Despite recent success, Zohran Mamdani still faces many challenges toward becoming mayor of New York City, particularly Islamophobia and biases against Democratic Socialists. In addition to being the Big Apple’s first Muslim candidate for mayor, he’s running against disgraced former Governor and establishment-approved sex pest Andrew Cuomo, who doesn’t miss an opportunity to provoke said establishment’s prejudices against his opponent.
But even the would-be high-profile fighters for Democracy can’t seem to treat an outsider candidate with due respect. In a New Yorker profile on Mamdani, the candidate revealed the dismissive line of questioning The Late Show With Stephen Colbert’s producers used to work around Mamdani’s belief that Israel shouldn’t be allowed to ethnically cleanse Gaza.
Mamdani appeared on The Late Show alongside New York City Comptroller Brad Lander during the June Democratic primary. The two candidates had recently endorsed each other in hopes of shutting out Cuomo, a plan that ultimately worked. Ahead of their appearance, Colbert’s producers held a prep call with Mamdani, Lander, and their aides to go over some basic political questions about their positions. It seemed to go well enough, but right before they went on stage, producers threw a couple of curveballs at Mamdani.
Per The New Yorker, hours before the segment, a group of prominent Jewish Zionists (the article only names Elie Wiesel’s son, Elisha) demanded that Colbert “grill” Mamdani on Israel. A Colbert producer thought of a “thumbs-up or thumbs-down” segment, as in “Thumbs-up or thumbs-down: Hamas. Thumbs-up or thumbs-down: a Palestinian state,” would do the trick. Mamdani was unimpressed. “I just couldn’t believe what was happening,” Mamdani told The New Yorker. “That a genocide could be distilled into a late-night game.”
Mamdani’s advisers were just as unhappy, with a senior adviser telling producers that they wondered why the producers didn’t want to ask about “the first Muslim candidate for mayor in the history of New York.” It’s an Islamophobic line of questioning foisted on Mamdani throughout the campaign, despite, as the candidate frequently tells people, he’s not running for mayor of Israel. Nevertheless, he offered an answer: “Yes, like all nations, I believe it has a right to exist, and a responsibility also to uphold international law.”
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