Written by Georgia Leigha Gilholy
“This has been the first time in Zohran Mamdani’s adult life that he hasn’t wanted to talk about Israel… ” the Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote last month. “This was also the first time he has run for mayor of New York,” they shrewdly note.
Is this simply a coincidence? Or is Mamdani, like many a politician before him, now trying to downplay aspects of his beliefs in the interest of his ambitions? Naturally, this is not a question I can answer, but more importantly, it is not one that many journalists are even interested in asking.
In her recent column, award-winning Guardian journalist Nesrine Malik writes of the Democratic Nominee for New York City Mayor: “Zohran Mamdani won by being himself – and his victory has revealed the Islamophobic ugliness of others”. No doubt Mamdani has received his fair share of genuine abuse, but what does it “reveal” about her journalism, that she completely ignores his praise of a U.S. designated terror group?
“My love to the Holy Land Five. You better look ‘em up,” Mamdani sang in 2019, as his then-rapper alter ego “Mr. Cardamom”. The reference is specific enough to leave little doubt that Mamdani knew exactly who he was praising. In 2001, the US government designated the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development a terrorist organization and seized its assets. The “Holy Land Five” refers to the five heads of the group who in 2008 were convicted of funnelling over $12 million to Hamas through pseudo-charities, under the guise of humanitarian aid.
The United States Department of Treasury had evidence that HLF had donated to Hamas-ran “zakat committees” and schools “that served Hamas’s ends by encouraging children to become suicide bombers and to recruit suicide bombers by offering support to their families”. Under a civil suit, a U.S. judge also found HLF, and a related group the Islamic Association of Palestine (IAP), liable for assisting Hamas in connection with the 1996 killing of American teenager David Boim in Israel.
Nesrine Malik complains that Mamdani has been called a “Hamas terrorist sympathiser”, but how exactly would the average observer describe someone who had heaped praise on this kind of group and failed to explain if or why his views had changed?
The way Malik crafted this particular sentence also seems to aid her obvious sympathy with Mamdani, writing: “He has been called a ‘Hamas terrorist sympathiser’ and a ‘jihadist terrorist’.” She combines the former, fairly justified accusation, with a second which is an obvious falsehood. There is no suggestion that Mamdani has ever been directly involved in terrorism. The result of this muddled language? Readers are overwhelmed, confused and deceived. They see both the sensible and the outrageous claims about Mamdani side by side, and are thus inclined to dismiss them both.
Malik writes: “He has made thorough explanations of his abhorrence of antisemitism… but he didn’t debase himself by rejecting phrases like ‘globalise the intifada’.” But surely this is contradictory? If Mamdani is truly an opponent of Jew-hatred, why would condemning a slogan which directly refers to sustained campaigns of terror against Israeli civilians, “debase” him?
When pressed on his view of the chant by The Bulwark podcast, he said: “To me, ultimately, what I hear in so many is a desperate desire for equality and equal rights in standing up for Palestinian human rights,” Mamdani said. “And I think what’s difficult also is that the very word has been used by the Holocaust Museum when translating the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising into Arabic. It’s a word that means struggle,” he continued.
The Holocaust Museum was not best pleased with this bizarre attempt at equivalence, slamming Mamdani’s inaccurate likening of an uprising against Nazi authorities to a rallying cry by anti-Israel activists to spread antisemitic terror worldwide. Mamdani’s comments here were historically illiterate at best, and deliberately cynical at worst.
Despite the column inches Malik dedicates to slamming those suspicious of Mamdani’s proximity to antisemitism, she offers no real discussion of these accusations, dismissing them as self-evidently bad-faith or rooted in anti-Muslim prejudice. Another aspect of Mamdani’s politics she ignores, is his long-running support for the Boycott Divest and Sanction Movement which singles out the Jewish State for malign. He even co-founded a Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter during his time at Bowdoin College. SJP is a group so extreme that it expressed support for the Oct. 7th Hamas massacre.
Then there is his own odd reaction to the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust. On October 8th 2023, mere hours after the Hamas-led massacre in Southern Israel, Mamdani shared a statement to X that criticised Netanyahu and made no mention of the terror group. Only after much time and pressure had expired did Mamdani tell a Jewish magazine that the attacks were a “horrific war crime”.
Malik also fails to note the extremist view of Mamdani’s father, Mahmood Mamdani, a Columbia University humanities professor who has publicly claimed that during the Second World War, the Allied Powers and Nazis had the same goal and that legendary U.S. President Abraham Lincoln was “Hitler’s inspiration”. He also thinks that ”white people are… the oppressors” and that America is the “root of all evil”.
No one should assume that Mamdani holds certain beliefs simply because his father does, but if he was a less favourable politician to the Guardian, would they be so soft on him? Or would they, like many a plucky news outlet before them, both report on his father’s comments, and demand that the fledgling politician disavow them?
It is not Mamdani’s views alone that are cause for concern, but the media’s refusal to scrutinise them. Figures with far tamer records have faced relentless questioning and cancellation. But when a candidate parrots extreme talking points on Israel, not for the first time, the Guardian is keen to push inconvenient facts to one side.
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