On the day Hamas murdered nearly 1,200 people, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani's wife, Rama Duwaji, liked multiple Instagram posts cheering on Hamas' October 7, 2023 assault. The posts weren't ambiguous policy critiques or expressions of grief for civilian casualties in Gaza. They 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.
Much of the mainstream press responded by looking for ways to change the subject.
One post, shared the day of the attack by the Instagram account "The Slow Factory," featured an image of a bulldozer breaching a barrier separating Israel from Gaza and people riding on top of a captured IDF vehicle. Text over the images read "Breaking the walls of apartheid and military occupation" and "Resisting apartheid since 1948," along with the slogan "Systemic change for collective liberation."
The People's Forum, whose posts Duwaji also liked, is part of Shanghai-based Maoist tech mogul Neville "Roy" Singham's network of nonprofits promoting pro-China, pro-Russia, and pro-Iran propaganda. She liked two posts from protests that organization led alongside the Democratic Socialists of America and allied organizations in Times Square, one day after the attack.
Duwaji also liked posts that included the phrase "from the river to the sea," a slogan widely used in pro-Palestinian activism that critics, including many Jewish organizations, say calls for the elimination of Israel.
The pattern extended months beyond October 7, Fox News reported. In February 2024, Duwaji liked an Instagram post referring to reports of Hamas rapes during the attack as a "mass rape" hoax that had been "fabricated" by The New York Times. 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 she liked say Israel is waging a "vile land grab," that the protesters who took over a Columbia University building in April 2024 were "on the right side of progress," and one called then-President Joe Biden "Butcher Biden" and said, "Your legacy is genocide, Joe."
When reporters confronted Mamdani at a press conference, he deflected with a wall of sentiment. Duwaji did not respond to multiple requests for comment, and the mayor's office would not answer questions regarding his feelings about her online activity, or whether they had discussed the October 7 attacks at the time.
My wife is the love of my life, and she's also a private person who has held no formal position on my campaign or in my City Hall.
Mamdani followed that with a careful pivot to himself:
I, however, was elected to represent all 8.5 million people in the city, and I believe that it's my responsibility, because of that role, to answer any questions about my thoughts and my policies and my decisions.
Notice what that response does not include: any condemnation of the posts. Any acknowledgment that celebrating a terrorist massacre is wrong. Any statement of his own feelings about his wife endorsing content that framed the slaughter of civilians as "collective liberation." His office issued its standard boilerplate:
Mayor Mamdani has been clear and consistent: Hamas is a terrorist organization, October 7 was a horrific war crime, and he has condemned that violence unequivocally.
He condemned the attack. He just didn't have anything to say about the woman he sleeps next to every night endorsing posts that celebrated it.
The media's response to a legitimate news story about the First Lady of the nation's largest city is itself a story worth examining.
MSNBC did not mention Rama Duwaji by name from the time the Jewish Insider report came out on Friday through Monday afternoon, according to a search of transcripts using Grabien Media. CNN only mentioned her name once during that same period, for an unrelated story.
The New York Times covered it under the headline "After Social Media Scrutiny, Mamdani Says His Wife Is a 'Private Person,'" which was widely criticized by the right. The Times then performed a familiar editorial maneuver: finding a way to make the story less about what Duwaji did and more about equivalence. The paper reported that "they were not married when she liked the posts" and that Mamdani "did not enter the Democratic primary for mayor until October 2024," framing Duwaji's social media activity as liking posts "supportive of the Palestinian cause immediately after the attacks."
"Supportive of the Palestinian cause." That is how the paper of record chose to describe posts featuring livestreamed footage of the massacre, paired with calls for Israel's elimination.
The Times then compared Duwaji's actions to those of Corinne Levy Goldman, the wife of Representative Daniel Goldman of New York, who liked or reposted social media posts from several right-wing accounts that some viewed as hateful or insensitive toward Palestinians and Black people. The Times enlisted Sophie Ellman-Golan, the director of communications at Jews For Racial and Economic Justice, to further downplay Duwaji's actions.
The comparison does not hold. Duwaji liked posts celebrating a mass murder as it was happening. The moral equivalence the Times is reaching for requires treating those as the same category of offense. They are not.
Former Obama staffer Ben Rhodes joined the effort to reframe what was, plainly, a news story:
There's a war, high prices, job losses, AI unleashed, and on and on. But Bari Weiss's CBS is on the case of the NY Mayor's wife's likes from years ago. WTF is going on.
Notice the framing. Rhodes doesn't dispute what Duwaji liked. He just argues you shouldn't care about it. And he makes it about Bari Weiss, not about 1,200 dead Israelis. A media newsletter run by former CNN employees used the fact that CBS News covered the story to put a harsh spotlight on its pro-Israel editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss.
This is the loop. Cover the story, and you're doing Bari Weiss's bidding. Ask harder questions, and you're a right-wing operative. The circle closes, and the story dies.
The press has spent years insisting that the character and values of political figures matter. That adjacency to extreme views disqualifies. That silence is complicity.
Those standards evaporate when the subject is the right kind of mayor with the right kind of politics.
Mamdani, at the time a state assemblymember, publicly criticized the Times Square rally for "making light" of Hamas' massacre of civilians, which gives him a public record of at least nominal condemnation. But the posts his wife liked weren't a slip of the algorithm. The Free Press found more than 70 Instagram posts in which Duwaji cosigned extreme positions against Israel. That is a pattern, not a mistake.
New York City has roughly one million Jewish residents. Their mayor now shares a home with someone who, in the hours after the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, hit the "like" button on posts framing the attack as liberation. The press spent a weekend mostly looking elsewhere.
The silence is the story.
