Mamdani--Hardly an Original Thinker
What do we know about our potentially first-ever naturalized American citizen and Shia Muslim (a member of the Shia Twelver branch)? Twelvers believe that in order for the 12th and final Mahdi to appear, true believers must foment an Armageddon.
I am talking about New York City's next possible mayor, Zohran Mamdani. He is a Shia Muslim. He has supported Hamas and Shia Iran's genocidal intentions towards both Israel and America; once founded a chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine at college; called for the "globalization of the Intifada," and is also a socialist communist. Unsurprisingly, he is a privileged guy, one who grew up as the son of Mahmood Mamdani, the Indian-Ugandan professor of Postcolonial Studies at Columbia and the son of the very talented filmmaker Mira Nair.
His politically correct ideas are hardly original.
I have watched many of Mira Nair's initially Bollywood-like films: sumptuous weddings, arranged marriages, unthinkable divorces, the constant and agonizing conflict between Indian-Ugandan-South African, and Hindu and Muslim customs versus Western rights. Originally, Nair’s films were not highly politicized but they were drenched in, almost obsessed with, identity politics, specifically with the plight of Indians, Bengalis, and Ugandans in situ and when they try to live in the United States or among white folk in the West.
I do not know how much a child absorbs from their parents. Some rebel in profound ways. Others do not. Zohran did not.
I reviewed one of her 2012 films in 2013--or twelve years ago. I am reposting it here and now.
Why did Haifa’s International Film Festival wish to honor filmmaker Mira Nair for her film The Reluctant Fundamentalist? The film is just another exceptionally well done piece of anti-American propaganda which justifies Islamic/Islamist terrorism by showing us that America harasses Muslims constantly, even Muslims as brilliant and assimilated as Nair’s “fundamentalist” hero, Changez. According to Nair, America is to blame for Pakistani fundamentalist terrorism.
Did the Haifa Film mavens really screen this film? If they did, how could they miss Nair’s agenda? Why would they wish to honor one more film that depicts America, the CIA, and American military forces as cruel, evil, and racist and which glorifies the offended dignity of innocent Muslims as a way of justifying the nihilistic terror that Islamist Muslims are unleashing, globally, first against other Muslims, second against infidels. Remember Syriana (2005), Paradise Now (2005), Kingdom of Heaven (2005), Babel (2006), The Kingdom (2007), Rendition (2007), and Amreeka (2009)?
What is wrong with the film mavens who live in Haifa, a jewel of a Jewish city and one with a large Arab Muslim and Arab Christian population? Haifa is a genuinely mutli-ethnic and multi-racial abode. No city in Israel is an “apartheid” city, but Haifa is exceptionally integrated in terms of its demographics. There is nothing like it in Gaza and there will be nothing like it in Judea and Samaria if the world prevails and ethnically cleanses Jews from their historically Jewish land.
This is truly heartbreaking: The so-called progressives and leftists—the “good” people—want to ethnically cleanse the “occupied West Bank” and East Jerusalem of its Jews—and all in the name of anti-racism. They do not demand that Arabs, including the new ones on the block, the Palestinian Arabs, allow Jews--not even the 800,000 Arab Jews who were forced to flee Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, the Maghreb--after centuries of persecution, to become citizens or even live in any of their twenty-two countries.
The Arab and Muslim world is almost entirely “judenrein,” cleansed of Arab Jews, and they are persecuting and cleansing themselves of their Christian Arabs; and yet, the “good people” still insist that such Muslim racists and ideologues are the victims, the underdogs, provoked by white—dare I write “Zionist”?-- colonialism into becoming fundamentalist terrorists.
Just like Mira Nair’s very sympathetic leading character Changez.
But do Jews and Israelis wish to be defamed year after year? Do we wish to live with the consequences of such defamation which are none other than righteous hatred, increasing isolation, and then extermination?
Mira Nair has just defamed Haifa and all Israel. She has been quoted as saying: “I will go to Israel when the occupation is gone…when the state does not privilege one religion over another. I will go to Israel when Apartheid is over.” She has tweeted that she supports “Palestine for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel and the larger Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions, (BDS) Movement.
Nair's film is a deft and emotionally dangerous piece of propaganda. Clearly, Nair cannot see the elephant in the room: Islamic and Arab gender and religious apartheid. The Islamist oppression of women and dissidents.
Like mother, like son.
The liberal jews haters and unfortunately many liberal jews have no qualms about replicating mayoral leaders of London and Leeds and others, right here in America. New York with a huge Jewish population would rather have a Jew Hater than a republican who is pro Israel . It's sickening.
Israel doesn't privilege one religion over others, everyone in Israel has freedom of religion. Yet every muslim country privileges islam over every other religion, worse, non-muslims are often persecuted and killed. The amount of gaslighting by the despicable Mira Nair and others like her is revolting. Yet they and their lies continue to be celebrated by cultural elites in the west.