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This summer, the voters of New York City have indicated that the man whom they would most like to elect as their next mayor is – for now, at least – Zohran Mamdani. On June 24, Mamdani finished first in an eleven-person primary race for the Democratic Party’s mayoral nomination, outpacing runner-up Andrew Cuomo by nearly 13 percentage points in New York’s “ranked choice” voting system. Both Cuomo and incumbent mayor Eric Adams plan to run against Mamdani as independents in the November general election, but at this point Mamdani is the overwhelming favorite to become New York’s 111th mayor. In light of this, let us take a close look at exactly who Mr. Mamdani is, and what his foremost political values and agendas are.
Radical Roots: Anti-American, Anti-Israel Father
Zohran Kwame Mamdani was born on October 18, 1991, in Kampala, Uganda, the only child of Marxist scholar Mahmood Mamdani and filmmaker Mira Nair – both of whom were of Indian descent. Zohran’s middle name was given to him by his father, in honor of Kwame Nkrumah, the first prime minister (1957-1960) and then president (1960-1966) of Ghana. A socialist and Pan-Africanist, Nkrumah in 1962 was awarded the Soviet Union’s International Lenin Peace Prize – an honor given by a Soviet government-appointed panel in recognition of individuals who advanced the totalitarian agendas of the Kremlin.
Since 1999, Mahmood Mamdani has been employed by Columbia University as a Professor of Government, International Affairs, Anthropology, Middle Eastern Studies, South Asian Studies, and African Studies.
During a 2022 panel discussion hosted by the Asia Society, Mahmood Mamdani stated that Adolf Hitler had drawn his “inspiration” for the genocide of Jews directly from Abraham Lincoln. “With the Civil War,” said the professor, “Abraham Lincoln generalized the solution of reservations; they herded American Indians into separate territories. For the Nazis, this was the inspiration – Hitler realized … that genocide is doable. It is possible to do genocide, that’s what Hitler realized.”
Characterizing America as the “genesis of what we call settler-colonialism” across the globe, Mahmood Mamdani argued that “nationalism and colonialism” were two faces of the same proverbial coin, and that the goals of the Allied forces during World War II were indistinguishable from those of the Nazis. “The Nazi political project was shared by the Allies,” he said, “and that political project was to turn Germany into a ‘pure’ nation — a ‘pure’ nation rid of its minorities.”
Objecting to the use of the term “suicide bomber” to describe Muslims who blow themselves up with explosive devices in an effort to kill Jewish civilian bystanders in their vicinity, Mahmood Mamdani claims that such murderous operatives are no different from professional “soldier[s] whose objective is to kill.” “We need to recognize the suicide bomber, first and foremost, as a category of soldier,” he wrote in 2004.
Consistent with his personal anti-Semitic sympathies, Mahmood Mamdani currently sits on the advisory policy council of the Gaza Tribunal — an anti-Israel organization that supports the Boycott, Divestment, & Sanctions (BDS) movement, a Hamas-inspired initiative dedicated to financially crippling the state of Israel and making its long-term survival impossible. Further, the Gaza Tribunal accuses Israel’s government of committing “genocide” against Palestinians.
According to a report in which the Washington Free Beacon chronicled Mahmood Mamdani’s academic arguments on an array of topics, Mamdani views Israel as “the logical conclusion of Nazism.”
In June 2025, Fox News reported that Professor Mamdani, while teaching a course titled “Settlers and Natives,” articulated his belief in “the necessity of violence in anticolonial struggle.”
Radical Roots: Anti-Israel Mother
Zohran Mamdani’s mother, Mira Nair, is an Indian-American, Oscar-nominated film director, producer, and writer. Like her husband, she supports the Boycott, Divestment, & Sanctions (BDS) movement dedicated to Israel’s permanent dissolution as a Jewish state.
In July 2013, Ms. Nair, citing her opposition to Israel’s alleged mistreatment of Palestinians, declined an invitation to be a “guest of honor” at the Haifa International Film Festival. “I will not be going to Israel at this time,” she said in a statement. “… I will go to Israel when occupation is gone. I will go to Israel when the state does not privilege one religion over another. I will go to Israel when apartheid is over.”
