Hamas-supporting Qatar funded films by Mamdani’s mother and is now promoting his campaign
Qatar, which supports Hamas, has financially supported film and stage projects by socialist Zohran Mamdani’s anti-Israel movie director mom — and one of its royals is now promoting her son’s mayoral campaign.
The Post has discovered.
Sheikha Al-Mayassa bint Hamad Al-Thani, sister of the ruling emir, and the state-funded cultural institutions she oversees, have supported Mira Nair and her artistic endeavors since at least 2009, including a personal invitation to participate in the cultural program for the 2022 World Cup.
Since mid-June, Sheikha Al-Thani has been promoting Mamdani’s mayoral run on social media, highlighting positive polling on Instagram and posting fire emojis under a TikTok video of him embracing Nair.
“They are buying someone willing to be bought, and at their convenience, they will demand what they want,” warned Danielle Pletka, a foreign policy expert at the American Enterprise Institute think tank, speaking about Nair’s connections to Qatar. “They need a coalition of people who will endorse the ideology they promote: sometimes it will be Islamism, sometimes antisemitism, sometimes anti-Israel.”
The Post found extensive ties between the Queens assemblyman’s mother and the Qatari elite, including:
- In 2009, her film ‘Amelia’ premiered at the first-ever Doha Tribeca Film Festival in the Gulf regime’s capital.
- From 2010 until 2014, the Doha Film Institute — founded by Sheikha Al-Thani — funded a “bootcamp” to train Qatari students in screenwriting and filmmaking at Nair’s Maisha Film Labs in East Africa and Doha, according to both organizations’ websites.
- The Doha Film Institute also financed the entire $15 million budget of Nair’s 2012 film “The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” one of the first movies it produced. The film, which had previously struggled to secure financing, tells the story of a Pakistani immigrant mistreated by U.S. authorities after 9/11, and it opened the Doha Tribeca Film Festival that year.
- Nair’s film “Nafas,” about historic Qatari pearl divers, was the first movie commissioned by the Qatar National Museum, which Sheikha Al-Thani chairs. It premiered at the museum’s 2019 opening, which Nair attended, and remains one of its flagship exhibits. Its budget has not been disclosed.
- A company Nair founded in her native India did $102,000 of business in 2022 and 2023 with event management firm Agence Publics Qatar, which shares its chairman with the Qatar Engineering & Construction Co., a key player in Qatar’s wealth-generating oil and gas industry, according to LinkedIn and publicly available import records collected by supply chain-monitoring firms.
- The country’s most high-profile support for the filmmaker came in 2022, when state-owned Qatar Airways and Qatar Creates — another initiative of the sheikha’s to promote Qatar as a cultural destination — produced an extravagant Nair-directed stage adaptation of her Golden Globe-nominated film “Monsoon Wedding” as part of the World Cup celebrations.
Qatar’s sharia-inspired social policies, which prohibit women from marrying or holding governmental roles without male guardian approval and can punish homosexuality with torture or even death, clash with the progressive images Nair and Mamdani have cultivated.
The filmmaker has presented herself as a voice for the “marginalized,” while her son has pledged to make New York an “LGBTQIA+ sanctuary city.”
Thousands of migrant workers died while building World Cup facilities in Qatar’s 125-degree heat under conditions human rights activists termed “modern day slavery.”
But in an interview with Qatar Happening during the soccer tournament and the ‘Monsoon Wedding’ musical’s run, Nair only praised the regime and her royal patron.
“Her Highness Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad Al-Thani has loved the movie but also supported the inception of this musical over several years,” Nair said.
Nair has boycotted the Haifa International Film Festival over Israeli policies she says “privilege one religion over another.” However, Qatar bans non-Muslims from public worshiping, and the State Department has warned the country is “pursuing a number of actions which will ultimately lead to the eradication” of its Bahá’i religious minority.
Despite these well-documented abuses, as recently as November 2024, Nair was photographed attending a prestigious exhibit opening at the Qatar National Museum. There is no record of her speaking out against the regime’s notoriously poor human rights record.
The filmmaker did not respond to repeated requests for comment, nor did the Qatari entities that financed her work.
Mira Nair, seen here with Qatar’s minister of culture, Dr. Hamad Bin Abdulaziz Al-Kuwari, receives support from the controversial nation despite its social policies restricting women from marrying without a male guardian’s approval and punishing homosexuality with torture or death. Michael Loccisano
Critics have labeled Qatar as “America’s ultimate ‘frenemy,’” due to its support for anti-U.S. Islamist organizations while also hosting a U.S. airbase. Jonathan Schanzer, executive director of the nonprofit Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, described it as “both arsonist and firefighter”: supporting destabilizing groups like Hamas and the Taliban, then offering mediation services on behalf of the West.
Schanzer expressed concern that only “one degree of separation” could exist between Qatar’s ruling elite and the mayor of America’s largest city, given how Qataris have used their wealth to bribe former New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez and European Parliament figures.
“The Qataris are aggressively engaged in international diplomacy, international investment, and all their actions are designed to expand their funds and influence,” he warned.
There is no publicly available evidence of a direct connection between Mamdani and the Qatari regime. The assemblyman insisted he had never traveled to Qatar or received direct financial support from its institutions.
However, his campaign would not answer whether he received such assistance from his mother or had any contact with the sheikha, and declined to directly criticize the Al-Thani family’s rule—only affirming his “belief in universal human rights and the freedom to advocate for justice worldwide.”
“The attempt to weaponize his mother’s career against him is an insult to voters who care about actual issues, not contrived distractions,” stated campaign spokeswoman Dora Pekec.
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