Latest news with #Bowdoin
Roya News
15-07-2025
- Politics
- Roya News
Unearthed 2014 article shows Zohran Mamdani's early advocacy for Palestinian rights
A resurfaced college article has shed light on Zohran Mamdani's long-standing support for the Palestinian cause, years before he became a leading figure in New York politics. Mamdani, now 33 and the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor, co-authored the piece as an undergraduate at Bowdoin College, where he co-founded the school's chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). Published on January 10, 2014, in Bowdoin's student paper, The Bowdoin Orient, Mamdani's article strongly endorsed the American Studies Association's (ASA) decision to join the academic boycott of 'Israeli' institutions, a move aimed at pressuring 'Israel' to end its occupation of Palestinian territories. 'The American Studies Association, a group of scholars on American culture and history, recently decided to honor the call of Palestinian civil society to boycott Israeli institutions,' Mamdani wrote. 'This academic and cultural boycott aims to bring under scrutiny the actions of the Israeli government and to put pressure on Israeli institutions to end the oppressive occupation and racist policies within both Israel and occupied Palestine.' The piece criticized 'Israeli' universities for what Mamdani described as active and passive complicity in 'Israel's' military occupation. He accused them of prioritizing soldiers in admissions, discriminating against Palestinian students, developing remote-controlled bulldozers for home demolitions, and conducting research for the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF), with some institutions operating from illegal settlements built on occupied land. Mamdani rejected claims that the boycott stifled free speech, arguing instead that it had sparked wider debate about 'Israeli' human rights abuses. He specifically challenged then-Bowdoin College President Barry Mills, who opposed the boycott, accusing him of ignoring Palestinian suffering: 'Mills regrettably makes no mention of Palestinians or Palestine… When Mills speaks of the 'free exchange of knowledge, ideas, and research,' he does so while privileging partnerships with Israeli institutions over basic freedoms for Palestinians, including the rights to food, water, shelter and education.' The mayoral nominee praised Bowdoin professors who supported the ASA resolution and urged students and faculty to sign a pro-boycott petition.
New York Post
07-07-2025
- Politics
- New York Post
Zohran Mamdani's ‘radical ingratitude' to the city and nation that gave him everything
So many brash and contradictory assertions have been hurled at the Democrat's shiny new mayoral candidate for New York City, Zohran Mamdani, that his nickname should be 'Notorious Z.' Is Mamdani the youthful, charismatic face of the future for the Democratic Party? Is he a gift to the Republicans? Is he, as some conservatives insist, a communist? I am here to answer all questions. A pretty basic question concerns Mamdani's qualifications for office. He's 33, with a degree from Bowdoin on 'Africana' — which, on the face of it, doesn't bode well for the city. He was an unsuccessful rapper, so at least there's that. For the last four years, he's been a state assemblyman from Queens with a perfectly virginal record of achievement. In fairness, New York's recent mayors haven't exactly dazzled the world with their leadership. Back in the day, Rudy Giuliani could take credit for breaking the mafia. Michael Bloomberg kept the wolves of Wall Street well-fed. But Bill de Blasio and Eric Adams play-acted the role of mayor and hoped for the best — which, alas, rarely came about. Voters chose Mamdani despite his lack of qualifications for a good reason. The Democratic Party today resembles a dark crypt out of Edgar Allan Poe, full of rotten and disgusting things. The front-runner in the race for mayor, according to everybody, was a repulsive creature from the crypt, Andrew Cuomo. Voters went for Mamdani because at least he's alive and all too human. But is he really a communist? He calls himself a Democratic Socialist, which is a contradiction in terms, but some of his proposals seem to leave Bernie Sanders behind and move him closer to Fidel Castro. Famously, he plans to build a city-owned grocery store in every borough, on the Cuban model. Whether the ration cards on which that model depends will go over well with New Yorkers is an interesting question. Mamdani has also said that he's intent on 'seizing the means of production,' which sounds alarmingly like he wants to invade China. I think he's just spouting Marxist boilerplate because, to college-educated Millennials, those words possess an irresistibly transgressive charm. Mamdani isn't a Lenin-style communist. He's more of a Picasso-style communist. The renowned modern painter, Pablo Picasso, was a member of the Communist Party, even though he lived in a stately chateau near the Mediterranean, attended by his women, with millions in the bank. It never entered Picasso's mind that the vanguard of the proletariat would confiscate his property or redistribute his money to the needy. He was a communist for a singular purpose: to signal to the world his irreconcilable loathing of the