NYC's first lady liked posts celebrating Oct. 7 as Mamdani's mask keeps slipping

Zohran Mamdani built his entire path to Gracie Mansion on a carefully maintained illusion: that he was the responsible progressive, the pragmatic leftist who could thread the needle between a radical base and a city that still expected to be governed. A new investigative report from Jewish Insider cuts that illusion to pieces.

Mamdani spent the mayoral campaign distancing himself from the most radical anti-Israel elements of his leftist movement. An examination of his wife's social media activity reveals she liked multiple Instagram posts cheering on Hamas' October 7, 2023 assault.

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. This was not an ambiguous political statement. This was a thumbs-up for a massacre.

What She Liked, and When

Duwaji liked a post on Instagram that showed photos of Palestinians breaching Israel's borders and said the invasion was "breaking the walls of apartheid." Another post she liked showed Palestinians sitting on a captured IDF vehicle alongside the caption, "Resisting apartheid since 1948." Those posts were shared on the day of the Hamas attack, as The Dallas Express reports.

It is unclear when Duwaji liked the Slow Factory post, or the materials that the People's Forum, part of Shanghai-based Maoist tech mogul Neville "Roy" Singham's network of nonprofits promoting pro-China, pro-Russia, and pro-Iran propaganda, posted to Instagram on October 8, 2023.

Duwaji liked two posts from The People's Forum promoting an October 8, 2023 Times Square rally held one day after the attacks. At the time, Mamdani, then a state assemblymember, publicly criticized the Times Square rally for downplaying or "making light" of the Hamas massacre.

Read that again. While Mamdani was publicly performing outrage at a rally that minimized the slaughter, his then-girlfriend was on Instagram approving the very posts promoting it. The gap between what he says and what surrounds him keeps widening.

A Pattern, Not a Moment

This is not the first instance of scrutiny regarding Duwaji's online activity. The Jerusalem Post previously reported that she posted a tribute to Palestinian influencer Saleh al-Jafarawi, described as having known ties to Hamas, following his death in Gaza in October 2025, writing "Beloved Jafarawi" with broken-heart emojis on her Instagram story.

October 7, 2023. October 2025. The likes and the tributes keep coming. This is not a one-time lapse in judgment. It is a sustained disposition toward people and content that celebrate Hamas.

City Hall's Non-Answer

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. Rather, his team repeated his standard line on the bloody terrorist rampage.

"Mayor Mamdani has been clear and consistent: Hamas is a terrorist organization, October 7th was a horrific war crime, and he has condemned that violence unequivocally."

That is a press release, not an answer. The question wasn't whether Mamdani has a line to recite. The question is whether the man now governing the largest Jewish population outside of Israel shares a home with someone who cheered Hamas on the day it murdered 1,200 people. City Hall chose silence on that. As of Friday afternoon, Duwaji's likes of these posts remain visible to her followers. Nothing has been walked back.

The mayor's defense contrasts with his own remarks in a January interview, when he referred to Duwaji as "the best advocate" and credited her with lobbying him to close public schools for a snow day after a student reached her by email. He wants to claim she is deeply involved in his administration when it helps him. He wants to call her a private citizen when it hurts him.

Iran Tells the Rest of the Story

The social media revelation does not arrive in a vacuum. It lands alongside the most revealing moment of Mamdani's young tenure as mayor.

As a joint strike on Iran by the United States and Israel was developing, Mamdani blasted the Trump administration's decision in a post on X that was viewed roughly 20 million times. "Today's military strikes on Iran, carried out by the United States and Israel, mark a catastrophic escalation in an illegal war of aggression," Mamdani wrote.

"Bombing cities. Killing civilians. Opening a new theater of war. Americans do not want this. They do not want another war in pursuit of regime change."

The strikes, carried out on February 28, eliminated Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, along with other top political figures. Mamdani published his condemnation of the operation before the dust had settled. He found the words quickly.

He had not found them when the Iranian regime was killing its own people in the streets. Some reports suggest around 30,000 deaths from security forces cracking down on mass demonstrations inside Iran. Mamdani's silence on that was nearly total. Then the United States acted, and suddenly he had a statement ready within hours.

Senator Ted Cruz posted, "Comrade Mayor is rooting for the Ayatollah. They can chant together." Billionaire Bill Ackman added, "How is it that you can't differentiate between good and evil?"

New York City Councilwoman Inna Vernikov noted that Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, the UAE, and Bahrain all supported the operation eliminating the world's top state sponsor of terror, while New York City's mayor was "shilling for Iran."

Let that sink in. Arab states that share a neighborhood with Iran supported the operation. The mayor of New York City did not.

The Image and the Reality

Mamdani's political project has always depended on a kind of managed ambiguity. He condemns Hamas in press releases while his inner circle applauds it online. He talks about affordability while proposing a $127 billion budget that relies on potential tax increases. He positions himself as a unifying figure while his administration produces a steady drip of controversies tied to radical anti-Israel sentiment.

Inflammatory social media activity by members of Mamdani's staff and inner circle, much of it directed at Israel, has caused repeated controversy since he launched his run for mayor. This is not a series of isolated incidents. It is a pattern with a clear direction.

Mamdani, previously a state assemblyman known for his outspoken criticism of Israel, was at pains during the mayoral campaign to condemn the Hamas attacks. He now represents the largest Jewish population in the world outside of Israel. Those two facts sit in an uncomfortable tension that no City Hall spokesperson can paper over.

New Yorkers deserve a mayor whose household does not require damage control every few weeks. What they have instead is a man who says all the right words about October 7 while the people closest to him have never stopped signaling exactly what they actually think.