Zohran Mamdani followed in dad's footsteps to found SJP

New York Post

a day ago

Zohran Mamdani followed in his father's path by setting up a branch of a US radical Muslim group at his elite alma mater in Maine, The Post has learned.
The Democratic mayoral nominee co-founded a branch of Students for Justice for Palestine at Bowdoin College in 2013, two years after his professor father, Mahmood Mamdani, gave the keynote address at the inaugural national conference of the group in October 2011.
'Whereas Apartheid South Africa was reluctant to claim that it was a white state, a white democracy, Israel is not.
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6 Zohran Mamdani at a 2014 meeting of Students for Justice in Palestine, a radical anti-Israel group he helped set up at Bowdoin College in Maine.
Bowdoin SJP/ Facebook
'Israel publicly claims it's a Jewish state and it demands that Palestinians acknowledge it as such…Israel was not South Africa. In many ways, it was, and is, worse than South Africa,' said Mamdani Snr., a professor of government and anthropology at Columbia University, in his speech.
The professor, 79, also claimed Israel admired the US for 'dealing' with its indigenous populations after it was settled by Europeans. 'The Zionists think of that particular part of American history as inspirational,' he said.
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'Like father, like son,' said Ari Shrage, co-founder of Columbia University's Jewish Alumni Association.
6 Zohran Mamdani was influenced by his father, Mahmood Mamdani (right), who gave the keynote speech at the first national convention of the Students for Justice in Palestine at Columbia. His mother, filmmaker Mira Nair, is pictured left with Zohran and his wife Rama Duwaji center.
Getty Images
'It's not a surprise that he learned from his father who teaches at the epicenter of anti-Israel indoctrination,' he added, referring to Columbia.
The 2011 national conference, titled 'Students Confronting Apartheid Students for Justice in Palestine: First National Conference 2011' drew 350 student activists from across the country to Columbia, according to a report, which also noted participants headed to the Occupy Wall Street encampment in the Financial District to protest corporate greed.
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Following Zohran Mamdani's stunning victory in the Democratic primary earlier this month, the spotlight has turned to his family's ties to anti-Israel groups. His father sits on the advisory council of the recently formed London-based Gaza Tribunal, which accuses Israel of committing genocide.
6 Hatem Bazian, a professor at UC Berkeley, is the founder of American Muslims for Palestine and co-founder of Students for Justice in Palestine.
UC Berkeley
Mamdani Sr. also made it on to a list of 'Professors to Avoid' along with AMP founder Hatem Bazian published by Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum, a conservative think tank. The list includes professors across the country who 'are most responsible for the politicization and bias sadly endemic to Middle East Studies,' according to the Campus Watch web site.
After Zohran founded the SJP chapter at Bowdoin, the group had an active Twitter account promoting lectures such as 'The Winter of Arab Discontent' in Nov. 2013 and support for the American Studies Association's boycott of Israel.
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That same year the Bowdoin College chapter of SJP invited a radical Lebanese-American academic As'ad AbuKhalil, to speak. Among his rhetoric he has called Israel a bigger threat than Hamas and said that the US had brought the Sept. 11 terrorist strikes on itself.
6 Mahmood Mamdani, a professor of government and anthroplogy at Columbia University, was included on a list of 'Professors to Avoid' in Middle East Studies by Campus Watch.
Robert Miller for NY Post
6 A picture of Zohran Mamdani from the archive of the Bowdoin student newspaper in 2010, which he contributed articles for.
The Bowdoin Orient
6 (L-R) Zohran Mamdani, mother Mira Nair, father Mahmood Mamdani and friend Nishant Tharani at the world premiere of 'Queen of Katwe,' directed by Nair, at the 2016 Toronto Film Festival.
Getty Images for Disney
The Bowdoin SJP's Twitter account remained active until late 2015 after Mamdani graduated, while a Facebook group lasted a few more months, posting until March 2016.
Last year, Students for Justice in Palestine organized student encampments across the country, including a large one at Columbia. Its umbrella group, American Muslims for Palestine has been named in US federal lawsuits brought by victims of the October 7 Hamas attacks, as well as the family of David Boim, the first victim of the terrorist group, who was gunned down at a bus stop in Jerusalem in 1996.
'If Hamas has practiced versions of indiscriminate and aimless violence — which I personally reject on principle – it should be pointed out that Israeli terrorism, in scale and in magnitude, by far exceeds that of Hamas, but nobody has noticed here in the US,' Mamdani Snr. wrote in a blog post in 2006.
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He's also come under attack on social media where an excerpt from one of his books recently surfaced. 'Suicide bombing needs to be understood as a feature of modern political violence rather than stigmatized as a mark of barbarism,' the elder Mamdani wrote in his 2004 book 'Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror.'
Hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman reposted the excerpt on X earlier this week, noting 'The apple @zohranmamdani doesn't fall far from the tree.'
On Tuesday, Mamdani told a group of business leaders that he would not use the phrase 'globalize the intifada,' adopted by anti-Israel protestors as a rallying cry for violence against Israel, following the October 7, 2023 attacks that left 1,200 Israelis dead.
Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine and Mahmood Mamdani did not return requests for comment Wednesday.