Zohran Mamdani and the Family Business

The fact that Zohran Mamdani has a very good chance of being elected mayor of New York City, the honorific capital of the world, ought to give rise to deep consternation and vigorous efforts to defeat him in November’s mayoral election. His political rise bodes ill for that proud city, for the Democratic party, and for America itself. The stakes are high, indeed.

Zohran Mamdani may be suave, articulate, and handsome, but he is also a purveyor of hate and an ideologue of the pernicious “settler colonial” sort. For him, Zionism and the state of Israel are coextensive with genocide and apartheid. He has said that too many times, and with too much zeal, for it not to be taken as his abiding conviction. If he becomes mayor, he has threated to arrest Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel for “war crimes” if he travels to New York again.

In a similar vein, Mamdani has not hesitated to call Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India (his parents’ native country) a “war criminal” as well. Conversely, he shows unqualified sympathy for the blood-soaked efforts of various terrorist groups and liberation movements throughout the Middle East and the Third World.  This, no doubt, for taking aim at a Western world that is the source of all evil.  

Given the enhanced spotlight of the campaign trail, he has sought to project a somewhat more moderate image.  But even if he now downplays the ferocious anti-Semitism that underlies such a global “anti-colonialist” and “anti-Zionist” crusade, he refuses to repudiate his repeated earlier calls to support the “Global Intifada.” He now announces that he will “protect” Jews, but in tones of a faux paternalism that points to a new and uglier version of dhimmitude down the line. 

Mamdani’s election would pose an existential threat to the 1.3 million Jews who live in the New York metropolitan area. More broadly, it would challenge the continued viability of a once great city as a place where different religions and ethnic groups live in peace. Those secular Jews who confuse their faith with messianic socialism and sundry “progressive” causes urgently need to reconsider that position before it is too late.

Hatred of Israel and the Jews is at the heart of Islamo-Leftism.  Mamdani is a caricature on steroids of that ugly ideological cocktail that the French call “Islamo-gauchisme” or Islamo-Leftism. He claims to be a devout adherent of Sufi Islam. But he endorses the most extreme version of the LGBTQ++ agenda, an agenda wholly at odds with an Islamic conception of piety, human sexuality, and moral obligation. Islam, as Mamdani understands it, is a weapon in the ongoing war with what he perceives as Western colonialism, racism, and global rapaciousness.

For Jews to support him on misplaced progressivist grounds would be at once foolish and suicidal. Leftist “intersectionality” does not allow its adherents to opt out of those causes that make one uncomfortable or that affect one’s own interests. Ideological fanaticism is a “whole” that must be completely accepted or adamantly rejected. There is no middle way. 

Zohran Mamdani’s utopian delusions are increasingly well known. He is a longstanding advocate of “defunding the police” and risibly wishes to replace them with social workers. He wants to make public transport free for all, and not just “means-tested” as it presently is. He wants to establish government-owned grocery stores, a Marxist fantasy that has failed everywhere it has been tried. He promises to soak the rich while claiming that New York would remain open to a vibrant financial sector and significant business investment. He is fully committed to the ill-considered task of “squaring the circle.”

Such promises are both foolish and contradictory. If establishment Democrats find them credible and vote for him, one will have to say that they deserve what they get.  One hopes that if political sanity does not win out among this cohort, clear eyed self-interest will. In this connection, it is easy to predict the future of a Mamdani-administered New York City.

Mamdani’s promise to freeze rents for “rent-stabilized” apartments would do what rent control has done since time immemorial: It would very quickly make housing much more expensive and much less available. 

At another level, Mayor Mamdani would spout ideological propaganda twenty-four hours a day. The American polity would be constantly delegitimized as a “settler colonial” project of unsurpassed injustice, while Israel and Zionism would be excoriated in the manner of the “two minutes of hate” in Orwell’s 1984.  

New York would protect illegal immigrants, no matter how criminal or dangerous, while warring with ICE agents carrying out their duties. And “anti-racist” racism would poison the comity of a diverse and, in some ways, still great city.

