One doesn’t need to be the Oracle of Delphi to foretell the coming of the vile Zohran Mamdani as the next mayor of New York. It’s almost unbelievable.
Mamdani’s father is Mahmood Mamdani, the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government and Professor of Anthropology and Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at — you may have heard — Columbia University. That is all too believable.
Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal carried Tunku Varadarajan’s review of Professor Mamdani’s new book, the aptly titled Slow Poison. Varadarajan writes:
Mahmood Mamdani has written a startling book. Startling, not because of the writing—which is often repetitive, tediously autobiographical and awash with anticolonial pieties—but because “Slow Poison” is an apologia for Uganda’s Idi Amin, a bloodthirsty tyrant like few others in modern history.
From 1971, when he declared himself president after overthrowing President Milton Obote, to 1979, when he himself was overthrown, Amin (1928-2003) ruled Uganda with the support, at various times, of Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi and even Israel—which had been so desperate for allies that it held its nose and courted the Ugandan strongman. His regime was characterized by rampant corruption and vicious human-rights abuses; it’s been estimated that some half-million people were killed during his rule. Many called him the Butcher of Uganda.
But never mind all that. “I ask the reader,” Mr. Mamdani writes, “to shed certain media-driven preconceptions before reading this book.” The first “is that Amin was a Hitlerite presence in Africa.” Not true, Mr. Mamdani insists. Amin’s “Hitlerite proclamations” and his use of “public buffoonery as political performance”—declaring himself King of Scotland, for instance, and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular—were a populist strategy designed to erase all vestiges of colonial rule from Uganda. Amin’s atrocities were palatable, we are asked to believe, being in the service of a fledgling postcolonial nation.
Varadarajan doesn’t mention Amin’s support of the terrorists who hijacked the flight full of Jews flying from Paris to Tel Aviv in 1976. The miraculous IDF rescue operation at the Entebbe airport resulted in the killing of Jonathan Netanyahu by the terrorists.
Jonathan was the older brother of Prime Minister Netanyahu. Jonathan led the rescue operation, now retroactively codenamed Operation Yonatan after him. Jonathan is buried in the military cemetery at Mount Herzl in Jerusalem, where visitors continue to pay their respects to his heroism and sacrifice. The younger Mamdani promises to arrest Prime Minister Netanyahu if he turns up in New York under Mamdani’s rule.
Varadarajan doesn’t mention that Professor Mamdani’s book is published under the Belknap imprint of the Harvard University Press. HUP is a respectable press, but the Mamdanis bring disgrace to everything they touch. The title A Slow Poison reminds me of the famous quote from Measure For Measure: “Our natures do pursue, Like rats that raven down their proper bane, A thirsty evil; and when we drink, we die.”
