Mamdani’s Father Defends Suicide Bombers

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Zohran Mamdani has described how, at the dinner table, his views were formed in long discussions about politics and society with his father, Mahmood Mamdani, who is a professor of government at Columbia University. Mahmood Mamdani has described suicide bombers as worthy to be considered as “soldiers.” He has been a supporter of the anti-Israel BDS (Boycott, Divest, and Sanction) movement that hopes to so damage Israel’s economy that the Jewish state will have to submit to territorial demands by its Arab enemies, including the terror group Hamas.

More on Mahmoud Mamdani can be found here: “Mamdani’s father sits on council of anti-Israel group tied to terror, legitimizes role of suicide bombers,” by Andrew Mark Miller, Cameron Cawthorne, Fox News, July 12, 2025:

Mahmood Mamdani, the father of socialist New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, sits on the advisory council of an anti-Israel organization that supports boycotts and sanctions of Israel, routinely accuses the Israeli government of committing “genocide”, and has expressed sympathy for suicide bombers.

The Gaza Tribunal, founded in London in 2024, says its primary goal is “to awaken civil society to its responsibility and opportunity to stop Israel’s genocide in Gaza,” according to its website.

Also on its website, Mahmood Mamdani is listed as a member of the group’s “advisory policy council” and is mentioned as having attended the group’s official launch in London last year.

Richard Falk, the president of the tribunal, outlined the group’s support of BDS in an online post saying, “the aim of the Tribunal is or [sic] legitimize and encourage civil society solidarity initiatives around the world such as BDS.”

BDS is described as “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,” according to Influence Watch.

Zohran Mamdani has also promoted BDS as recently as May, 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, which is non-violence.”

Mahmood Mamdani, the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government at Columbia University, has also faced criticism on social media in recent days over a resurfaced book excerpt where he expressed sympathy for the way suicide bombers are viewed.

“Suicide bombing needs to be understood as a feature of modern political violence rather than stigmatized as a mark of barbarism,” the elder Mamdani wrote in his 2004 book Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror.

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

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

Falk has a long history of espousing anti-Israel views and was repeatedly accused of using his “Special Rapporteur” United Nations position to “spread unsubstantiated allegations against Israel,” according to Canary Mission, a watchdog organization that works to expose antisemitism. In 2011 and 2014, Falk accused Israel of being a “colonialist” nation and claimed it was pushing “ethnic-cleansing goals.” He would go on to echo these views as recently as February of this year during an interview.

Falk, who is as viciously anti-Israel as one of his successors as the UN’s Special Rapporteur on conditions in the “occupied Palestinian territories,” the egregious Francesca Albanese, chose to have Mahmoud Mamdani join his anti-Israel organization, The Gaza Tribunal.

Falk faced backlash in 2007 for comparing Israel’s government to the Nazis by accusing them of ushering in a “Palestinian Holocaust” and rhetorically asking, “Is it an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not.” The comparison led to backlash and former Israeli U.N. Ambassador Itzhak Levanon opposing his 2008 UN nomination.

If Israel is committing a “Holocaust” of Palestinians, how is it that the Palestinian population of Gaza in 1967, when Israel took control of the Strip, was 400,000, and then, when Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005, the Arabs in Gaza had more than tripled to 1.2 million? If Israel has been committing “genocide,” then why has the Arab population of Judea and Samaria (a/k/a the West Bank) gone from 900,000 in 1967, when Israel took over, to three million today? Finally, if Israel is committing “genocide,” then why has the Arab population of Israel proper increased from 160,000 in 1949 to two million today? Neither Falk nor his fellow members of The Gaza Tribunal, including Mahmoud Mamdani, has ever answered those questions. They prefer to simply ignore them, because they have no answers.

One would like those covering the resistible rise of Zohran Mamdani to also question his father, particularly on his defense of suicide bombers. Does he still believe that they are legitimate “soldiers,” and not, as most of us believe, barbaric murderers? Has he ever had any qualms about belonging to the virulently anti-Israel organization headed by Richard Falk known as The Gaza Tribunal? Does he wish to comment on the acceptability of such chants as “From the river to the sea/Palestine will be free,” which is a call for Israel to disappear, its Jewish population to be expelled or killed, and the country to be replaced by a 23rd Arab state? And what does he think of his own son’s refusal to say he recognizes Israel as a Jewish state? Finally, does Zohran’s father agree with his son’s refusal to denounce the phrase “Globalize the Intifada,” which is a call to murder Jews, not just Israelis, worldwide? Zohran has said that the major influence on his political thinking has been his father Mahmood. That being the case, we have a right to know whether Mahmood Mamdani himself thinks about Israel as a Jewish state, and whether he still maintains that terrorists should be seen as “soldiers” worthy of respect.