In a resurfaced excerpt from his 2004 book, Mahmood Mamdani, a professor at Columbia University and father of New York mayoral candidate and Islamist terror supporter Zohran Mamdani, argued for a controversial reframing of suicide bombers, stating they should be seen as soldiers rather than barbarians in the aftermath of the 9/11 Twin Tower terror attack.
The excerpts, from his book Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror, have gone viral. In them, Mamdani writes, “Suicide bombing needs to be understood as a feature of modern political violence rather than stigmatized as a mark of barbarism. We need to recognize the suicide bomber, first and foremost, as a category of soldier.”
Zohran Mamdani’s dad Mahmood wrote this 3 years after 9/11 pic.twitter.com/OAvVEqj6NJ
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In a subsequent interview with the Asia Society, Mamdani elaborated on his stance, arguing that understanding non-state terror requires examining its link to state violence. He dismissed common Western media interpretations of suicide bombers as “a throwback to pre-modernity.”
Calling those views “too easy and too self-serving,” Mamdani presented his own analysis, stating, “The reality is more likely the opposite; the suicide bomber is more likely born of a youth revolt than of patriarchal authority. The suicide bomber comes out of the history of the Intifadah.”
He further justified his “soldier” classification by pointing to the prolonged Israeli occupation of Palestine, which he described as a “brutal reality.” He argued that the “failure of the older generation to find a humane alternative” led to the desperation of the young.
“Even then, we need to recognize that the term suicide bomber is a misnomer. The suicide bomber is a category of soldier whose objective is to kill – even if he or she must die to kill,” Mamdani said in the interview.
(Source: Times of India)
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