Columbia University Professor Mahmood Mamdani, the father of New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, compared Israel to South Africa during the apartheid era and characterized Holocaust survivors as "today's perpetrators" in a video of a 2002 lecture, the New York Post reported on Sunday.
In remarks delivered on Nov. 16, 2002, at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, he described both Israel and South Africa as colonial settlers hostile to native populations.
The professor, who specializes in the study of colonialism, anti-colonialism, and decolonization, said that white Afrikaners feared how Black South Africans might treat them if they ever gained political power.
"That same specter must also haunt survivors of the Holocaust in Israel — yesterday's victims turned today's perpetrators," said Mahmoud Mamdani.
He added, "The European bourgeois cannot forgive Hitler the fact that he applied to Europe the colonial practices that had been previously applied to the Arabs in Algeria, the Koulis in India, and the Negroes in Africa. The Holocaust was the imperial chickens come home."
Mahmood Mamdani also argued that Israel wielded power with "impunity" and "without accountability," backed by U.S. support, according to the Post.
Canary Mission, a group that monitors antisemitism and anti-Israel and anti-U.S. sentiment, discovered the 23-year-old speech.
"Zohran Mamdani's father, Mahmood, is one of the most antisemitic voices in academia by spewing lies and distortions uninterrupted," Canary Mission said. "If not for his son's fame, we might not know that this hateful rhetoric was infecting impressionable students' minds year after year after year @Columbia."
Brian Freeman ✉
Brian Freeman, a Newsmax writer based in Israel, has more than three decades writing and editing about culture and politics for newspapers, online and television.
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