Zohran Mamdani has said he edits his father’s speeches and writings and has described his father as an intellectual influence
New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s father wrote shortly after 9/11 that there was a “moral equivalence” between the al Qaeda attack and retaliatory U.S. bombing of Afghanistan.
“There is an eerie similarity between the American bombing of Iraq and Afghanistan and the al-Qaeda bombing of embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam and of the Twin Towers on 9/11,” Mahmood Mamdani, a professor at Columbia University, wrote in his 2004 book, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim. He added that there is a “moral equivalence between the two.”
“[B]oth testify that, when it comes to the contest for power, the rest of the world exists only as collateral.”
The elder Mamdani also proclaimed in previously unreported writings a “growing common ground between the perpetrators of 9/11 and the official response to it called ‘the war on terror,'” arguing that there was no moral difference between the U.S. government and the terrorist organization that killed nearly 3,000 civilians at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
“Both [the U.S. and al-Qaeda] are informed by highly ideological worldviews, which each articulates in a highly religious political language, one that is self-righteous,” he wrote. “The righteousness of self goes alongside the demonization of the other as evil.”
Mahmood Mamdani’s comments could raise new questions for his democratic socialist son during his campaign for mayor of New York City, where al Qaeda killed 2,606 civilians in its attack on the World Trade Center. Zohran Mamdani has said he stays “engaged” with his father’s work and has helped edit his writing and speeches to make them “more accessible,” the Washington Free Beacon reported earlier this month.
While the younger Mamdani has not spoken much about the Sept. 11 attacks during his campaign, he recently said he stands by “the idea” of the “globalize the intifada” slogan after receiving condemnation from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial and Museum.
He also once blamed the FBI for al Qaeda leader Anwar al-Awlaqi’s decision to join the terrorist group.
“Why no proper interrogation of what it means for @FBI to have conducted extensive [surveillance] into #al-Awlaki’s private life?” he wrote in a 2015 Twitter post, the Dispatch reported. “Why no further discussion of how #al-Awlaki’s knowledge of [surveillance] eventually led to him to #alqaeda?”
The argument echoes his father’s writing, in which the Columbia professor claimed that the CIA was behind Osama bin Laden and his rise to power.
“The best-known CIA-trained terrorist was, of course, Osama bin Laden,” the elder Mamdani wrote. “Bin Laden was not the only distinguished CIA creation—the others, as discussed, included Abdullah Azzam, a founder of Hamas, and Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind Egyptian prayer leader. All CIA inventions, all were on the FBI list of those most wanted.”
He also compared George W. Bush to Osama bin Laden, arguing that both “employ a religious language, the language of good and evil, the language of no compromise: you are either with us or against us. Both deny the possibility of a third response. For both, political loyalty comes before political independence.”
Mahmood Mamdani also blamed the Global War on Terror, in part, on the “extraordinary power of the Israel lobby in Washington” and the Jewish “ethnic donor machine.”
“Rather than ‘a traditional ethnic voter machine’ that would organize the Jewish vote behind particular candidates, the Israeli lobby functions more as ‘an ethnic donor machine,'” he wrote. “Its power is exercised through campaign contributions and government appointments.”
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