There are broader lessons here.  The young, white progressives who voted for Mamdani in the Democratic primary, the so-called Barista Bolsheviks, have long been sold a bill of goods and have taken, on one hand, to “settler colonial” propaganda and, on another, to the promise of free goodies from an omnicompetent state. Their willingness to buy into absurd, hate-filled ideological clichés, along with promises of an eternal candy store, serves as an indictment of an educational system (and social media dominated by ideological drivel) that has made ideological extremism and fantasies de rigueur for too many white progressives in our major cities. 

They are not the first people in modern times time to succumb to the allure of self-abasement and enslavement in the guise of Utopia. One only needs to remember the misplaced enthusiasm of “educated society” in Russia prior to the Revolution. For once, we need to learn some lessons from the past. 

The Family Tree

The apple does not fall far from the tree. In Mamdani’s case, It would be remiss not to note that he is the faithful heir of the family ideological business — the Islamo-gauchiste equivalent of the “red diaper babies” of past generations. His father, Mahmood Mamdani, is a public intellectual and academic specializing in “settler colonial” theorizing, well-known and esteemed in leftist academic circles. He has long held high-level positions at Columbia University. 

Educated in the United States in the 1960s, Mahmood Mamdani imbibed a caricatured version of Marxism and Third-Worldism at MIT. When he returned home to Uganda, he was expelled (along with at least 55,000 others of Asian descent) by the “anti-colonialist” demagogue Idi Amin Dada, who could see in hard-working and successful Asian entrepreneurs only “blood-suckers” and exploiters. The Ugandan economy predictably took decades to recover. 

But Mamdani Senior was too much of an ideologist to draw the appropriate conclusions. In a 2016 article in the journal Critical Inquiry he reaffirmed the crudest ideological Manichaeism: “Africa is the continent where settler colonialism has been defeated; America is where settler colonialism triumphed.” 

In that article, Mamdani denounced Alexis de Tocqueville for putting forward an account of “American exceptionalism” that is an “autobiography of the settler” and that ignores oppressed people of color (in this catechism, people of color are forever destined to be oppressed, at least in “settler colonial” societies). But the real Tocqueville wrote poignantly about the fate of native Americans and condemned chattel slavery as incompatible with democratic liberty and the Christian religion. Mamdani is too addicted to ideological formulas and categories to notice the decency of the French aristocrat fair-mindedly judging the strengths and weaknesses of the nascent democracy in America. As Raymond Aron said, Tocqueville was humane through and through.

On the other hand, Tocqueville recognized, as Aron put it, that in France and elsewhere,“the radicals…were not humanitarians, but revolutionaries, drunk with ideology and ready to sacrifice millions of men to their ideas.” This spirit is alive and well in Mahmood Mamdani who wrote in his 2004 book, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror, that “We need to recognize the suicide bomber, first and foremost, as a category of soldier.” He added that suicide bombing is a legitimate “feature of modern political violence” and should not be “stigmatized as a mark of barbarism.” This affirmation is itself barbaric, a justification of the unjustifiable. It is in the Frantz Fanon tradition of valorizing revolutionary violence.  Here, the ideological violation of the truth leads inexorably to the violation of the norms of civilized order. With a million previous examples of this, one is forewarned.

Zohran Mamdani’s mother, Mira Nair, is a talented filmmaker whose films are marred, if not characterized, by giving voice to anti-colonial grievances of a highly ideological kind. She speaks much more for a transnational academic clerisy than for the quotidian concerns of, let’s say, the people of India. 

The Ultimate Stake

Settler colonialism is a poisonous pseudo-discipline that has played a major role in corrupting the minds of young people, of estranging them from the free and decent civilization that is the West. Its proponents see America as “occupied territory” governed by incorrigibly evil “European settlers.” So-called native peoples, like Third World peoples today, are said to be free from sin and never guilty of crimes and misdeeds when they, too, settled in new lands in the past, inevitably displacing others. An academic pseudo-discipline based on an incoherent mixture of romanticism and ideological fanaticism, one which denies the moral legitimacy of our country, can only sow discord, division, and worse. 

New Yorkers need to reject this insidious ideological brew before the greatness of New York is no more, and before American Jews become pariahs in a city to which they have contributed so much. 

The stakes go beyond Gotham. They are truly civilizational.

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