New York’s First Lady Loves Hamas 

Order Jamie Glazov’s new book, ‘United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny, Terror, and Hamas’: HERE.

I have a special affection for Gracie Mansion, the large handsome federal-style house, built in 1799 alongside the East River on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, that since 1942 has served as the official residence of the mayor of New York City. When I was born, my parents lived right down the block from it, in a building on East 89th Street called Gracie Gardens. When I was still a baby we relocated to Queens, and over thirty years later, after many more moves, I found myself living again at Gracie Gardens, where I got a remarkable deal on a first-floor co-op.

It was wonderful. East 89th Street between East End and York Avenue was, in my view, not only the most pleasant block in the whole city but also the safest. The mayor, after all, lived right down the street. At that time the mayor was the great Rudolph Giuliani, and even though 9/11 hadn’t yet happened, making him “America’s Mayor,” he was already a hero to me, having transformed New York, to exaggerate only slightly, from hell to heaven. It was remarkable that I could step outside at three in the morning, walk half a block, pass Gracie Mansion, and stroll along the waterside without a hint of fear. In those moments, New York was, thanks to Mr. Giuliani, sheer bliss, everything that a civilized city could be.

I left Gracie Gardens, and the U.S., 28 years ago. But I’ve continued to follow New York politics. Not long after Giuliani saved the city, I was stunned to see the voters put in office – for two terms, mind you – the execrable, corrupt Bill de Blasio, whose policies were precisely the sort that had led New York into disaster. But nothing could have prepared me for the election, twenty-four years after 9/11, of a man who professed to be both a socialist and a devout Muslim. To me, it was a testament to several things: just how quickly memories – and outrage – can fade; just how quickly a generation goes by, swelling the electorate with young people who lack historical memory; just how effectively the legacy media, even now, can brainwash voters; and just how ignorant Americans still are, by and large, about Islam. When Mamdani took his oath of office as mayor, he took it on the same book whose commandments the 9/11 terrorists had been obeying when they steered their airliners into the Twin Towers.

It didn’t take long for the neighborhood around Gracie Mansion to turn from a serene, out-of-the-way little corner of Manhattan into a war zone. The occasion was a protest against Islam on March 7. But it wasn’t the critics of Islam who committed violence. No, they were peaceful. The violence was the work of Muslim counter-demonstrators, who actually hurled bombs at police, including at least one item that the police described as “a potentially deadly IED.” Only two of the Muslims, Emir Balat and Ibrahim Kayumi (who had said they wished to kill more people than the 2013 Boston Marathon bombers), were arrested. And here’s the kicker: when Mamdani publicly spoke about the fracas the next day, he said, first, that “hate has no place in New York City” – which, given his point of view, was presumably a comment on the anti-Islam protesters – and then, second, made a pro forma denunciation of violence, while dancing neatly around the fact that the purveyors of violence were his brothers in faith.

The headlines about the Gracie Mansion melee had barely died down when a new set of Mamdani stories hit the news. On March 10, Jon Levine of the Washington Free Beacon reported that two nights earlier, the mayor had welcomed Mahmoud Khalil, a Syria-born Algerian national, along with his wife and son, as dinner guests at Gracie Mansion. In the wake of the Hamas invasion of Israel, Khalil, head of the Columbia University Apartheid Divests movement, which calls for “death to America,” had led protests in support of Hamas at Columbia University and taken part in the occupation of the Barnard library. In March of last year, after families of Hamas victims sued Khalil and his cronies on charges of working in cahoots with Hamas, the Trump administration confiscated his visa and green card, took him into custody, and sought to deport him, an effort stymied two months later by a federal judge who ordered Khalil released. Next stop: a convivial dinner with the Mamdanis at Gracie Mansion.

Other stories that broke in March focused on Mamdani’s wife, Rama Duwaji. Since her husband became a public figure, Duwaji has maintained a relatively low profile, but it has become clear in a very short while that she is a force to be reckoned with in her own right. Born in Houston, the daughter of a pediatrician and a software developer, both from Damascus, she was raised largely in the Persian Gulf region, received an art degree from Virginia Commonwealth University, and enjoyed artist residencies in Beirut and Paris before moving to New York to earn a master’s degree at the School of Visual Arts. But the wonderful life and education that America has given her has not exactly made her a cheerleader for the country of her birth.

