The Zohran Mamdani apple didn’t fall far from the family tree.

Peloni:  Important details on Mamdani and his political relationship with his father

How Zohan Mamdani’s Father Influences his thinking, and will that affect how he will approach 9/11 as mayor of New York.

Barry Shaw | Israel Institute for Strategic Studies. | Oct 31, 2025

Zorham Mamdani. Screengrab via Youtube

Zohan Mamdani is on track to become the next mayor of New York.

A big test about what this man truly represents, perhaps even bigger than his ability, or lack of it, to govern the city, will be shown in how he approaches the anniversary of 9/11. The most pivotal moment in the city’s history.

On this topic, Mamdani shocked many when he spoke emotionally outside the Islamic Cultural Center in The Bronx by saying of 9/11, “I want to speak to the memory of my aunt, who stopped taking the subway after September 11th because she did not feel safe in her hijab.”

This was what brought the potential mayor of New York to tears when referring to 9/11. Not the thousands who lost their lives both on the two planes and inside the Twin Towers. Not the families and friends who are missing loved ones. But his aunt and her hijab.

Was this the only way he could think of to suck up the Muslim vote in New York? Surely, they are already in his pocket? Or was he riding on the fears of Islamophobia by inventing a false story. An invented story, a lie if you will, because, according to pictures of her posted in the New York Post, she doesn’t wear a hijab, and she didn’t live in New York on 9/11. She lived in Tanzania.

When caught out he switched the identity of his family member to being a cousin of his father.

Without doubt, his father holds a powerful influence over his son.

In Mahmood Mamdani’s book, “Good Muslim, Bad Muslim,” published several years after 9/11, he wrote, “We need to recognize that a suicide bomber, first and foremost, as a category of soldier.”

He also chillingly wrote that suicide bombing must not be “stigmatized as a mark of barbarism.”

His thoughts should be a stark reminder to Americans, particularly New Yorkers, of the ideology that Professor Mamdani has offered his students and, one suspects, his son, the front-running mayoral candidate in New York City.

Nor have his observations muted over time.

His most recent book, “Slow Poison,” seeks to rehabilitate one of Africa’s most ruthless dictators, Idi Amin.

In this book Zohan Mamdani’s influential father blames Europeans for Idi Amin’s brutality against his own people suggesting that this dictator’s atrocities were done in the cause of strengthening his post-colonial nation.

Israelis recall that their country helped Idi Amin and equip his military. They even presented him the air force winged badge which he proudly wore on his military outfit.

That didn’t stop Idi Amin using his soldiers to protect the Palestinian and German hijackers of an El Al plane that landed at his Entebbe airport. One of them killed Yoni Netanyahu, the commander of the Israeli rescue force and the brother of the current Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu as they came to raid the terminal building to kill the terrorists and rescue the hostages.

So will Mayor Zohran Mamdani say on the 9/11 memorial, on the anniversary of New York’s terror attack, that the terrorists were courageous soldiers who flew crowded passenger planes into the iconic New York Twin Towers and the Pentagon because they were victims of a “post-colonial” America?

That his city warranted the murder of 2,977 New Yorkers?

Or will he parse the words of the British Muslim Home Secretary who said, after the murder of Manchester Jews at their synagogue on Yom Kippur, that she grieved for everyone who died in that terror attack leaving the unalert unaware that she also grieved for their killer, a man named Islam, who also died that dreadful day.

Surely, on 9/11. Mamdani will grieve as much for the Islamic hijackers as he may do for their victims.

Perhaps even more.

The shadow of his father looms over the politics of Zohran Mamdani.

Mamdani’s distaste for America stems from his father’s indoctrination that America was born in sin. That is was the original settler colonization put into practice and that Abraham Lincln was an inspiration to Adoplh Hitler. This is how far off the ranch the Mamdani family has strayed since being welcomed into that country.

Mamdani taught as Columbia’s Herbert Lehman professor of government that;

“With the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln generalized the solution of reservations. They herded American Indians into separate territories. “For the Nazis, this was the inspiration. Hitler realized two things: One, that genocide is doable. It is possible to do genocide, that’s what Hitler realized. Second thing Hitler realized is that you don’t have to have a common citizenship.”

This was from a video clip of a panel discussion hosted by the Asia Society in 2022 that received huge criticism when recently exposed.

Mahmood Mamdani sits on the advisory council of an anti-Israel organization, the Gaza Tribunal, which supports boycotts and sanctions of Israel and routinely accuses the Israeli government of committing “genocide”

The Gaza Tribunal’s founder and members have deep ties to anti-Israel movements, with at least one member being deported from the United States due to terror ties.

