Hate U: Mamdani at Bowdoin

The heat keeps growing on New York City socialist mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani for his refusal to condemn the slogan “Globalize the Intifada,” but his position is nothing new. For more than a decade, Mr. Mamdani has been attacking the Jewish state.

His college journalism, obtained by Judicial Watch, reveals a record of revolutionary fervor, anti-Israel and anti-White.

In 2014, as a senior at Bowdoin College, Mr. Mamdani wrote in his college newspaper, The Bowdoin Orient, that “the struggle for rights is global,” and he condemned the “Israeli colonial occupation of Palestine.”

By that time, Mr. Mamdani had founded the Bowdoin chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, a radical national movement that a decade later greeted the Oct. 7 Hamas atrocities in Israel with open arms. After the Hamas attacks, many SJP campus chapters “openly praised Hamas terrorists and the death of innocent Israeli citizens,” the American Jewish Committee noted in a report.

“SJP leaders have made clear they support the use of violence to achieve their political goals,” the report noted. “SJP rallies regularly call for an ‘intifada,’ meaning armed aggression against Israel, and call for Palestine to be free ‘From the River to the Sea,’ which would eliminate the existence of Israel.”

There is no record of Mr. Mamdani disavowing SJP or calls for intifada.

It’s not just Israel.

In a 2013 commentary, Mr. Mamdani castigated “white privilege” and said that “all of society … must break the stranglehold of whiteness, wherever it might be.”

White males, Mr. Mamdani wrote, “are privileged in their near-to-exclusive authority in print, on television, and around us in our daily realities. We, the consumers of the media, internalize this and so believe in the innate authority of the white male’s argument.”

In addition to hostility to Israel and grievances against “white privilege,” Mr. Mamdani drifts close to the Arab world.

He complains that Arabic is not offered as a minor at Bowdoin and that the college “lags behind” similar elite colleges in its Arabic offerings. Still, he notes, by the time he graduates, he will have “taken seven courses in Arabic at Bowdoin, one abroad, and four over the course of one summer at an intensive language program.”

Mr. Mamdani’s 2013 trip to Egypt to study Arabic, landing just after the military moved to depose President Mohamed Morsi, inspires his longest piece for The Bowdoin Orient: “Bearded in Cairo.”

By then, Mr. Mamdani had grown a beard. It “began mostly as a symbolic middle finger to the sometimes spoken but oft-accepted stereotype that pervades America: ‘brown with a beard? Terrorist!’”

After a little while in Cairo, Mr. Mamdani writes, “I understood the addiction of revolution, of protest.” A “new social solidarity was founded in a widespread opposition to all that the government had grown to represent — inefficiency, unjustness and sectarianism.”

Leaving Bowdoin in 2014, Mr. Mamdani was torn, forced to grapple with the “inconsistencies of my time here.” Race haunts him. “I’m tired of being one of the few non-white students in a classroom, if not the only one.” People are tired of him bringing up race, he thinks. “I grow a beard only to be called a terrorist.”

Yet he senses a direction in life. “I’ve found organizing. I’ve found solidarity, allies, inspiration.”

Mr. Mamdani left Bowdoin more than a decade ago. Has he changed? The record is not promising. He continues to dodge disavowal of “Globalize the Intifada,” code words for “Kill the Jews,” and echo the grievances of the left that inspired him at college not too long ago.

The Washington Times, 29 July 2025