The father of New York City mayoral runner Zohran Mamdani sits on the board of anti-Israel organization The Gaza Tribunal and once wrote that suicide bombers should be considered soldiers. This was first revealed by Fox News on Saturday.
Mahmood Mamdani, the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government at Columbia University, is one of The Gaza Tribunal’s 29-member advisory policy council, alongside former British Labour Party MP Jeremy Corbyn. The organization aims to “awaken civil society to its responsibility and opportunity to stop Israel’s genocide in Gaza” by “exerting civil society pressure on governments to act.”
The Gaza Tribunal, like Zohran Mamdani, advocates for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel. His father signed a letter in support of Columbia’s BDS movement in 2016 when it officially formed as a group, and called for divestment from Israeli holdings.
Additionally, extracts from Mahmood Mamdani’s 2004 book Good Muslim, Bad Muslim have made the rounds this week, reflecting his clear sympathy with suicide bombers. “Suicide bombing needs to be understood as a feature of modern political violence rather than stigmatized as a mark of barbarism,” he wrote. Additionally, he said in his book that “We need to recognize the suicide bomber, first and foremost, as a category of soldier.”
Billionaire Bill Ackman, founder and CEO of hedge fund company Pershing Square Capital Management, tweeted, “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” in response to the extracts of statements by Mamdani’s father.
Sequoia Capital partner Shaun Maguire tweeted, “Zohran’s delightful father Mahmood loves to justify suicide bombing and advocates for Intifada and blames 9/11 on America and calls for violence on the streets.”
He also called the Mamdanis “Islamists.”
However, an assistant teaching professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at North Carolina State University, told Forbes that the book “analyzes the causes of suicide bombing and does not advocate for it.”
Lean added that the book explores how “US foreign policy decisions, especially during the Cold War, helped create the kinds of conditions in which militant Islamism and political violence were perpetrated by groups like al-Qaeda.”
Describing terrorism as 'resistance'
Nevertheless, Mamdani has tweeted multiple times about Palestinian violence as resistance, including one tweet in May 2021 when he wrote, “The resistance this time began in Jerusalem and spread to Gaza, now the West Bank and Palestinian communities beyond. This is not a conflict between Israel and Hamas. We are witnessing something far more meaningful, the birth of the Third Intifada against settler colonialism!”
Mamdani senior was also pictured forming a blockade to prevent pro-Israel students from accessing the pro-Gaza encampments of 2024 at a protest that involved burning the American flag.
His new book, Slow Poison, is set to come out this fall. In its bio, Mamdani describes Israel as a “colonial power” that transformed Uganda into “an orgy of violence.”