Mahmoud Mamdani may claim as he did in a New York Times interview that his son “is his own person,” but his son echoes and advances the teachings of his father, specifically as they apply to a sympathy for an Islamic brand of terrorist, and his father’s jaundiced views of America and Israel.

Andrew Mark Miller of Fox News exposed how Zohran Mamdani sees himself and admitting how his upbringing made him open to being seen as a radical in a 2020 interview on “The Far Left” show in that the family he grew up in made him “open” to being a “radical” and suggesting that socialism needs to be re-branded.

“So being a Muslim, being an immigrant, these are things that already kind of put you in the box of ‘other.’ And so it’s not that far of a jump because whenever you… stand up to speak up for the rights of others who share the same identity as you, then you’re a radical, right? So often people in this country are considered radicals if they stand up for Palestinian human rights.”

This is always the jumping off point for radical pro-Palestinians that hate Israel rather than attempt to reform the Palestinian leadership into becoming accommodating peace makers.

And it’s also not that far of a jump to hate Israel and its very existence in which everything is permitted to right the wrongs of the Palestinians who, surely, deserve their land “from the River to the Sea.”

And to achieve that aim you have to “Globalize the Intifada.”

There is always a starting point in anyone’s political career, and, in Mamdani’s case, it wasn’t the social condition of the deprived in New York.

It was actively supporting an anti-Israel boycott and starting a Students for Justice in Palestine chapter during his college days, as well as the repeating and advancing past writings of his father, Mahmood Mamdani.

Andrew Mark Miller’s detailed Fox News article reminds us that Mahmood Mamdani’s social media presence is littered with anti-Israel positions referring to Israelis as “colonial settlers” and celebrating the idea of a “Third Intifada.”

Additionally, Mahmood Mamdani sits on the council of an openly anti-Israel tribunal and once wrote in a book, which he dedicated to his son, that suicide bombers are “stigmatized as a mark of barbarism.”

Zohran Mamdani has built his political brand on the same radical, hate-filled, and anti-American ideology that his father, Mahmood Mamdani, has spent decades promoting—one that demonizes Jewish people and legitimizes anti-democratic violence.

Brooke Goldstein, a human rights attorney who specializes in antisemitism, told Fox News Digital that, “The Jew-hatred that the Mamdani family peddles is fundamentally anti-American and violates the core values our country was founded on—tolerance, equality, and liberty. Our nation’s strength lies in its diversity and commitment to protecting minority rights. Antisemitic world views threaten the peace and security of our communities.”

In an interview, the younger Mamdani went on to lament the criticism that Democratic Socialists of America have faced for supporting BDS.

Zohran Mamdani has also promoted BDS even into this year when he declined to say whether Israel has a right to exist and said his support of BDS “is consistent with my core of my politics.”

BDS is an international campaign to delegitimize the State of Israel as the expression of the Jewish people’s right to national self-determination by isolating the country economically through consumer boycotts, business and government withdrawal of investment, and legal sanctions.

I have written books about this anti-Israel phenomenon including “Fighting Hamas, BDS, and Anti-Semitism” and “BDS for Idiots.”

Israel has experienced these boycott movements, What starts with economic boycotts never stop there, especially when they prove ineffective. They always descends into violence and terrorism, including suicide bombers.

Zohan Mamdani’s father is well aware of this phenomenon. He wrote in his 2004 book Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror that; “Suicide bombings needs to be understood as a feature of modern political violence rather than stigmatized as a mark of barbarism,”

“We need to recognize the suicide bomber, first and foremost, as a category of soldier.”

Is that the way the Mamdani family viewed the 9/11 plane hijackers?

Zohran Mamdani’s stance on Israel has been a sparsely discussed topic during the mayoral campaign, and he sparked controversy by refusing to condemn the phrase “Globalize the intifada,” which has become a rallying cry for anti-Israel protesters in the United States ever since Hamas’s October 7, 2023, massacre in Israel.

Father Mamdani, who was the co-founder of Bowdoin College’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter, expressed support for an academic boycott of Israel in the school’s paper.

Mamdani the son has been widely criticized by New York Jewish groups over his positions and comments as he tries to position himself to win the City’s election in November.

Michael Oren, former Israeli Ambassador to the US, appealled to New York Jews in a Substack column saying;

“To the 38% of New York Jews who, according to the most recent polls are planning to vote for this candidate, I implore you to think clearly and deeply before you do. Consider what this candidate’s victory would mean for your family, for your children and grandchildren. Think what it would mean if the mayor of America’s largest Jewish community calls for the disappearance of the world’s largest Jewish community. The person who denies our right to defend ourselves and our right to exist may well end up opposing your right to self-defense and your ability to live peacefully and securely in the magnificent city you call home.”

It remains to be seen how effective this community will be in preventing a disaster for them and for the Big Apple.