In the heat of New York City’s primary campaign for mayor in June, the New York Post broke a story about Zohran Mamdani’s previous career as a rapper. The media went wild. Rolling Stone gushed that “People Are Discovering NYC Mayoral Candidate Zohran Mamdani’s Rap Past.” The Washington Post explained how Mamdani’s rapper past prepared him for politics, while Billboard reported that “Zohran Mamdani Used to Rap—and His Catalog Has Been Surging in Streams.”
But few publications lingered on Mamdani’s praise—in rap form—for the five leaders of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF), who were convicted by a federal jury in 2008 of “providing material support” to the Hamas terror group. In 2017, Mamdani released a track called “Salaam” under the alias Mr. Cardamom, in which he declared about HLF’s leaders: My love to the Holy Land Five / You better look ’em up.
Maybe the media was blinded by the hype surrounding Mamdani. He was young, good-looking, and a rising political star. No one dug deeper into the highly significant legal milestones behind Mamdani’s allusion to the Holy Land Five.
Had they done so, they would have discovered that the Holy Land Five had also been found liable in a 2004 federal civil trial for the murder outside Jerusalem of a Jewish boy from New York City. And they might have wondered why the front-runner in New York City’s mayoral campaign would ever praise a Hamas-aligned influence network that has been slowly and deliberately infiltrating American institutions for three decades.
