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Zohran Mamdani’s scholar father was among the founders of the Gaza Tribunal, a group one critic likened to “a cesspool of London-based Hamas terrorists.”
The group is calling for “Israeli perpetrators and Western enablers” to face consequences over their actions in the Gaza Strip, The Post has learned.
The group’s website says it seeks to collect evidence against Israel regarding the war in Gaza sparked by the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks which left 1,200 Israelis dead and over 200 captured as hostages.
Mahmood Mamdani, 79, attended the inaugural “preparatory” meetings of the “symbolic court of conscience” in London last year.
Despite its lofty description, the Gaza Tribunal does not have any judicial mandate and no power to try legal cases.
Mamdani, a professor at Columbia University’s Department of Anthropology who pushed for the school to boycott Israel, joins Ramy Abdu, a Palestinian financier who has been accused of close links to Hamas terrorists on one of the advisory councils of the new group.
The Israeli government has claimed members of Abdu’s non-profit Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor are the “main operatives” for Hamas in Europe.
After the October 7 atrocities, the group claimed on X, “The crime scene has then been doctored & assault rifles appear to have been added to the bodies,” referring to a video of Gazan terrorists killed by IDF soldiers.
“These individuals may have been civilians who crossed the fence after its collapse. Their killing as they surrendered is an act of extrajudicial execution that constitutes a war crime,” they claimed.
Gregg Roman, executive director of the Middle East Forum, an independent non-profit, claimed the group was like “a cesspool of Hamas terrorists.
“Mamdani’s father is openly cavorting with people responsible for terrorism against Israel,” said Roman in an interview with The Post from Israel Tuesday. “Like father, like son.”
The chairman of the board of Euro-Med, Richard Falk, is also among the members of the Gaza Tribunal.
Falk is an emeritus professor of international law at Princeton who was appointed a former United Nations special envoy to Palestine to document human rights abuses in 2008.
But Israel refused to allow him to enter the country, deporting him once he reached the Tel Aviv airport in December over his “hostile position toward” the country, according to reports.
In 2011, Falk was condemned by then-UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon for his “preposterous” comments questioning whether the 9/11 terrorist attacks were orchestrated by the US government, according to reports.
Hatem Bazian, an anti-Israel professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at University of California Berkeley, is also an advisor to the Gaza Tribunal.
Bazian is linked to American Muslims for Palestine which “helped to incubate and fund the development of Students for Justice in Palestine” which organized anti-Israel encampments at universities across the country last year, according to a Senate committee that is investigating the group.
Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic frontrunner in the New York City mayor’s race, co-founded a chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine at Bowdoin College in 2013 and organized boycotts of Israel on campus a year later.
Donations for the Gaza Tribunal are being handled through the International Center for Transitional Justice, a New York-based human rights group that received nearly $600,000 from the Open Society Foundations, part of the non-profit empire run by progressive billionaire George Soros, according to public documents.
ICTJ has also received backing from Humanity United, a nonprofit funded by billionaire eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife Pam.
Mamdani Sr. attended the two-day London conference last November to help lay the groundwork for the Gaza Tribunal, according to the group’s website. Among the 100 attendees were US activist and former independent presidential candidate Cornel West and Canadian activist and author Naomi Klein, according to the Gaza Tribunal website.
“The tribunal’s formation reflects growing frustration with the perceived constraints and delays in formal international justice systems, such as the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC), where cases regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have been slow to make progress,” the group said on its website.
At its most recent meeting this week in Istanbul, a participant condemned “Western corporate media’s complicity” in dehumanizing Palestinians. Another, Maura Finkelstein, said that universities in the US have “actively supported Israel’s genocide.”
Finkelstein, a former anthropology professor at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Penn., was fired for her anti-Israel views last year.
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