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This story is part of Fox News Digital’s investigative series Campus Radicals. Get the full series here.
Controversy surrounding the Columbia University father of socialist New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani resurfaced on social media as a video of him claiming that Adolf Hitler was inspired by President Abraham Lincoln went viral leading up to Tuesday’s election.
“Zohran Mamdani’s father: America is the root of all evil and was the inspiration for the nazis,” internet video editor MAZE posted on X over the weekend along with a clip of Mahmood Mamdani that was viewed over 10 million times.
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“Hitler learned genocide from Abraham Lincoln. I’m sure Zohran loves America though. Nice job NYC.”
The clip stems from a 2022 panel discussion hosted by the Asia Society where Mahmood Mamdani asserted that America was the “genesis of what we call settler-colonialism” around the world, Fox News Digital reported in July.
“With the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln generalized the solution of reservations, they herded American Indians into separate territories,” Mamdani, Columbia’s Herbert Lehman professor of government, said. “For the Nazis, this was the inspiration — Hitler realized two things: one, that genocide is doable. It is possible to do genocide, that’s what Hitler realized. Second thing Hitler realized, is that you don’t have to have a common citizenship.”
The video received strong pushback from conservatives on social media.
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“This is one of the most insane things I’ve ever heard, and I say that as someone who used to work at the Young Turks,” political commentator Dave Rubin posted on X.
“Like father like son,” Fox News anchor Laura Ingraham posted on X.
“What a joke — why are we importing people who hate America?” Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis posted on X.
Fox News Digital reached out to Mamdani’s father and the Mamdani campaign for comment.
Many have criticized the younger Mamdani for some of the views shared by his father over the years, including quotes from a book the professor wrote and dedicated to “Zohran and his mates.”
“Suicide bombing needs to be understood as a feature of modern political violence rather than stigmatized as a mark of barbarism,” the elder Mamdani wrote in his 2004 book Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror, Fox News Digital previously reported.
“We need to recognize the suicide bomber, first and foremost, as a category of soldier.”
Additionally, Mahmood Mamdani sits on the advisory council of an anti-Israel organization, the Gaza Tribunal, that supports boycotts and sanctions of Israel and routinely accuses the Israeli government of committing “genocide”
The Gaza Tribunal’s founder and members have deep ties to anti-Israel movements, with at least one being deported from the United States due to terror ties.
“He’s his own person,” Mahmood Mamdani told The New York Times in an interview earlier this year headlined, “The Parents Who Helped Shape Zohran Mamdani’s Politics.”
Mahmood Mamdani added, “Now, of course, what we do as his parents is part of the environment in which he grew up, and he couldn’t help but engage with it. That doesn’t mean anything is reflected back on us.”
“I don’t agree!” Nair interjected in the interview. “Of course the world we live in, and what we write and film and think about, is the world that Zohran has very much absorbed.”
In a 2020 interview, Mamdani suggested in his own words that he was influenced politically by his parents,” Fox News Digital reported earlier this year.
“I think, honestly, growing up in the family that I grew up in, I was quite open to what would be considered being a radical from a very young age,” Mamdani said on The Far Left Show.
“I mean, from the beginning, my identities are already considered radical by a lot of mainstream American political thought. So being a Muslim, being an immigrant, these are things that already kind of put you in the box of ‘other.’ And so it’s not that far of a jump because whenever you… stand up to speak up for the rights of others who share the same identity as you, then you’re a radical, right? So often people in this country are considered radicals if they stand up for Palestinian human rights.”
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