Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s father compared Israel to apartheid-era South Africa and called Holocaust survivors “today’s perpetrator’s” in a resurfaced video of a victim-blaming 2002 university lecture.
Columbia University professor Mahmood Mamdani described both Israel and South Africa as colonial settlers hostile to native populations in the unearthed comments from a Nov. 16, 2002 talk at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts.
He said the white Afrikaners wondered how black South Africans who lived under the oppressive system would treat them if they ever took power.
“That same specter must also haunt the survivors of the Holocaust in Israel — yesterday’s victims turned today’s perpetrators,” said Mahmood Mamdani, referring to treatment of Palestinians.
The academic — who specializes int he study of colonialism, ant-colonialism and decolonization — also invoked Hitler in the lecture.
“The European bourgeois cannot forgive Hitler the fact that he applied to Europe the colonial practices that had been previously applied to the Arabs in Algeria, the Koulis in India and the Negroes in Africa,” Mahmood Mandani said. “The Holocaust was the imperial chickens come home.”
He said the state of Israel exercised power with “impunity” and “without accountability” with backing from the US.
“There is one state that stands in defiance to practically every UN resolution that affects it. That’s the state of Israel,” he said.
Many anti-Israel activists and protesters mouth the same arguments amid the war in Gaza, initiated by Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attacks on Israel.
Reports of alleged antisemitism have skyrocketed since then, including on campuses and Jews have been targeted and harassed going to synagogue.
Canary Mission, a group that monitors antisemitism and anti-Israel and anti-US sentiment including on college campuses, dug up the 23-year-old speech by Mahmood Mamdani, given a year after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorists attacks..
“Zohran Mamdani’s father, Mahmood, is one of the most antisemitic voices in academia by spewing lies and distortions uninterrupted,” Canary Mission said.
“If not for his son’s fame, we might not know that this hateful rhetoric was infecting impressionable students’ minds year after year after year @Columbia,” the group said.
His critique of Israel reemerges as democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani has taken heat for supporting the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel. The mayor-elect has also called Israel an apartheid state and even said he would try to arrest Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a war criminal if the politician stepped foot int he Big Apple.
The Post reached out to Mahmood and Zohran Mamdani for comment.
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