Few seem to care that Zohran Mamdani’s wife is unhinged.
Few seem to care that Zohran Mamdani’s wife is unhinged.
O ur news media tell us the spouses of public figures are fair game for investigative reporting.
Just ask any conservative Supreme Court justice.
Yet, for some strange reason, this generally accepted convention tends to run only one way.
Take Rama Duwaji, the wife of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. She’s an unhinged ultra-left-wing radical, a superfan of anyone dedicated to the mission of humbling the United States and erasing Israel from the map, yet she is nevertheless a media darling.
A shiny penny says this would not be the case were she a radical in the other direction.
Duwaji just wrapped up attending an overseas wellness retreat known as the “Women Sanctuary,” her third visit this year, hosted by organizers who have called for “abolishing Israel” and “cleansing” it of Jews. To be fair, if this were an isolated incident, it’d be silly to hold Duwaji responsible for the retreat organizers’ rhetoric, as if she were answerable for every word they posted.
The thing is, Duwaji is constantly in the company of these types of people, to the point where one feels justified drawing assumptions. The retreat is only the latest in a long string of choices and preferences on Duwaji’s part that all point in one direction.
Recall that she skipped America’s 250th-anniversary festivities this year for a “Plants of the Quran” retreat in Mallorca, hosted by the same “cleanse Israel of Jews” group. She also co-hosted a “Mary in the Quran” retreat in Corsica, which recast the Virgin Mary as a “Palestinian woman giving birth under occupation.”
Duwaji and her husband staged a big to-do this year where they hosted agitator and anti-Israel activist Mahmoud Khalil and his family at Gracie Mansion on the anniversary of his 2025 detention by ICE.
Khalil, who is not a U.S. citizen, helped lead the 2024 anti-Israel protests at Columbia. He has called the U.S. government a “killing machine” and once bragged: “The top echelons of the United States government are coming after me; that means I’m doing something right.” Or he is simply an unbelievably lousy guest. Try telling that to Duwaji and Mamdani, both of whom treat him as a martyr for the cause.
And let’s not forget about Duwaji’s social media presence, including a spree of “likes” for posts celebrating and justifying the October 7, 2023, massacre of Israeli civilians. One liked post called the New York Times’ reporting on the October 7 sexual violence against Israeli women a “mass rape hoax” that had been “fabricated.” Other liked posts described the attack as resistance, accused Israel of a “vile land grab,” called the Sde Teiman prison a “concentration camp,” and labeled former President Joe Biden a “butcher” over his support of the U.S. ally.
Neither Mamdani nor his wife has offered any serious defense of those “likes,” aside from maintaining that she did all this in her capacity as a “private citizen.” That defense has so far satisfied most of the press.
Duwaji also provided an illustration for a collection of essays edited by the activist Susan Abulhawa, who called October 7 “a spectacular moment that shocked the world.” Abulhawa has also called Jewish Israelis “rootless soulless ghouls” and Israel a “cultureless, rootless human aberration in the form of a manufactured ‘nation.’” And she’s complained that “we live in the time of Jewish supremacist demons.”
There is more from Duwaji, including social media activity from when she was much younger: sharing a tribute to a Palestinian bomb maker, sharing the message “F*** #TelAviv. Shouldn’t exist in the first place. They’re occupiers,” and boosting allegations that U.S. soldiers are guilty of “mercilessly slaughtering 3rd world civilians” to maintain “American hegemony.”
There is quite a body of evidence for Duwaji’s radicalism, all of it pointing to her intense hatred of Israel and her more than admiring regard for actual terrorists and murderers, including those intent on doing the United States harm.
Yet, for reasons that are probably as clear as you suspect, you will find hardly a word of this radicalism described in, say, the New York Times or the Washington Post. The scrutiny has come almost entirely from right-of-center outlets.
Perhaps the Times cannot bring itself to look too closely at a potential ideological ally, especially when Duwaji’s view of the war lines up so neatly with the paper’s own framing of it.
Or perhaps the news media simply do not have the resources and manpower to pursue the matter, having committed the bulk of their investigative assets to tracking which flags Mrs. Alito flies above the family home on holiday weekends.