As the Free Press revealed on March 7, she “liked” a 2024 Instagram post by a Palestinian who dismissed reports of rapes by Hamas during its invasion of Israel as a “mass hoax.” More revelations ensued. According to a March 12 article by Jon Levine, Duwaji had “provided a drawing for ‘A Trail of Soap,’ an essay in the collection Every Moment is a Life compiled by Susan Abulhawa.” Levine explained who Abulhawa is: after a long career of “supporting terror and demonizing Jews,” she reacted to the Hamas massacres of October 7, 2023, with an op-ed in Electronic Intifada (an anti-Semitic cesspit) in which she described the atrocities as “spectacular,” called the Hamas butchers “freedom fighters,” and wrote that their butchery had “inspired not only the whole of Palestine, but the oppressed masses worldwide, to imagine what freedom looks like; what resistance is possible; and what life is attainable.”

Since that day, Abulhawa has continued to sound off in precisely the same fashion, referring last September to “Jewish supremacist demons” and writing on X this past December that the people of Israel are “rootless, soulless ghouls.” She has also used words like “cockroach” and “parasite” and “vampires” and “sons of Satan” to refer to Israelis and their supporters. In response to inquiries, a Mamdani spokeswoman said that Duwaji has no relationship with Abulhawa and that the illustration had been commissioned by a third party. Well, they might not know each other, but it seems to me, as a lifelong freelancer, highly unlikely that a drawing by Duwaji would have found its way into a book edited by a person with Abulhawa’s background unless the two women were ideological soulmates.

Another recent article, this one by Will Bredderman of Jewish Insider, noted that while Mamdani had “spent the mayoral campaign distancing himself from…radical anti-Israel elements,” his wife had chosen a different path. On Instagram, she clicked “like” on a number of despicable posts. One showed a bulldozer used by Hamas to breach the Israeli-Gaza barrier and contained the text: “Breaking the walls of apartheid and military occupation.” On another post, a photograph of Hamas terrorists in a captured Israeli army vehicle was accompanied by the text “Resisting apartheid since 1948.” Both posts also included the words “Systemic change for collective liberation.” Two other items, posted by Neville “Roy” Singham, identified by Bredderman as a “Maoist tech mogul,” and also “liked” by Duwaji, showed pro-Hamas protests held in Times Square on the day after the assault on Israel. Both featured the slogan “from the river to the sea”; one of the two photos depicted “signs and banners declaring ‘WHEN PEOPLE ARE OCCUPIED, RESISTANCE IS JUSTIFIED’ and ‘RESISTANCE AGAINST OCCUPATION IS A HUMAN RIGHT.’” On March 22, the New York Post reported that Duwaji provided artwork for an anti-Israeli campaign by the Democratic Socialists of America, and two days later the same newspaper revealed that Duwaji’s artwork had been used in a lesson on activism for seventh-graders at a Brooklyn middle school that had, at the same time, “temporarily blocked a Holocaust survivor from speaking to students.”

Duwaji’s subversive social-media activity and her use of art to push radical causes are not a new development. She didn’t become a Hamas fan, in other words, as a result of October 7 or start commenting on international affairs because of her husband’s entry into politics. Back in 2017, she posted a photo on Tumblr of the terrorist Leila Khaled, head of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), with the caption: “If it does good for my cause, I’ll be happy to accept death.” In 2015, Duwaji reposted a tweet celebrating another terrorist, Shadia Abu Ghazaleh, who died in 1968 when a bomb intended to blow up a Tel Aviv building exploded accidentally in her home. In another 2015 post, Duwaji wrote online that “American soldiers…are mercilessly slaughtering 3rd world civilians and fighting to maintain American hegemony.” Also in 2015, she retweeted a post reading: “F*** #TelAviv. Shouldn’t exist in the first place. They’re occupiers. You celebrate them.”

There’s a long list of similar items written or retweeted or liked by Duwaji over the years. They add up to a vivid picture of a fanatic hater of America and of Jews. Her husband’s only defense of her reprehensible online conduct has been that she is a private citizen. Nonsense. She is the First Lady of New York and she lives in Gracie Mansion. Any government that had a proper concern for its own security and a reasonable contempt for its own enemies would yank her out of that hallowed place and prosecute her to the fullest extent of the law. Nor can any sensible observer of the Mamdanis accept for a moment the preposterous claim that Duwaji’s politics differ significantly from her husband’s. These two are plainly birds of a feather – their contempt for America and Jews is undoubtedly a big part of what brought them together – and, owing to the foolishness of New York City voters, they will remain ensconced in Gracie Mansion for four years. And unless Mamdani undergoes some kind of road-to-Damascus moment, the idea of walking along the East River at three A.M. will soon seem – if it doesn’t already – as insane as holding a gay wedding in what’s left of Gaza.