Rama Duwaji, New York City's first lady and wife of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, celebrated Palestinian terrorists on social media over a period spanning years, including a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine who hijacked commercial airplanes, according to a Washington Free Beacon review of her past accounts on X and Tumblr.
The posts, which date from 2012 to 2017, reveal a pattern far broader than a single youthful indiscretion. Duwaji shared content glorifying Leila Khaled, who participated in plane hijackings in 1969 and 1970 and once threatened to detonate a grenade mid-flight. She was 20 years old when she posted the Khaled content in September 2017. She was 17 when she tweeted about another PFLP figure. She was 15 when she used a racial slur on X.
The Free Beacon connected the accounts to Duwaji through identifying details across platforms. A spokeswoman for Mamdani said Duwaji had "never engaged with or met" the individuals referenced in the posts.
The scope of the material is worth laying out plainly, because the defense that inevitably follows stories like these depends on people not reading past the headline.
In September 2017, Duwaji shared an image of Khaled alongside the quote:
If it does good for my cause, I'll be happy to accept death.
That same month, she posted a stamp image and the caption:
We salute the valiant freedom fighters of Palestine.
In March 2015, when she was 17, Duwaji retweeted a post referencing Shadia Abu Ghazaleh, a PFLP figure who participated in the bombing of an Israeli bus and died in 1968 when one of her own bombs exploded. The post called Abu Ghazaleh the "first palestinian woman to fight in resistance after 1967 occupation," tagged for International Women's Day.
In December 2017, she shared an image captioned as showing a Palestinian demonstrator sewing a Palestine Liberation Organization flag before a protest during the First Intifada, which lasted from 1987 to 1993 and killed about 200 Israelis.
In July 2015, she reposted a statement on Tumblr that attacked American soldiers directly:
*taps mic* American soldiers fighting in imperialist wars are not brave nor are they fighting for anyone's freedom.
The post continued: "They are mercilessly slaughtering 3rd world civilians and fighting to maintain American hegemony." In December 2015, she reposted content referencing al Qaeda.
And on February 2, 2013, when she was 15, Duwaji posted on X using a racial slur.
Duwaji is 28 years old. Some of the posts were made when she was a teenager; others when she was a young adult. The instinct from sympathetic quarters will be to wave this away as youthful rebellion, the kind of thing everyone posts before they know better.
That framing has a problem: the posts span five years. They aren't a single edgy reblog from a 14-year-old who just discovered political Tumblr. They represent a sustained engagement with content that celebrated people who bombed buses, hijacked planes, and killed civilians. By September 2017, Duwaji was 20 and saluting "valiant freedom fighters" while sharing the words of a woman who threatened airline passengers with a grenade.
There is a difference between an impulsive post and a worldview. Five years of consistent content looks a lot more like the latter.
This is not the first time Mamdani's orbit has drawn scrutiny for associations with figures who celebrated violence against Israelis. Reports earlier this month indicated Duwaji had liked Instagram posts related to October 7. Mamdani himself dined this month with Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia activist who said "we couldn't avoid" the Hamas attack and called certain positions "very racist."
When author Susan Abulhawa described the Hamas attack as "spectacular" and referred to Jewish Israelis as "Jewish supremacist vampires" and "rootless soulless ghouls," Mamdani called her rhetoric "reprehensible." Give him credit for that single word. But one denunciation does not build a firewall when the pattern keeps repeating from closer and closer to home.
The spokeswoman's statement that Duwaji "never engaged with or met" the terrorists she posted about is a curious defense. No one alleged she had tea with Leila Khaled. The issue is that the first lady of America's largest city spent years publicly celebrating people who killed civilians in the name of Palestinian liberation. Whether she met them is irrelevant. She amplified them.
Consider the standard that operates in every other direction. A Republican candidate's spouse found to have shared content praising militant groups, used a racial slur online, and called American troops imperial murderers would face wall-to-wall coverage demanding accountability. Opposition research firms would have surfaced it before the primary. Editorial boards would call it disqualifying by association.
For Mamdani and Duwaji, the rules are different. New York's political class will treat this as a nuisance story, a right-wing outlet digging through old posts. The machinery of institutional sympathy will frame Duwaji as a young woman whose views evolved, whose teenage Tumblr shouldn't define her, whose husband's progressive bona fides earn the benefit of the doubt.
But the content speaks plainly enough. Bus bombings. Plane hijackings. Grenade threats. Dead Israeli civilians. American soldiers slandered as murderers. All of it posted, reposted, and shared across multiple platforms over half a decade by the woman who now represents New York City alongside its mayor.
New Yorkers can decide for themselves whether that deserves the benefit of the doubt or something closer to an honest answer.
