Debunking All the B.S. About Zohran Mamdani

A good run down from Rolling Stone:

Mamdani is not in the country illegally

This is among the more flagrantly false claims about Mamdani, floated on Tuesday by the president himself. “A lot of people are saying he’s here illegally,” Trump said at a press conference with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, adding, “You know, we’re going to look at everything.” The comments seemed to echo a call last week from Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) to denaturalize and deport Mamdani, whom he gave the racist nickname “little Muhammad” in a post on X.

Mamdani was born in Uganda to Indian parents and lived for a short time in South Africa before his family moved to New York in 1998, when he was seven years old. He was naturalized as a U.S. citizen in 2018.
[...]

He does not have any connection to 9/11 or jihadist terrorism

The MAGA right responded to Mamdani’s primary victory with a blitz of Islamaphobic fury that had nothing to do with anything he has ever said or done, as a politician or otherwise. Donald Trump Jr. shared an X post that suggested New Yorkers were “voting for” another 9/11. Rep. Nancy Mace posted a photo of Mamdani attending an Eid service at the Parkchester Islamic Center in the Bronx with the caption: “After 9/11 we said ‘Never Forget.’ I think we sadly have forgotten.” Commentators Charlie Kirk and Benny Johnson also invoked the specter of the 9/11 attacks — which occurred when Mamdani was nine years old and living in New York himself. He has no connection to the terror plot and has never expressed support for it or the extremist group Al-Qaeda.

Likewise, there is no basis to claims from Trump zealots, including Laura Loomer, that Mamdani is a “jihadist Muslim” or has ties to Iran or the Muslim Brotherhood and can be arrested on terrorism charges. Insinuations that he would impose Sharia law on New York — as from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who posted an AI-generated image of the Statue of Liberty wearing a black burka — also lack any grounding in reality. All in all, these are just a rehash of the xenophobic outbursts that dominated cable news in the aftermath of 9/11 itself and eventually mutated into birther and “secret Muslim” conspiracy theories about Barack Hussein Obama. Which, not incidentally, launched Trump’s political career.

Mamdani has meanwhile faced criticism for certain lyrics from his years as a rapper in the 2010s. On “Salaam,” a track he released as his MC persona Mr. Cardamom, he shouted out his support for the so-called “Holy Land Five,” Palestinian-American organizers for what was at one point the largest Muslim charity in the U.S. The group was convicted in 2008 of providing material support to the militant group Hamas, designated as a terrorist organization. The advocacy group Human Rights Watch has argued that the defendants in the landmark War on Terror case “were never accused of directly funding terrorist organizations or terrorist attacks, nor were the Palestinian charities they funded accused of doing so,” and other civil rights attorneys have found significant fault with how the charges were prosecuted.

[...]

Mamdani hasn’t actually said or done anything antisemitic

The claims of antisemitism seem focused around his stance on Israel: Mamdani cofounded a chapter of the activist group Students for Justice for Palestine at his college, and has advocated for equal rights for Israelis and Palestinians in Israel, as well as an end to the war in Gaza. When confronted with questions about why he had not co-sponsored an annual New York state Holocaust Remembrance Day resolution, he answered that he had voted for the symbolic measure every year, and backed the allocation of more funds to survivors. He said his office had a blanket policy of not signing resolutions emailed to his office. Since taking office in 2021, he has also made public statements commemorating Holocaust Remembrance Day each year.

Many Jewish New Yorkers supported Mamdani’s run, organized on his behalf, and endorsed him, including the city’s highest-ranking Jewish politician, Comptroller Brad Lander, who condemned Cuomo for the “weaponization of antisemitism.” Mamdani, meanwhile, used his candidacy to speak about the threat posed by rising antisemitism and his plans to increase city funding to combat hate crimes.

He did not call to ‘globalize the intifada’

In the ongoing attempts to portray Mamdani as an Islamist extremist, one phrase has become a sticking point. During a June appearance on The Bulwark podcast FYPod a week before the primary election, Mamdani was asked if he was “uncomfortable” with the slogan “globalize the intifada,” usually interpreted as a call to make Palestinian liberation a worldwide movement through a mass uprising against Israeli oppression. The word “intifada,” which in a more literal translation means “to shake off,” or “struggle,” has also been used to describe violent rebellion.

“To me, what I hear in so many is a desperate desire for equality and equal rights,” Mamdani said, remarking that it would be Trumpian to try to police such language. “As a Muslim man who grew up post-9/11, I’m all too familiar in the way in which Arabic words can be twisted, can be distorted, can be used to justify any kind of meaning,” he added.

Across social media, this exchange was indeed twisted by right-wing media to push the falsehood that Mamdani had personally called to “globalize the intifada.” Then, on a Meet the Press appearance Sunday, he repeatedly declined to condemn the phrase in an interview when host Kristen Welker brought it up. “That’s not language that I used,” Mamdani said, truthfully. “The language that I used and the language that I will continue to use to lead the city is that which speaks clearly to my intent, which is an intent grounded in a belief in universal human rights.”

[...]

He’s not a communist [...]

As a cheap scare tactic, the Communist Boogeyman line is far older than Trump himself, and Mamdani’s promises to expand childcare and fight for a $30 minimum wage don’t exactly sound like a vision for some Stalinist dystopia. He is not aiming for government takeovers of private industry and property, and his proposed taxes on the top one percent are meant to subsidize social programs in a way that resembles socialism as it exists in various European countries. His criticism of wealth inequality — he has said “I don’t think we should have billionaires” — does not define him as a communist.

“No, I am not,” Mamdani said in his Sunday interview on Meet the Press, in response to Trump calling him a communist. “I have already had to start to get used to the fact that the president will talk about how I look, how I sound, where I’m from, who I am, ultimately because he wants to distract from what I’m fighting for. I’m fighting for the very working people that he ran a campaign to empower, that he has since then betrayed.”