Billionaire hedge‑fund manager Bill Ackman trained his guns at New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani after his father’s controversial takes on “suicide bombers” and recognising them as “soldiers” went viral on social media.Ackman, responding to a post pointing out Mahmood’s stance, in an effort to target Zohran, said, “The apple @ZohranKMomdani doesn’t fall far from the tree.”The excerpts that have gone viral are from the book ‘Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror’ published in 2004 written by Mahmood Mamdani.The highlighted text read: “We need to recognize the suicide bomber, first and foremost, as a category of soldier. Suicide bombing needs to be understood as a feature of modern political violence rather than stigmatized as a mark of barbarism.”
But why did Mahmood make such a claim? Hear it from the man himself
Zohran’s father Mahmood Mamdani, who is a professor at Columbia University, had made several arguments about suicide bombers and how they should be viewed in the current political context in his 2004-published book.In an interview with Asia Society, he talked about his stance over terrorism. Mahmood said that to understand terrorism today, one needs to look beyond ideas like “self-defense” or “anti-colonial struggles” and focus on the “deeper link between state and non-state violence.”“To understand terrorism, we need to go beyond self-defense, beyond the violence of liberation movements, beyond the violence of anti-colonial struggles and liberation movements. To understand non-state terror today, we need to understand the historical relationship between state terrorism and non-state terrorism,” he said.Using this as the context, he talked about the need to “rethink” the suicide bomber, which he claimed, western media views “as a throwback to pre-modernity, either as adult irrationality or as a response of adolescents coerced by patriarchal authority.”Calling this noting “too easy and too self-serving”, Mahmood presented his own understanding of the term: “The reality is more likely the opposite; the suicide bomber is more likely born of a youth revolt than of patriarchal authority. The suicide bomber comes out of the history of the Intifadah.”His comment on calling suicide bomber a “soldier” comes in the context of prolonged political occupation and generational failure, according to the interview.He argued that unlike Vietnam war or apartheid South Africa, both of which eventually ended, the occupation in Palestine continues, becoming a “brutal reality.” “The failure of the older generation to find a humane alternative in Palestine in part explains the desperation of the younger generation, resorting to violence in politics. Even then, we need to recognize that the term suicide bomber is a misnomer. The suicide bomber is a category of
soldier
whose objective is to kill – even if he or she must die to kill,” he said.
