Douglas Murray: Mamdani smears Cuomo for allegedly talking to Trump —and yet associates himself with Mahmoud Khalil

“Democratic socialist” Zohran Mamdani is trying to smear one of his rivals by association.

The Democratic mayoral nominee claimed Wednesday that former Gov. Andrew Cuomo recently spoke to President Trump by phone.

Mamdani claimed that the two men had been “conspiring about the fate of this city.”

For his part, Cuomo has denied that he has even had a phone call with the president.

But so what if he had?

Is the president of the United States — a man who won the popular vote last November — so fringe that no candidate for mayor of New York should even speak with him?

That seems to be Mamdani’s view.

Keep away from fringe, wacko figures like, er, the president of this country.

But if Mamdani is so keen on guilt by non-association, why not apply the same standard to him?

To that end, it would be good to know why Mamdani has been so happy to advocate for, associate with and even campaign alongside Columbia University.

‘A moral victory’

Readers will remember that Khalil was the former student who was weirdly living with his wife in student accommodations but whose main occupation seemed to be leading student protests at Columbia since October 2023.

It is Khalil’s group — Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) — that declared the Oct. 7 massacre “a moral, military and political victory” and declared that as an organization, CUAD was “fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization.”

After discovering that Khalil — a foreign national — had lied on his visa application, praised terrorists and organized unrest in New York, ICE detained Khalil.

He promptly became one of the great poster boys of the anti-American left.

They decided that nobody in America will be free until Mahmoud Khalil is free.

They decided that Khalil had done nothing wrong and was ­indeed a free-speech martyr.

It’s funny the people some folks are willing to make into folk ­heroes.

Since his release from ICE detention, Khalil has been playing the same sob story as his wife did while he was in custody — claiming that America had been exceptionally mean to him.

Apparently all he wanted to do was to study in the US. Something he appears to have spent almost zero time actually doing — preferring the path of agitation.

‘Had to reach’

Now, in an interview out this week, Khalil has once again exposed his real views and intent.

In an interview with Ezra Klein of the New York Times, he talked about why he came to America in the first place.

He said he was attracted to “the quality of education” in this country, knew about Columbia because of its reputation in “Palestinian circles” and was pleased to get a scholarship in 2018.

He didn’t exactly reward this country for the honor and opportunities it gave him.

In fact, he seems to have found one of the most radical campuses in America to be not radical enough for him.

“The anti-Palestinian sentiment at Columbia was very obvious,” he now claims — a statement so deranged that you wonder whether Khalil knows the difference between up and down, earth and sky.

But it is his statements about Hamas and the October 7 massacre that are most disgusting. Asked about his reaction to the events of that day, he said: “It felt frightening that we had to reach this moment in the Palestinian struggle.”

Apart from asking who the “we” is in that sentence, I’d love to know why Khalil thinks that raping women and massacring young people at a dance party is some kind of inevitability.

According to Khalil, “We [again] couldn’t avoid such a moment.”

‘Palestinians are here’

Pushed lightly on why it was necessary to murder babies and kidnap pensioners, Khalil went on to explain that the problem was that the Israelis were trying to make a peace and normalization deal with the Saudis.

Something that would have added to the extraordinary success of the Abraham Accords that had been signed with other Arab countries.

Khalil thinks the idea of “normalization” is appalling.

In his view, the Palestinians “are not being heard” and so the atrocities and barbarism of October 7 were an “attempt to tell the world that Palestinians are here.”

That’s certainly one hell of a way to tell people.

‘It was not inevitable’

In case it isn’t obvious, this is pure apologism for Hamas.

Moderate, peace-loving Palestinian voices comprehensively refute Khalil’s evil view. For instance, the proud American, Gazan-born Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, said yesterday, “Khalil invoked the repetitive and tired idea that the October 7 attack by Hamas was an inevitability, when the truth is far more straightforward and needs to be told by Gazan voices and those who are impacted by the war.”

“October 7 was a choice, not an inevitability! A choice that two psychopaths made from within Hamas’ military wing, Sinwar and Al-Deif. It was not inevitable that Gaza had to be the source of the worst single-day attack on the Jewish people since the Holocaust.”

He went on: “Hamas squandered billions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives for a fraudulent resistance narrative.”

Unfortunately, Khalil is one of many arrivals in this country who have pushed that fraudulent narrative.

The same people who claim, as Khalil went on to claim in his interview with Klein, that the bloody and murderous Second Intifada (2000-2005) was a mostly “peaceful uprising.”

So, Mr. Mamdani, if Gov. Cuomo is to be smeared for having the audacity to even be reported to have spoken to the US president, what are we to make of you knowingly and repeatedly associating with a terrorist mouthpiece?

What are the voters of New York to think about a candidate for mayor who is so happy to advocate for terrorists for years and associate himself even now with someone who makes such excuses for terrorism?

Any candidate for mayor who thinks President Trump is a more reprehensible figure than a Hamas apologist should be nowhere near the running of this city.