In 2025, Ms. Nair signed onto an open letter exhorting the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to bar Israeli actress Gal Gadot from attending that year’s Academy Awards ceremony. The letter said, in part: “Gadot has openly and repeatedly expressed her support for Israel’s military actions against Palestinians, a stance that aligns her with a system that has caused immeasurable pain and destruction. This is especially troubling in light of the International Court of Justice’s determination that there is a plausible case for genocide against the Palestinian population.”
Zohran Mamdani’s Privileged Youth
Zohran Mamdani lived in Kampala, the capital city of Uganda, until he was five, at which time he and his parents moved to Cape Town, South Africa, where his father taught African Studies at the University of Cape Town.
Two years later, the Mamdani family immigrated to the United States, settling in the Morningside Heights section of Manhattan’s Upper West Side. There, Zohran attended the Bank Street School for Children, a very high-priced private institution. From 2006 to 2010, he attended the prestigious Bronx High School of Science. Throughout his youth in New York City, Zohran lived in the housing facilities of Columbia University, where his father was employed as a professor.
In 2025, Zohran Mamdani reflected upon his youth in an interview with The New York Times: “I would say I had a privileged upbringing. I never had to want for something, and yet I knew that was not in any way the reality for most New Yorkers.”
Self-Identifying as Both “Asian” and “Black”
When Zohran Mamdani applied for admission to Columbia University in 2009, he identified himself on his application forms as both “Asian” and “Black or African American.” When Columbia ultimately decided not to admit him, he enrolled instead at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine.
Students for Justice in Palestine
During his years at Bowdoin (2010-2014), Mamdani co-founded the school’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), an anti-Israel advocacy group that supports the Hamas-inspired BDS movement. In 2013, Bowdoin’s SJP chapter invited the radical Lebanese-American political science professor As’ad AbuKhalil, to address the student body.
- Nicknamed the “godfather of Middle Eastern terrorism,” AbuKhalil is a BDS leader who openly and proudly acknowledges that the movement’s objective is to permanently destroy the Jewish state.
- In 2019, AbuKhalil said that the Trump administration’s reported desire to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization showed America to be an “arrogant” nation that – in light of the fact that it was “killing more civilians [in Afghanistan] than the Taliban” – “certainly should not have the moral authority to judge and label an organization on the basis of the criteria of terrorism.” “This is very much like the Israelis when they themselves declare their enemies and the people who want to resist their occupation as being terrorists,” he added.
- In 2021, AbuKhalil accused the U.S. of having brought the 9/11 attacks upon itself, saying: “We have to remember that the U.S. basically was hit on 9/11 by forces that were reactionary and fanatic and were raised and armed and sponsored by America and its allies in the Middle East…. [T]here were many earlier 9/11s that the U.S. inflicted on people around the world.”
In 2014, the year Zohran Mamdani graduated from Bowdoin College, the school’s SJP took to Facebook to share an article about Rasmea Odeh and demand “justice” for her. A longtime organizer with the Marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Odeh famously masterminded a February 1969 PFLP terrorist attack in which two Israeli university students were killed by a bomb blast in a Jerusalem food market. When Odeh stood trial for her role in the bomb plot, she was convicted on all charges and sentenced to spend the rest of her life in an Israeli prison. She was freed in 1979, however, as part of a deal in which she and 77 other Palestinian prisoners were released from Israeli jails in exchange for a single Israeli soldier who had been taken hostage in Lebanon. Odeh eventually immigrated to America in 1996 and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2005 — falsely and illegally denying, on both occasions, that she had ever previously been convicted of, or incarcerated for, a crime. In 2014 a federal jury in Detroit convicted Odeh of immigration fraud because of those denials and sentenced her to 18 months in prison, prompting Bowdoin’s SJP to call for her exoneration in the name of “justice.”
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