed from that position, and the council president noted the committee had fallen more than 100 matters behind. Raman then reportedly failed to appear for her final scheduled meeting as chair.

ICAN is profoundly disappointed that Councilwoman Raman has chosen, whether through political calculation, reckless rhetoric, or willful ignorance, to direct moral condemnation at Israel while the government she helps operate presides over preventable death and institutional failure on an extraordinary scale.

John Mirisch, ICAN’s Chief Policy Officer, commented on Raman’s remarks:

“Make no mistake about it, antizionism is a hate movement aimed at demonizing and delegitimizing Israelis and the Jewish state. The genocide libel so glibly deployed by Nithya Raman can be directly traced back to the Zionologists of the former Soviet Union, to Islamist Jew-hatred and to Nazi propaganda before that.

Antizionism is a virulent strain of racism, one that is directly related to the age-old disease of Jew-hatred, but a variant that has its own pathology.

By perpetuating racist, antizionist libels, LA mayoral candidate and councilmember Nithya Raman is manufacturing consent for violence against the Jewish community in the Los Angeles area and is fueling hatred against Israel, Israelis and Jews that endangers Jewish communities everywhere.

In sacrificing the safety and security of LA’s Jewish community trying to score cheap political points, Councilmember Raman has not only proven herself unfit to serve as mayor of Los Angeles; she has shown beyond all doubt that she has no business serving on the LA City Council.

Nithya Raman should apologize, drop out of the LA mayoral race, and resign her seat on the LA city council immediately.”

Dillon Hosier, ICAN Founder and Chief Executive Officer added:

“The only genocide relevant to Los Angeles is the one happening right now in California. If the numbers in Los Angeles are staggering, then the statewide numbers of slaughter and death due to housing-first and harm reduction policies are horrifying. Raman is just the latest in a long line of California politicians looking to distract from the deaths caused by their own policies by smearing the world’s only Jewish state with the genocide lie.”