Waste of the Day: Federal Grants Support Mamdani’s Antisemitism

Columbia University’s Middle East Institute received $4 million in federal grants to train future government employees, and spent part of it on payroll for radical professors including Mahmood Mamdani, who has argued against suicide bombing being “stigmatized.”

Mamdani’s son, Zohran, is the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City.

In 2018, Columbia applied for two Department of Education grants: the National Resource Centers program and the Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowship. The school received $12 million from the two programs from 2018 to 2024 and promised to use it to “train students for employment in positions in the government (State, Defense, Homeland Security, Intelligence agencies, and Congressional Offices),” according to its grant application.

A third of Columbia’s grant money went to its Middle East Institute, of which $1 million was spent on payroll.

Columbia’s grant application highlighted Mahmood Mamdani’s work as a senior faculty member and his “courses on Islam, state violence, and international relations.”

Mamdani was a controversial figure even before his son began campaigning for mayor. His 2020 book “Neither Settler Nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities” compares the founding of Israel to the Holocaust, claiming that both were “acts of extreme political violence undertaken to create ethnically homogeneous states,” according to an article in The Nation.

His 2004 book “Good Muslim, Bad Muslim” claims that “Suicide bombing needs to be understood as a feature of modern political violence rather than stigmatized as a mark of barbarism.”

Later in the book, Mamdani waxes poetic about terrorists and their victims, asking “Does not the suicide bomber join both aspects of our humanity, particularly as it has been fashioned by political modernity, in that we are willing to subordinate life — both our own and that of others — to objectives we consider higher than life?”

Mahmood Mamdani’s beliefs are in-part reflected in his son’s mayoral campaign. Zohran Mamdani made national headlines by refusing to condemn the phrase “Globalize the Intifada,” which, according to the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, is a “call for the murder of Israelis and Jews around the world.” Mahmood Mamdani has also praised the Intifada as something “meaningful.”