Zohran Mamdani’s Father Said Abraham Lincoln Inspired The Holocaust

Americans may be shocked by Zohran Mamdani’s radical politics. But the communist upstart’s views wouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone familiar with his father.

Mahmood Mamdani, a professor at Columbia University, claimed on a panel at the Jaipur Literature Festival in New York in 2022 that Hitler was inspired by Abraham Lincoln, that the antisemitic Nuremberg laws were patterned after American laws, and that “the Nazi political project was shared by the allies.”

The discussion centered around the release of his book, “Neither Settler Nor Native: The Making And Unmaking Of Permanent Minorities,” which “explores the nature of the nation-state, and the path to a reimagined, decolonized future.”

Mahmood Mamdani began by saying that “America is the genesis of what we call settler-colonialism” around the world. He goes on to say that Adolf Hitler got the idea of the Holocaust from President Abraham Lincoln:

“With the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln generalized the solution of reservations, they herded American Indians into separate territories. 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.”

Mahmood Mamdani also said that Nazi Germany’s racist and antisemitic Nuremberg Laws were “patterned after American laws.”

Moreover, “The Nazi political project was shared by the Allies, and that political project was to turn Germany into a ‘pure’ nation.”

“When the Allies defeated the Nazis and went into Eastern Europe, they began to create ‘pure’ nations. To ethnically cleanse Eastern Europe of Germans — move them back into Germany. One crime doesn’t wipe out another.”

Mahmood Mamdani’s book reveals a blatantly Marxist philosophy: “There are two kinds of identities, there is the identity of the oppressor and the identity of the oppressed,” he said.

He argues that “The nation state is what prevents us from living together.” This is because “The majority precedes democracy.” The tension between citizen and subject, or majority and minority, is an inherent consequence of colonialism:

“I argue that nationalism and colonialism are not two different things. We normally think of two kinds of nationalism, good nationalism and bad nationalism. Good nationalism brought us together and bad nationalism targeted other minorities. The important thing to realize is that these two things happen at the same time, they are two sides of the same coin,” he stated.

In order to eliminate oppression, Mamdani argues that we need to dismantle “colonialist architecture,” stating that “the tribes must take charge and the tribes must be sovereign.”

In an interview with the New York Times, the elder Mamdani stressed that Zohran is “his own person.”

“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.”

Zohran’s mother, the director Amrit Nair, disagreed: “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.”

Zohran Mamdani self-identifies as a democratic socialist and has espoused numerous radical socialist policies, including freezing the rent on a million apartments, raising the minimum wage to 30$ by 2030, making child care and the bus system free, replacing police with teams of mental health professionals, and establishing city-run grocery stores.

PolitiFact recently rebuffed President Donald Trump’s claim that Zohran Mamdani was a communist. But, as The Daily Wire reported, the expert they cited was himself a longtime socialist.