It’s important to understand the intellectual genealogy behind Zohran Mamdani’s politics. His father, Mahmood Mamdani, is not merely a prominent anti-Israel professor at Columbia—he is one of the most influential theorists of genocide and postcolonialism in the academy today. One of his most notorious arguments is that calling the Darfur genocide a “genocide” constitutes a form of Western colonialism. In his view, the language of international law is selectively applied—instrumentalized by the West to intervene in the Global South under the banner of humanitarianism.

But what does it mean to argue that naming a genocide—where Black Africans were systematically murdered by an Islamist regime espousing Arab supremacist ideology—is itself a colonial act? Mamdani’s position effectively exonerates the perpetrators by redirecting blame toward those who would stop them. The very notion of moral responsibility is inverted: genocide becomes a Western narrative, while the killers are reframed as victims of imperial discourse.

But here lies the deeper paradox. Mamdani insists that international law is biased and politically motivated when used to condemn an Islamist genocide in Sudan—but that same skeptical lens is nowhere to be found when it comes to Israel. In the case of the Jewish state, suddenly these same international bodies are treated as neutral, infallible arbiters. Accusations of genocide against Israel—no matter how distorted or ideologically charged—are taken at face value. The claim of politicized lawfare vanishes, replaced by a dogmatic faith in global institutions that, only moments earlier, were dismissed as tools of Western domination.

This double standard is not accidental, but deeply revealing. A postcolonial ideology that once prided itself on exposing the political uses of law and language has become rigidly selective in its skepticism. And it is this very selectivity that enables the re-legitimization of genocidal politics under an anti-colonial banner.

It is no surprise, then, that support for the Muslim Brotherhood and its genocidal aims against Israel finds sympathy in these same circles. The same framework that denied the Darfur genocide now helps rationalize, or outright justify, the elimination of the Jewish state. The inversion is complete.

And Zohran Mamdani—who aligns with Hamas, traffics in slogans like “globalize the intifada,” and echoes every accusation leveled against Israel—can be seen as the symbolic distillation of this intellectual inheritance. A politics that once claimed to resist colonialism has mutated into a theology of anti-colonialism so rigid, so selective, and so perverse, that it ends up defending Islamist genocide as liberation and casting the Jews—again—as the obstacle to be removed. "It seems that genocide has become a label to be stuck on your worst enemy, a perverse version of the Nobel Prize, part of a rhetorical arsenal that helps you vilify your adversaries while ensuring impunity for your allies. In Kristof’s words, the point is not so much ‘human suffering’ as ‘human evil’. Unlike Kivu, Darfur can be neatly integrated into the War on Terror, for Darfur gives the Warriors on Terror a valuable asset with which to demonise an enemy: a genocide perpetrated by Arabs."- Mahmood Mamdani. lrb.co.uk/.../the-politi….

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Antisemitism forces us to confront a deeper question: What happens when truth no longer matters in public life?

When discourse abandons truth for emotional indictment, social exclusion, and majoritarian power, antisemitism—and antizionism—flourish. 2/
In the case of antizionism, this collapse of truth isn’t a side effect—it’s the method of the ideology itself.

Even if every accusation against Israel were true, it would still be antisemitic to use those claims to harass, discriminate against, and exclude Jews.