system that had rewarded him with fame and bounty. The Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, Picasso's compatriot, coined a phrase for this mindset: 'radical ingratitude.' Mamdani comes from a wealthy family. His mother is a prominent film director — an industry not known for its generous sharing instincts. His father is 'Herbert Lehman Professor of Government' at Columbia — that would be Herbert Lehman, as in the Lehman Brothers banking family. Mamdani is a child of privilege who's eager to denounce the capitalist society in which he enjoys wealth and status without having lifted a finger to earn either. It's the best of both worlds. He condemns everything but surrenders nothing. Every morning, the NY POSTcast offers a deep dive into the headlines with the Post's signature mix of politics, business, pop culture, true crime and everything in between. Subscribe here! And since he's an immigrant of non-Western origins, his condemnations will thrill white progressives desperately seeking to atone for their genetic racism and colonialism — a racket first invented a generation ago by Edward Said, a Palestinian professor whom Mamdani's father befriended at Columbia. The mayoral candidate's actual communist principles are extremely simple to explain — an 8-year-old could understand them. The political goal is a kind of universal equality, but when Mamdani turns his leveling gaze on New York, all he sees is disparity. Some people own apartment blocks while others have to pay rent for apartments. That must be fixed. Some people are in jail while others wander around at will. That's surely an injustice. Some students get A's while others get F's. That's just plain racism. Who decides what amount to pay for goods and services? Why does anyone have to pay at all? Why not tax 'richer and whiter neighborhoods' and make lots of stuff free? Or even better, why not make the city a billionaire-free zone? Mamdani is too soft-headed to be a Stalinist. He won't start a gulag at Riker's and fill it with the super-rich. But a New York that refuses, on principle, to distinguish between property rights and government power, or economic reality and frat house fantasy, or excellence and mediocrity, won't resemble the socialist utopia of Millennial imaginings but rather a lunatic free-for-all devoid of any law but that of the jungle. There'll be no need for a violent purge of billionaires — they will self-deport to Palm Beach within minutes of Mamdani's inauguration. New Jersey will boom with relocated supermarkets, gas stations, and investment firms. The New York Stock Exchange will escape under the cover of darkness to Jersey City. And when crooks and malcontents take to the street, and Mayor Mamdani sends social workers to heal their souls, something fragile will break that can't easily be put back together. Probably the most troubling questions surrounding Mamdani have to do with the implications for New York's 1.4 million Jews of his obsessive hostility to Israel. He rejects — or, in Mamdani-speak, is 'not comfortable' with — Israel's identity as a Jewish state. He has attacked that nation for being 'apartheid' and guilty of genocide in Gaza and elsewhere. Since his days at Bowdoin, he has actively promoted a boycott of Israeli exports. While all of this can be dismissed as a stereotypical leftist attitude, with Mamdani it seems to slide into tolerance, and possibly support, of violent 'anti-Zionist' groups. When asked to repudiate the 'globalize the intifada' movement, which often targets American Jews, he pointedly refused to do so. Is Mamdani an antisemite? Not in a 20th-century sense. We shouldn't worry that he'll be unleashing the brownshirts or leading pogroms in Crown Heights. But the line between political anti-Zionism and cultural antisemitism, American Jews have learned, is faint and shifting. Whenever Israel acts in a way that is hated by the left, Mamdani, as mayor, is certain to make inflammatory statements. And if anti-Zionist night riders should decide to punish Hasidic neighborhoods for Israel's sins, I doubt he'll bother to send out the cops, or even social workers, to restrain them. Our last question, I'm sorry to report, involves the terrifying political monster that for years has fed on leftist brains — I mean, of course, Donald Trump. Because both men are supposedly charismatic and play well with social media, Mamdani has been put forward by some as the Democrats' younger, cooler answer to Trump. Can this be true? Well, Trump is a successful building magnate who ran for president three times, won twice and changed the politics of the country and the world. Mamdani won the nomination to run for mayor. Comparisons strike me as a bit hasty. Here's another way to look at the matter. Trump was a celebrity who entered politics as a neophyte. Mamdani is a neophyte who went into politics to become a celebrity. The two men are in fact mirror images of one another. The difference boils down to one of scale. Trump used his status as an amateur politician to build a national movement based on anti-establishment principles. Mamdani's reach, even in New York, will hinge entirely on the answer to the trivia question: 'How many socialist hipsters can be found in the United States of America?' That answer, I'm reasonably sure, is 'Not enough.'
