Qatari patronage of his mom’s work is another piece of Zohran Mamdani’s privileged puzzle

Yes, it matters that a Qatari royal has patronized the later career of Zohran Mamdani’s film-making mom, Mira Nair: It’s another piece in the vast, hypocritical puzzle of the Democratic Socialist’s privileged life.

Nair got her BA at Harvard; Mahmood Mamdani, his PhD. They raised Zohran on Riverside Drive in a high-end complex dedicated to Columbia faculty housing and sent him to pricey Bank Street School and later to also-pricey Bowdoin College.

She had fully established herself well before Sheikha Al-Mayassa bint Hamad Al-Thani, sister to Qatar’s ruling emir, began sponsoring her work.

Nair’s 1991 film “Mississippi Masala,” starring Denzel Washington, won three Venice Film Festival awards; her 2001 “Monsoon Wedding” earned the Golden Lion at Venice; her made-for-HBO 2002 “Hysterical Blindness” won a Golden Globe for Uma Thurman.

But then her 2009 “Amelia” opened the first-ever Doha Tribeca Film Festival in Qatar’s capital, after which Al-Thani’s Doha Film Institute paid for Qataris to study at Nair’s Maisha Film Labs.

The institute then covered the entire $15 million budget for Nair’s “The Reluctant Fundamentalists” in 2012; a decade later, Al-Thani’s Qatar Creates and the state-owned Qatar Airways and Qatar Creates paid Nair for an extravagant stage adaptation of “Monsoon Wedding” as part of the 2022 World Cup festivities in the emirate.

A global creative woman winning support from a female, culturally inclined royal: Surely admirable?

Except that Qatar has a horrific human-rights record, including the deaths of thousands of laborers building the stadiums and so on for that World Cup, plus brutal treatment of the Bah’aii minority and the royal family’s backing for both Hamas and the Taliban.

Not to mention a gay-rights record as awful as that of Uganda — where his dad Mahmood, has spent much of his life and career, where Zohran was born and the site of the Mamdani family compound, where the mayoral candidate recently celebrated his wedding in a multi-day festival.

Yet the whole family condemns Israel as uniquely evil: His dad’s on record insisting, “Jews can have a homeland in historic Palestine, but not a state”; his mom pushed to ban Gal Gadot from the Oscars stage and boycotted the Haifa International Film Festival over Israels’ supposed religious discrimination — and of course Zohran has been down on the Jewish state since before he founded Student for Justice in Palestine at Bowdoin.

Zohran Mamdani has moved among international elites his entire life; bashing Israel is stylish for this set, along with a leftism deeply resentful of European colonialism yet strangely at ease with vast Third World inequalities and oppression.

No wonder he’s been such a prolific fundraiser in this race, despite his modest record of accomplishments on his own.

No wonder, too, his affinity for socialist leftism: It’s core to a world where his family came out on top, for all its endless failures to ever lift up the masses.