The father of socialist mayoral front-runner Zohran Mamdani helped found the so-called Gaza Tribunal—a self-styled “court of conscience” that serves as a propaganda vehicle for Hamas sympathizers seeking to criminalize Israel and the West.

Mahmood Mamdani, a 79-year-old Columbia University professor and longtime anti-Israel activist, attended the group’s inaugural meetings in London last year. The “tribunal,” which has no legal authority or judicial standing, claims to be gathering evidence against “Israeli perpetrators and Western enablers” over the war in Gaza. Its advisory council includes figures accused of close ties to Hamas and activists with a history of extremist rhetoric.

Among Mamdani’s colleagues on the panel is Ramy Abdu, a Palestinian financier and chair of the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor—a group that the Israeli government says functions as Hamas’s main operational front in Europe. After the October 7 terror attacks that left 1,200 Israelis dead, Abdu’s organization posted online that the massacre footage had been “doctored,” implying that slain Hamas terrorists were civilians—a claim widely denounced as a grotesque distortion.

The tribunal’s chairman, Richard Falk, is a former Princeton professor and ex-U.N. envoy who was barred from entering Israel in 2008 over his “hostile position” toward the Jewish state. Falk was later condemned by the United Nations itself after suggesting that the U.S. government might have orchestrated the 9/11 terror attacks.

Another adviser, Hatem Bazian, a professor at UC Berkeley and founder of American Muslims for Palestine, is currently under Senate investigation for ties to Hamas-linked organizations that helped fund Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP)—the group that organized anti-Israel encampments at colleges nationwide.

Notably, Zohran Mamdani himself founded Bowdoin College’s SJP chapter in 2013 and led boycott efforts against Israel the following year.

“This tribunal is nothing more than a cesspool of Hamas propagandists and Western apologists,” said Gregg Roman, executive director of the Middle East Forum. “Mamdani’s father is openly cavorting with people responsible for terrorism against Israel. Like father, like son.”

The Gaza Tribunal’s website frames itself as a response to “the constraints of international justice,” citing dissatisfaction with the International Criminal Court’s pace in pursuing war crimes cases against Israel. But its rhetoric has mirrored Hamas talking points, accusing Western media of “dehumanizing Palestinians” and U.S. universities of “actively supporting genocide.”

At its latest meeting this week in Istanbul, participants accused “Western corporate media” of complicity in “Israel’s crimes,” while another member—Maura Finkelstein, a former Muhlenberg College professor fired last year for anti-Israel statements—charged that U.S. higher education “actively supports Israel’s genocide.”

Financial disclosures show the tribunal’s fundraising is managed by the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ), a New York-based NGO that has received nearly $600,000 from George Soros’s Open Society Foundations. ICTJ also counts funding from Humanity United, the nonprofit of eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife Pam.

Mamdani Sr., a fixture of Columbia’s far-left academic scene, previously called for the university to boycott Israel and has used his platform to promote “decolonization” movements that paint Israel as an apartheid state.

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