Zohran Mamdani Said He Helped Edit the Writings of His Father, a Radical Academic Who Has Called for a ‘Third Intifadah,’ To Make Them ‘More Accessible’

Democratic nominee for New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani said he has helped his father, a radical Columbia University professor who has called for a “Third Intifadah,” edit his writings in an attempt to “stay engaged” with his work, audio reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon shows.

“I will help my parents, like editing their speeches or writings, just as, like, a fresh eye, to make it more accessible,” he said during a resurfaced 2017 interview on the AirGo podcast. “And that’s awesome, because I also get to stay engaged with what they’re saying and doing.”

The comments raise new questions about Mamdani’s support for the extremist views of his father, Mahmood Mamdani. The elder Mamdani’s latest book, dedicated to his son, repeatedly equates Jews with Nazis, rails against the “Judaization” of Israel by “Ashkenazi elites,” and claims that Israel’s existence proves that Hitler’s “Final Solution” worked. He has also appeared to justify suicide bombers as simply a “category of soldier” and called for a “Third Intifadah against settler colonialism.”

Mahmood Mamdani, who “specializes in the study of colonialism,” according to his Columbia bio, played down any intellectual influence he may have had over his son in an interview with the New York Times last month.

“He’s his own person,” the elder Mamdani said. “Now, of course what we do as his parents is part of the environment in which he grew up, and he couldn’t help but engage with it. That doesn’t mean anything is reflected back on us.”

Zohran Mamdani, though, said during the podcast interview that his father has played a large role in shaping his ideas.

“I’ve always been forced to reckon with things from an early age about what’s going on,” he said. “But obviously, as you get older, you can get more in depth about things. And I can actually read what it is that he’d like me to read from time to time.”

The Democratic mayoral nominee said his upbringing was steeped in his father’s work.

“I grew up, like, going to his lectures, book talks, book launches, that kind of stuff,” he said. “So, I heard a lot of the main arguments of a lot of the pieces.”

The revelation that Mamdani edits his father’s writings comes amid scrutiny on his views of Israel and Jews. He told a group of New York business leaders on Tuesday night that he stands by “the idea” that the slogan “Globalize the Intifada” represents. The slogan, as the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum noted in a condemnation of Mamdani, has been used to inspire the murder of Jews around the world for decades.

Mahmood Mamdani wrote in his 2020 book, Neither Settler Nor Native, that Jews have exploited the historical memory of the Holocaust in order to commit their own atrocities.

“The state [of Israel] memorializes that trauma daily and hourly lest its lessons escape the mind of any Jew, Israeli or not,” he wrote before quoting radical anti-Zionist academic Norman Finkelstein. “In other words, ‘While the Holocaust forbids Germans (and everyone else) from being perpetrators, it entitles the Jews to do as they please.’”

The elder Mamdani’s beliefs about Jews seem to have rubbed off on his son. In the same podcast interview, Zohran Mamdani appeared to agree with the host’s contention that Jews have become “the oppressor.”

“[Jews have] had in this country a moment where the boot hasn’t been on our neck, and instead of figuring out how to heal, we took the opportunity to become the oppressor,” host Daniel Kisslinger said, to which Mamdani replied, “Yeah.”

Kisslinger and Mamdani proceeded to offer other examples of minority groups becoming oppressors themselves.

“I watch in Chicago how, you know, second- and third-generation Mexican-American communities, you know, are moving to the ‘burbs and becoming police officers,” Kisslinger said. “And the officers who shoot, you know, many of the high-profile murders in Chicago of black teens are by brown officers, um, and that’s just one example.”

Mamdani agreed, listing other instances of supposed oppression on the part of minority groups.

“A lot of progress that we need to happen, it first has to come, like, in our own very specific communities,” he said. “Like, we have to talk about the anti-blackness within Indian communities. Like, that s— is huge, you know what I’m saying? … If you really want to know how far along are we and you’re an Indian-American, like, go and ask your parents about Kashmir and how they think about the world’s largest military occupation.”

Mamdani then discussed Islamophobia among Latinos in the United States.

“You’re saying a lot of brown officers are the ones who kill a lot of unarmed black teens in Chicago, a lot of Islamophobia is not—it’s—I mean, like, you know, a lot of times it is white men, probably a majority of the time, but there are also occasions where it’s not white men, and there is a lot of virulent Islamophobia,” he said. “Like, there was this older Bengali auntie, Nazma Khanam, who was, who was murdered on the streets of Queens less than a year ago, um, and the man who did so was a young Hispanic man. And it’s just to say that we have to look deeper than, than what’s fed to us sometimes if we want to actually see how far and wide issues have spread.”

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