I’ve written before about Mayor Mamdani’s wife, Rama Duwaji. Several news outlets did stories about her social media posts after the 10/7 attack on Israel. Her social media activity was undeniably pro-Hamas at a moment when Hamas was murdering Israeli civilians by the hundreds.
The posts liked by Rama Duwaji, a Syrian-American artist, unambiguously celebrated the terrorist attack, which saw nearly 1,200 Israelis and foreign workers killed, thousands wounded, 251 civilians and military personnel kidnapped and numerous episodes of sexual assault…
The Instagram post shows stills from participants’ livestreamed footage of the attack: first of a bulldozer that terrorists used to breach the barrier separating Israel from Gaza, the second of attackers riding on a captured IDF vehicle. Printed on the former are the words “Breaking the walls of apartheid and military occupation,” and on the latter “Resisting apartheid since 1948,” and on both the slogan “Systemic change for collective liberation.”
Another story found she had also liked an Instagram post referring to the “rape hoax” of Israeli women.
In February 2024, a few months after The New York Times published an investigation into the sexual violence that occurred on October 7, 2023, Rama Duwaji, the wife of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, liked an Instagram post referring to the “mass rape” hoax that was “fabricated” by the paper.
That was just one of more than 70 Instagram posts uncovered by The Free Press in which the First Lady of New York City cosigned extreme positions against Israel. A sampling of the posts say Israel is waging a “vile land grab,” and the protesters who took over a Columbia University building in April 2024 were “on the right side of progress.” Another post liked by Duwaji, who identifies as Syrian but was born in Houston, Texas, calls for the International Criminal Court to issue an arrest warrant for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu—which Mamdani has said he would honor if the Israeli leader steps foot in New York City on his watch. One post she liked referred to then-President Joe Biden as “Butcher Biden,” and said, “Your legacy is genocide, Joe.”
The mayor’s response to all of this was to say that his wife was a private person and not part of his campaign. Apparently there’s nothing wrong with supporting Hamas so long as you don’t draw a government paycheck.
Yesterday, the Washington Free Beacon dug into some older social media posts, going back to the time when Duwaji was a teenager, but also some from when she was a young adult. What they found is that her later pro-Hamas views are all of a piece with who she was as a young person.
New York City’s first lady, Rama Duwaji, glorified terrorist violence in a wide range of posts made on social media when she was a teenager and in her early 20s, celebrating members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terror group and the First Intifada, a Washington Free Beacon review of her old X and Tumblr accounts found.
Duwaji, 28, posted a photo to her Tumblr account in September 2017, when she would have been 20 years old, of the infamous Palestinian terrorist Leila Khaled. Under the username “diimashq,” she echoed one of Khaled’s most famous statements.
“If it does good for my cause, I’ll be happy to accept death,” the caption read.
Khaled, a longtime member of the PFLP, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, participated in plane hijackings in 1969 and 1970. Between the two hijackings, she underwent several cosmetic surgery procedures to disguise her identity. In the 1970 hijacking, Khaled threatened to detonate a grenade unless the pilots let her into the cockpit. Today, she is revered by terrorists and their allies as the first woman to hijack a plane.
Look, I think you can carry some kinds of symbolism too far, but in this case the symbolism seems, well, really symbolic.
Just to spell this out…The first Muslim mayor of New York City, scene of the worst terror attack in US history– an attack that involving hijacking planes and flying them into buildings, is married to someone who deeply identified with the first woman hijacker. She identified with this person to the point of quoting her line about dying for the cause.
And Duwaji wasn’t a kid at the time she posted this, she was 20-years-old. She’s only 28-years-old now, so this wasn’t that long ago. To put it another way, she and Mamdani started dating in 2021, just four years after she posted this. I wonder what they talked about? What did they have in common?
In the posts, Duwaji celebrated other members of the terrorist PFLP as well. In March 2015, when she was 17, New York City’s future first lady reposted a tweet on International Women’s Day praising the terrorist Shadia Abu Ghazaleh. It shows a photo of Ghazaleh, a leading PFLP figure who participated in the bombing of an Israeli bus and led several other terrorist attacks, posing with a rifle. She was killed in 1968 when a bomb she was building in her home—which she intended to use to blow up a building in Tel Aviv—exploded accidentally.
It’s really hard to believe that her support for terrorism wasn’t something she and the mayor had in common. As I noted before, he has denounced mass murder by Hamas but when asked if the group should disarm, Mamdani never really gave a strait answer.
Finally, Ryan Grim was mocking the idea that someone’s tweets from their teen years could be considered politically relevant now. He’s, unfortunately, being pretty dishonest about it by pretending the story in question is about things she wrote when she was 15:
The Free Beacon is now going after Mamdani’s wife for posts when she was 15.
This is what happens when you feed this beast.
— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) March 19, 2026
As mentioned above, she was 20 when she was simping for a terrorist hijacker. In any case, many people pointed out that Grim had a different view when the issue was Kavanaugh’s teenage behavior.
Who fed the beast first? https://t.co/FCZj2lt3R7 pic.twitter.com/8EQOV9R0kK
— Chris (@chriswithans) March 19, 2026
If Duwaji had written some overheated tweets in high school and that was the end of it, I’d agree with Grim that it unfair and maybe even silly. The problem for Duwaji is that her extremism continued into adulthood up to just a few years ago when she was either dating or married to the mayor. In short, there’s no evidence she’s changed much since she was 15.
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