Candidate Nithya Raman Tells 1,000 Jews That Israel Is Committing Genocide in Gaza

LOS ANGELES - City Councilmember Nithya Raman walked into a packed Jewish Federation mayoral forum at the Skirball Cultural Center on Tuesday night and told a crowd of about 1,000 that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

The word landed like a brick. Parts of the hall groaned. Raman said she understood it was "a deeply painful word" with a "historical context" that mattered "for the world, not just for the room." Then she used it anyway. She said she is "not an expert," but that international and Israeli experts had used the term, and that images of hospitals and dead children had compelled her to speak.

Mayor Karen Bass, appearing separately at the same forum, said the term was not appropriate. Both women promised to protect Jewish Angelenos. They are the two Democrats left standing for the Nov. 3 runoff to run a city that already looks like a case study in municipal failure: tents, open drug use, and a mayor's office that has spent hundreds of millions without clearing the sidewalks. Raman wants Bass's job. Bass wants four more years. Either way, Los Angeles keeps the same argument.

Councilwoman defends the word at Skirball forum while Mayor Bass rejects it; Spencer Pratt, who calls the street population vagrants, addicts and criminals, was not in the room. Asked how to keep homeless people away from schools and homes, Raman had no answer.

Spencer Pratt was not there. The reality-TV also-ran finished third in June after calling people living on the street what a large share of voters already call them: vagrants, addicts, and criminals. He did not make the runoff. The two candidates who did spent the evening talking about Gaza to a Jewish audience and about antisemitism in a city where anti-Jewish hate crimes are still climbing. Pratt's absence was its own punchline. The man who talks about the sidewalk crisis in plain English was not invited to the conversation about who gets to be the next failed mayor of Los Angeles.

When the moderator turned from foreign policy to the thing voters trip over on the way to school, Raman ran out of road. How do you get homeless people away from schools and homes? She did not produce a hard answer - no timeline, no enforcement rule, no "they will not sleep next to the playground." She talked process, experts, and district numbers. The question was about the encampment by the kindergarten gate. The answer never arrived.

Raman also had to explain her spring interview with Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, in which she had already said "I do, yes" when asked whether Israel had committed genocide. She said she condemns the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre "without reservation," supports Israel's right to exist, and will fight antisemitism. The room had already heard the first word.

That is the race now. One candidate tells a thousand Jews their ancestral state's war is genocide and cannot say how to keep tents off school fences. The other is the incumbent of a city that still cannot keep the same fences clear. Pratt is home writing Substack. Election Day is five weeks away.