MAHMOOD MAMDANI, ZOHRAN'S FATHER, BLAMED AMERICA FOR THE ATROCITIES COMMITED BY THE NAZIS DURING HITLER'S REIGN

Zohran Mamdani’s dad claims Nazis learned to commit atrocities from US — including ethnic cleansing 

Mahmood Mamdani wrote in one of hi books: “The United States is the outcome of a history of genocide, ethnic cleansing, official racism and concentration camps (known as Indian reservations).”

 

By Isabel Vincent

 

New York Post

Oct 24, 2025

 

 

Mahmood Mamdani (right) exhorted his son Zohran to “change the world” in one of his academic books.

 

Zohran Mamdani’s dad claims the Nazis took direct cues from the United States’ “history of genocide, ethnic cleansing, official racism and concentration camps.”

Mamdani, 34, has often credited his father as his greatest influence, but in the elder Mamdani’s politically charged writings, he takes a dim view of the Western culture he happily lives in on the Upper West Side.

Radical socialist Mahmood Mamdani, 79, goes as far as to claim at one point that the Nazis got their idea for killing Jews from watching the US.

“The Allies who prosecuted individual Nazis at Nuremberg were invested in ignoring Nazism’s political roots, for these roots were also America’s,” he wrote in one of his books.

“The United States is the outcome of a history of genocide, ethnic cleansing, official racism and concentration camps (known as Indian reservations).”

That book, “Neither Settler Nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities,” is dedicated to Zohran Mamdani. And, in the acknowledgments, the elder Mamdani exhorts his son to revolution.

“And Zohran, our son, who understands that the time has come to go out and join those impatient to change the world,” he wrote.

 

Scholar Mahmood Mamdani has said the Nazis learned about ethnic cleansing from America’s treatment of its indigenous populations

Survivors of the Mauthausen concentration camp cheer US forces during its liberation in May 1945

US soldiers saved thousands of Jewish prisoners being transferred from Bergen-Belsen to another death camp in April 1945. In one of his academic works, Zohran Mamdani’s father says the Nazis learned about ethnic cleansing from the US. 

 

By that time, Zohran Mamdani was poised to blaze that trail when he entered the state Assembly, equipped with his parents’ anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist and anti-capitalist views.

As a student at Bowdoin College in Maine, he had founded a branch of Students for Justice in Palestine, an anti-Israel group.

 

“The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” a film by Mira Nair, was completely funded by the government of Qatar, which provided the movie’s $15 million budget

 

“Neither Settler Nor Native,” the elder Mamdani’s academic treatise on settler colonialism around the world, was also published in 2020, and argues that “Zionist settlers in Israel forcibly exiled and concentrated non-Jews, an ongoing process.”

Mahmood — who did not respond to The Post’s request for comment — is also a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel, alongside others in his anthropology department, such as Lila Abu-Lughod and Brinkley Messick, who both backed sanctions against Israel and were included in the acknowledgments section of his book.

Messick also pushed for scholars to boycott Israeli academic institutions in 2016 and urged Columbia to divest its pension funds from Israel. He died in August.

Born in India, raised in Kampala and educated at US universities, Mahmood Mamdani is an anti-imperialist who helped to found the Uganda-Korea Friendship Society in 1981, a group connected to North Korea. Mamdani traveled to Pyongyang in the early 1980s, writing a report that noted “what struck us from the beginning was the immense mobilization of the population. School children going to or coming from school march in orderly groups singing songs.” 

 

Zohran Mamdani’s radical views were largely shaped by his parents. 

 

Zohran Mamdani’s mother, Mira Nair — who won an Academy Award for her film “Salaam Bombay!” — also opposes Israel.

In 2013, she rejected an invitation to attend the Haifa International Festival as a guest of honor to screen her 2013 film “The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” which was made with a $15 million grant, the film’s entire budget, from the Doha Film Institute in Qatar, The Post revealed.

“I will go to Israel when occupation is gone,” she wrote in a social media post at the time. “I will go to Israel when the state does not privilege one religion over another. I will go to Israel when apartheid is over.”

In 2004, Nair established a film school in Kampala, the Maisha Film Lab, to give scholarships to aspiring filmmakers. The film school is partly funded by Qatar as well as the OSI Development Fund, a nonprofit run by progressive philanthropist George Soros, according to the film school’s website.

 

Zohran Mamdani said he owes everything to his parents, filmmaker Mira Nair and Columbia professor Mahmood Mamdani

George Soros’ Open Society Foundations contributed more than $600,000 to Kampala’s Makerere University, where Mahmood Mamdani founded the school’s Institute for Social Research in 2010

 

In addition, a portion of Mahmood Mamdani’s scholarship was also financed by Soros.

The progressive philanthropist between 2020 and 2023 gave a total of $620,000 to Makerere University, where the elder Mamdani headed up a social policy research center, oversaw the construction of a new pavilion, a library and established a PhD program.

The largest single grant of $450,000 was earmarked for Mamdani’s Makerere Institute for Social Research for the “decolonization of knowledge in Africa and in the African academy,” according to Soros’ Open Society Foundations.

In additions to the family’s anti-Israel views, the elder Mamdani embraces the same kind of radical socialism favored by his son, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. In his latest book, “Slow Poison: Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni, and the Making of the Ugandan State,” released last week, Mamdani faults Ugandan dictator Yoweri Museveni, who has ruled Uganda for nearly 40 years, for embracing international capitalism.