Mahmood Mamdani, the Columbia University professor and father of New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani (D.), called Columbia's new anti-Semitism task force a "prosecutorial agency" during a recent University Senate meeting. Professor Mamdani compared the panel to imperial British colonizers using their race-based "divide and rule" strategy to maintain power, according to an unofficial transcript obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
"It became very clear that [the task force] saw itself not as representing the community, but as a prosecutorial agency," Mamdani—who teaches classes on decolonization and researches subjects like "racial capitalism" and "colonialism"—said at the Dec. 12 meeting.
Two sources who attended the December meeting confirmed Mamdani's remarks, which have not been previously reported, while a third said the unofficial transcript matched his notes verbatim.
When Mamdani finished speaking, acting Columbia president Claire Shipman, who is the University Senate's presiding officer, thanked him. "If I have your permission, I will come to you for guidance," she said, addressing him as "Senator."
Mamdani did not respond to a request for comment. Asked about when and on what issues Shipman would seek Professor Mamdani's guidance, a Columbia University spokesman said that Shipman hears from a variety of people on a broad range of issues and believes that "listening—particularly to those with whom you disagree" is a hallmark of "good leadership."
Columbia established its Task Force on Antisemitism in November 2023 after its campus saw a surge in anti-Semitic incidents following Hamas's Oct. 7, 2023, terror attack. Mamdani's criticism was a response to the panel's fourth and final report, published December 9 of last year, which Mamdani said he did not read. The report's authors painted a "disturbing" picture of life as a Jewish student at the Ivy League institution, where instructors smeared Jews and Israelis in their classes as occupiers and "murderers" and used their lectures on unrelated topics like astronomy to rail against "genocide" in Gaza.
After telling his fellow senators that he hadn't read the task force's report, Mamdani said that "I assume that this is the end of the task force" and later, referring to the anti-Semitism controversies that have bedeviled Columbia, that "we've come to a point where hopefully this period can end."
Mamdani, whose Columbia profile shows he has been on leave since at least April 2022 even as he has continued to teach classes and oversee research, made his remarks at last month's faculty meeting, after his son had been elected mayor and the end of the campaign, during which the younger Mamdani battled allegations of anti-Semitism.
In his comments to the University Senate—a powerful body that sets policy for Columbia—Mahmood Mamdani also accused the task force of exacerbating divisions between various groups on campus, creating feelings of exclusion. He said such moves were akin to British colonialists' "divide and rule" strategy, which separated various ethnic, racial, and religious groups as a means of preserving power over conquered territories.
"In British divide and rule, you set up different sections of the population as independent, as autonomous, as separate constituencies, and each begins to see the other as a competitor," said Mamdani, who grew up in Uganda when it was still a British protectorate. "Soon you have a fragmented society like grasshoppers in a bottle," he added, noting that the phrase was a Ugandan expression.
Mamdani did not name or define the campus groups that were isolated, but he did question why there was only a task force specifically targeting anti-Semitism and not one focusing on Islamophobia. A Columbia official told CNN in June that the university tried to impanel one, but there was insufficient "professor buy-in" and "no willingness from those who were calling for it."
Mamdani's comments came a month after his son's victory, and New York City has faced an array of anti-Semitic incidents in the wake of the election. In November, vandals painted red swastikas on a Jewish school and agitators threw bottles at Jews, including Holocaust survivors, outside a synagogue. And just Thursday night, a week after Mamdani's inauguration, chants of "we support Hamas" and "globalize the intifada" erupted outside a Queens synagogue and Jewish children's school at an anti-Israel event promoted by the Muslim American Society of New York, which has extensive ties to the mayor. Mamdani has said the protesters' remarks "are wrong."
Zohran Mamdani has said he edits his father's speeches and writings and has described his father as an intellectual influence. Mahmood Mamdani, meanwhile, has a long history of pushing controversial remarks, beginning well before his December 9 comments.
"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," the elder Mamdani, who has strong personal ties to Kenya and Tanzania, wrote in his 2004 book Good Muslim, Bad Muslim. He added that there is a "moral equivalence between the two."
Mahmood Mamdani also proclaimed in writings first reported by the Free Beacon that 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.
In his book Neither Settler nor Native, which he dedicated to his son, Mahmood Mamdani repeatedly equates Jews with Nazis, rails against the "Judaization" of Israel by "Ashkenazi elites," and claims that Israel's existence proves that Hitler's "Final Solution" worked.
Mahmood Mamdani's dedication to his son says, "You teach us how to engage the world in difficult times. May you inspire many and blaze a trail!"