New Indian Express
05-07-2025
- Politics
- New Indian Express
Zohran Mamdani: Manhattan masala
Zohran Mamdani is fond of reminding the world that he 'exists' because his mother had travelled to Uganda to shoot Mississippi Masala. The masala packed in that tiny sachet of information gives a taste of the broth Zohran—now the Democratic nominee to be the mayor of New York—was cooked in. The mother, Mira Nair, is a Punjabi born in Rourkela who studied literature and visual arts at Delhi and Harvard universities. In an aside that speaks to her feistiness, Nair claims that while playing Cleopatra at St Stephen's College, she ate onions to keep Shashi Tharoor's Antony at a distance. In Kampala to shoot her second film, Nair met Mahmood Mamdani, a Gujarati-origin, Uganda-born scholar who had come back to research his Harvard PhD thesis. The rest is the rolling history of an immigrant family. Born in Kampala and given the middle name Kwame after Ghana's first president, Zohran moved to New York just after hitting his school years when Mahmood got a teaching job at Columbia University. In the US, Zohran first attended a posh Manhattan private school before passing through a Bronx public school and graduating in 'Africana studies' from Bowdoin, a liberal arts college. He dived headlong into politics after Bernie Sanders' 2016 presidential bid and won a seat in the New York state legislature in 2019. As a young assemblyman who had signed up as a democratic socialist—considered an extreme leftist fringe within the Democratic tent—Zohran championed affordable housing and debt relief for cabbies. But it was not until he announced his bid to be the mayor of America's largest city and surged from near-nothing to challenging Andrew Cuomo for the Democratic ticket that the political establishment looked closely at him. The task was indeed formidable. Zohran, 33, was an underfunded upstart facing Cuomo, 67, a former governor from a well-known political family who had millions of dollar in his war chest. There were also Democratic party members to charm. In a city with the largest Jewish population outside Israel, a majority of them Democrat voters, Islamophobia had peaked at a time when Israel was waging a brutal war in Gaza. As it would happen, the June 24 vote also came just two days after Donald Trump directed the US military to strike three nuclear facilities in Iran.
The Hindu
18-06-2025
- The Hindu
From The Hindu, June 19, 1925: Unexplored continent
London, June 18: An Arctic expedition headed by Mr. Donald MacMillan has started from Boston. It consists of two ships Bowdoin and Peary, the latter carrying three aeroplanes. It will proceed to Etah (Greenland) with the object of investigating the supposed existence of a vast unexplored continent between the North Pole and the North-west passage. The expedition, with which the United States Government is co-operating, has aroused particular interest in Canada in view of her claim to all the territory between Canada and the North Pole.
Boston Globe
05-06-2025
- Politics
- Boston Globe
Trump ordered an investigation into Biden's ‘mental acuity.' Constitutional experts are skeptical.
Biden soundly rejected the claims made in Trump's memo. 'Let me be clear: I made the decisions during my presidency. I made the decisions about the pardons, executive orders, legislation, and proclamations,' he said Advertisement Trump has made those very suggestions often over the last few months, especially in recent weeks Trump has promoted with particular zeal a conspiracy theory that others had taken actions on Biden's behalf Advertisement He's also elevated more bizarre claims about his predecessor: On Saturday, Trump 'This conspiracy marks one of the most dangerous and concerning scandals in American history,' Trump Legal scholars and political observers, however, are skeptical the memo will have much practical impact. The request for an investigation, which is not an executive order, does not specify any laws Trump believes Biden and his allies violated. Instead, it directs Attorney General Pam Bondi and White House counsel David Warrington to launch an investigation into Biden's 'cognitive decline.' The Department of Justice under former President George W. Bush Rather, several experts said they see the memo as a means to direct attention away from unpopular actions the Trump administration has taken and stoke interest in Advertisement 'It's a silly distraction to keep Biden in the news cycle. A nonsense non-starter,' said Jed Shugerman, a law professor and presidential historian at Boston University. 'The only upside is that it would set a precedent to overturn Trump's executive actions, but there is no way a court buys any of this argument.' While past presidents have feuded or criticized one another's policies, never before has a president investigated another and 'went after their predecessor's legitimacy in quite the same way' before, said Rudalevige, the Bowdoin professor. But Rudalevige added that playing up an alleged 'cover-up' by the previous administration helps support Trump's agenda by underscoring a need for drastic change. 'If Biden really was so terrible and left the country in such crisis, then obviously it's important that we have the kind of unilateral expansion of power that the president is claiming,' Rudalevige said, describing Trump's approach. Trump references Biden often and has sought to But actually upending Biden policy in this particular way would be unprecedented and difficult, said Sai Prakash, a law professor at the University of Virginia: 'I don't know of this ever happening before — I don't think the Constitution has an obvious answer to this." Advertisement Prakash noted that while the Trump administration reversed dozens of Biden-era orders beginning on day one of his presidency, there are some that he could not undo or that have 'a little more sticking power.' The memo, for instance, points to the clemency power Biden used after the 2024 election, when he demoted the sentences of 37 people on death row to instead face life in prison without parole. The Department of Justice is reportedly investigating those commutations, as well as the preemptive pardons Biden issued to his family, Those seeking to overturn Biden's actions would need to show the courts Biden did not personally decide for something to be signed at all, Prakash said. Proving his intent, or lack thereof, Prakash posited, would require things such as Biden's cooperation and for people to believe that what he remembers about his decisions as president is reliable. 'There's all kinds of issues that are brought to the fore, and no one doubts there are questions that need to be answered about Joe Biden's cognitive decline — which decisions he made and which he didn't," Prakash said. 'But I am not confident that we will get any definitive answers.' Anjali Huynh can be reached at
