The likely next mayor of New York City who has recently tried to deny his alleged anti-semitism left an explosive paper trail of evidence contradicting these claims while he was an undergraduate at Bowdoin College in Maine.
Zohran Mamdani, who would be the Big Apple’s first Muslim mayor, wrote in Bowdoin’s student newspaper complaining about Israel’s “occupation” of Palestine.
He also blasted Bowdoin’s president for refusing to join an Israeli boycott.
But Mamdani’s self-loathing didn’t stop with Jews – he also used his college column in The Bowdoin Orient to accuse the student newspaper of maintaining a “white stranglehold” by allegedly keeping out a “diversity of opinion.”
So whether or not Mamdani is claiming still to be a victim of Israeli suppression or of whiteness, or both, his days of youthful editorial indiscretion may well prove to offend a large swath of voters in the country’s largest city going in to the general election.
A Democrat socialist would typically be favored in that race, but with the New York City’s problems ranging from crime to an ongoing flood of protected illegal immigrants – and one of the largest concentrations of Jews outside of Israel – all that it might take to tip the election is an underbelly of promotional racism to let a Republican such as Guardian Angel founder Curtis Sliwa creep up the inside lane.
“The issue of antisemitism, which remains central to the rhetoric in the mayor’s race as the U.S. joined Israel in its war against Iran, is now on the ballot – even as New Yorkers say their top issues are affordability and public safety,” according to Jason Beeferman of Politico.
“While he ran on affordability and did not make his anti-Israel obsession a centerpiece of his campaign, he didn’t hide it even though he was running in the most Jewish city in America,” John Podhoretz writes in his column on Wednesday in Commentary.
Podhoretz also points out – as previously reported by The Maine Wire – that Mamdani opened a chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine while he was at Bowdoin.
Mamdani’s trouncing Tuesday of disgraced former Gov. Andrew Cuomo came during the Democrat primary election.
But general elections put a magnifying glass on candidates that provides an extra layer of electoral scrutiny for discerning (non-racist) voters.
While at Bowdoin, Mamdani complained in a 2014 Bowdoin Orient column that the school’s president was refusing to join an “academic and cultural boycott of Israeli institutions to put pressure on them to end the oppressive occupation and racist policies within both Israel and occupied Palestine.”
(The first mentions of Palestine in regional history, incidentally, were made by the British empire in the 1920s, suggesting that Mamdani’s course-load at Maine’s venerated college was selective indeed).
In an earlier column, in 2013, the angry young man blasted the Orient’s editorial board for promoting “white privilege and homogeneity in the opinion section.”
The paper – already sensitive to a prevailing sentiment on campus that it wasn’t being color-blind enough and it’s columns – had actually solicited more diverse voices to add to its opinions page.
Drew Van Kuiken, one of Mamdani’s classmates, responded in a column to the Orient by saying that as a white guy he saw no need for the paper to have to defend itself.
That’s all Mamdani needed to play the race card. He wrote his column alleging “white privilege,” accusing Van Kuiken of being a racist.
Countering charges that Mamdani is an anti-Semite is JFK’s erratic grandson Jack Schlossberg, who endorsed his fellow angry young man and accused anyone who suggested Mamdani of dis-liking Jews of being “brainwashed.” Well, that settles that…
Mamdani, who graduated from Bowdoin in 2017, wrote more than 30 columns in the student paper, most of them railing against either Jews, white supremacy or an American society that fails to enact guardrails to protect its people against permissiveness.
He even shared his bitterness about Bowdoin College itself with an incoming class of freshmen in 2012.
Mamdani wrote that while he was giving a tour of the campus to the new class, he took time out on the walk to complain to them that the school had a history of not offering a course in his native tongue.
“A few years ago, the college didn’t offer Arabic, but after hearing the student body’s desire for the subject, it approved it as a program and now offers two courses in the subject,” he told incoming freshmen.
Nothing like poisoning a group of impressionable newcomers with your bitterness for a school – and a country – that not only welcomed you from your native homeland but gave you four solid years of one of the best universities in the United States – in beautiful Brunswick, Maine, no less.
