Federal funds earmarked for increasing “the security and prosperity of the United States” bankrolled the work of the father of New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani that would seem to do the opposite.
Columbia University’s Middle East Institute applied for the Department of Education’s “National Resource Centers and Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships” money based on its employment of professors including Mahmood Mamdani, who it called senior faculty, highlighting his recent work on “colonialism” and “native as political identity,” and his “courses on Islam, state violence, and international relations.”
The application said that Columbia should get taxpayer money because its international professors would shape the views of Americans who would go on to work for the United States government. It “specifically trains students for employment in positions in the government (State, Defense, Homeland Security, Intelligence agencies, and Congressional Offices),” it said.
The Middle East unit at the lavishly endowed private university asked for more than $1 million from taxpayers to fund the professors’ salaries and other costs for four years under the National Resource Centers program, and $1.6 million for “institutional payments” and “subsistence allowance” for students under the Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowship. Between 2018 and 2024, Columbia University as a whole received nearly $12 million in grants from both programs, with nearly $4 million specifically for the Middle East program, according to data compiled by spending watchdog OpenTheBooks.
That means even as Columbia this week agreed to pay a $200 million settlement to the federal government and $20 million to Jewish employees it wronged with its culture of anti-Americanism and antisemitism, the federal government has been paying it to shape federal employees and diplomats.
When it comes to the Karl Marx-quoting prospective mayor of New York, who would not condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada,” the son’s views appear to have been shaped by his father. In May 2021, Professor Mamdani tweeted: “This is not a conflict between Israel and Hamas. We are witnessing something far more meaningful, the birth of the Third Intifadah against settler-colonialism!”
Even though the United States took in the elder Mamdani after he was cast out of Uganda by a dictator and made him a wealthy university professor, Mamdani’s 2020 book, “Neither Settler Nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities,” criticizes America as oppressive, according to an interview with The Nation. The book reaches back hundreds of years to complain of “the genocide of Native Americans by Europeans” and conversion of Muslims by Christians, and casts “the founding of the state of Israel” as an act “of extreme political violence undertaken to create ethnically homogeneous states.”
He seemed to suggest to The Nation that the cure for Hamas violence was giving in to terrorists.
“You can fill an unlimited number of jails [with] perpetrators, but it will not bring a solution to the problem unless you acknowledge that the problem is more political than criminal, and that when it comes to political conflicts and political violence, adversaries mobilize around issues,” Mamdani wrote.
In his 2004 book “Good Muslim, Bad Muslim,” he made a similar argument, writing: “Suicide bombing needs to be understood as a feature of modern political violence rather than stigmatized as a mark of barbarism.”
Columbia University. Selcuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images
The professor sits on an advisory council whose goal is “to awaken civil society to its responsibility and opportunity to stop Israel’s genocide in Gaza” — a position that conflicts with that of the U.S. under Democrat and Republican administrations.
Columbia University also used Professor Dr. Joseph Massad as a selling point for federal money. Massad called Hamas’ October 7 attack “a stunning victory of the Palestinian resistance.” According to the Middle East Forum, students said Massad “takes a categorically anti-U.S. tack at every possible opportunity,” and lists “the West’s various cultural crimes ad nauseam.”
George Washington University, located near the State Department’s headquarters, received millions of dollars in Middle East Foreign Language and Area Studies funding from the Department of Education, even as a lawsuit said it let an anti-Israel activist group operate out of its international affairs school, leading to rampant antisemitism on a campus where more than one in four students is Jewish.
Prosecutors said in 2019 that a Texas-born woman charged with spying for Iran had her radicalization “accelerated while she was in graduate school” at George Washington University, where she earned a master’s degree in its Middle East Studies program.
Also in 2019, the first Trump administration threatened the University of North Carolina and Duke University for their use of the funds, writing that “It seems clear foreign language instruction and area studies advancing the security and economic stability of the United States have taken ‘a back seat’ to other priorities at the Duke-UNC CMES.” But little seems to have changed sector-wide.
OpenTheBooks CEO John Hart said that the Department of Education’s persistent funneling of millions of dollars for professors who cultivate anti-American sentiment, using funds intended to do the opposite, shows that the National Resource Centers and Foreign Language and Area Studies program, if not the department as a whole, should be abolished.
“Professor Mamdani’s embrace of faddish, faculty lounge DEI theories on ‘decolonialism’ illustrates why the Department of Education needs to be eliminated or dramatically downsized,” Hart said. “I support Professor Mamdani’s free speech rights, and the rights of his son to call for ‘seizing the means of production,’ but that does not mean either are entitled to advance their radical views with taxpayer subsidies.”
