Duwaji described Mansour as an artist of the “intifada”—something he was also very open about.By Jon Levine, The Washington Free BeaconNew York City first lady Rama Duwaji’s self-declared artistic “inspiration,” whose portrait she’s painted in tribute, is a radical Hamas propagandist who praised the terror group’s leaders as “great heroes,” openly celebrated the Oct. 7 attack against Israel, and has claimed that The Diary of Anne Frank is a Jewish forgery.Sliman Mansour, a Palestinian artist, was also pleased when a warlike reinterpretation of one of his paintings was used as a backdrop for an angry press conference by future Oct. 7 mastermind Yahya Sinwar, where he thanked Iran for funding Hamas.Mansour died in August after spending decades propping up violent “resistance” movements against the State of Israel.Before that, Duwaji had animated a portrait of the painter and indicated he “inspired the work that I do.”“Hi, I’m Rama, a Syrian illustrator and animator based in Brooklyn, and today I’m going to be animating a portrait of Sliman Mansour, who is a painter and sculptor that’s inspired the work that I do. Sliman is an artist of the Intifada,” said Houston-born Duwaji, the wife of Zohran Mamdani, in a video first posted online in April 2024.The second intifada, in the early 2000s, involved thousands of terror attacks against Israelis, including deadly suicide bombings on buses. It left more than a thousand Israelis dead, mostly civilians.Mansour’s work “is about the Palestinian experience under occupation, and growing up seeing his paintings, I was always really inspired by the emotion behind his portraits,” Duwaji continued.The video shows her working in a Palestinian-themed studio under a large banner reading “Artists Against Apartheid: Palestine Will Be Free”—a reference widely considered an antisemitic trope.She wears a keffiyeh-patterned headband and even lights a candle using matches from a Brooklyn Palestinian restaurant.“Sliman has been jailed twice since the start of his career,” Duwaji says proudly. “And since then, he’s inspired many artists after him, including myself.”A review of Mansour’s work, writings, social media, and public associations by the Washington Free Beacon, however, shows a decade-long career of egging on Palestinian violence against Jews and participating in it.On Oct 8—in the hours after Hamas slaughtered over 1,200 Israelis—Mansour posted on Facebook an image of his war-themed painting “Rising,” which prominently features a Palestinian fighter clasping a gun.His comments page was full of ebullient celebrations.“So timely and amazingly beautiful,” read one.On Oct. 17, Mansour posted an image of Ghassan Kanafani, a founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a longtime U.S.-designated terrorist organization, with a message of encouragement for followers—one of whom is Duwaji.“You might have heard the news through the imperialist propaganda system that the Palestinian people are currently exhausted, that they have given up the struggle, and that they are defeated by the reactionary Israel. Comrades, do not believe them. There is no end to our struggle,” the post read.“The struggle has no end,” Sliman added.In a November 2017 post to Facebook, Sliman called Hamas founders Ahmed Yassin and Abdul Aziz Al-Rantasi “great heroes.”Both men, who directed multiple terror attacks against civilians, were killed in targeted Israeli airstrikes in 2004.In 2021, Sinwar, the Hamas leader, held a press conference in Gaza to discuss a spate of violence he unleashed that year that left more than a dozen Israelis dead.Breathless live coverage from Al Jazerra remains on YouTube.“Our political ideology is clear and well-known. We are for the demise of Israel through Jihad and armed struggle. This is our ideology,” Sinwar thundered.“All thanks and gratitude to the Islamic Republic of Iran, which has not been stingy with us over the past years nor with other Palestinian resistance factions regarding money, weapons, expertise, and support in all fields,” he said later.As the terrorist chieftain ranted and raved, behind him was a large banner of a Palestinian fighter carrying the city of Jerusalem on his back.That image was a direct reinterpretation of Mansour’s painting The Camel of Bearings. Mansour said he was pleased that Sinwar and his team used his art.“They didn’t put the face of a politician but rather the face of a young resistance fighter who has become the future in the eyes of Palestinians, the resistance fighter who carries Jerusalem on his back,” he told Al Jazeera in the days after the press conference.“Using icons in different expressions is legitimate,” Mansour reflected, adding that it “didn’t bother him at all.”Duwaji described Mansour as an artist of the “intifada”—something he was also very open about.In a fawning NPR interview published after his death, he freely bragged about his participation in the violent uprising.“I participated in the first intifada,” he said, saying he had been throwing stones and whatever during the deadly clashes.In 2025 he said Palestinians had a right to pursue “armed resistance” against Israel. In 1981, Mansour was arrested for taking photographs in a military area, according to a clipping from the Palestine Liberation Organization newspaper Al Fajr, which notes that Mansour worked as a cartoonist for it.The PLO—another designated U.S.-terrorist organization—has long made use of Mansour’s pen and brush to push its agenda.His 1980 Communist-inspired “Workers’ Arms Defend the Revolution and the Masses” was first published by the Palestine Martyrs Works Society, according to the Palestinian Poster Project Archives.The group, also known as SAMED, oversaw the PLO payments to the families of Palestinians killed committing terrorist attacks against Jews.On July 31, 2024, the day Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was killed by Israel at his hideout in Iran, Mansour posted an image of his painting “Abu Jihad” to Instagram—named for an earlier terrorist leader killed by Israel.On September 28, 2024, the day after Israel evaporated Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, Mansour posted an image of his painting “The Martyr” to his Instagram account.After the Palestinian terrorist Walid Daqqa died in an Israeli prison in April 2024 after being sentenced to life for killing an Israeli soldier, Mansour met his widow and daughter a few months later, his Instagram shows.Duwaji is far from Mansour’s only fan. In the past he’s been honored by former Palestinian terrorist boss Yasser Arafat and his work was recently featured in the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art.In March 2025, Mansour was awarded the Necip Fazıl Award in Istanbul and singled out for special praise by Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.The award is named for a notorious antisemite who produced the Turkish translation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and called for the eradication of Jews in Turkey.Mansour’s Facebook page shows a long history of deranged and frequently antisemitic ranting, mostly in Arabic.He often shared unhinged conspiracy theories.“The diaries ‘I am Frank’ that they made the world famous finally turned out to be the invention of an American Jewish writer,” Mansour said in a February 2016 post, sharing a link to the widely debunked claim.“Look at how the Jewish mind works: setting up, cheating, and making profits, and the strange thing is that the world believes the lies and considers them a truthful history, while in reality, it is a forgery, a fantasy, and a deception in order to achieve the goal: material, more money, and control,” reads a top comment to the post in Arabic, which Mansour liked.In September 2015 Mansour shared a painting by Adolf Hitler, calling the Nazi dictator in a follow-up comment a “technically proficient artist.”“May God have mercy on you … oh Muhammad Hitler… you were a natural Muslim Daesh,” reads a comment, which Mansour liked. Daesh is another way of saying ISIS.In November 2016, Mansour accused Hillary Clinton of donating money to ISIS.For Duwaji, who appears to be overwhelmingly preoccupied with the Palestinian cause, it is only the latest in a long string of associations and collaborations with groups and individuals bent on the violent destruction of Jews and Israel—behavior that has continued after she moved into Gracie Mansion.She has a long history of social media posts celebrating Palestinian terrorism.On and after Oct. 7 she “liked” multiple social media posts that characterized the massacre as legitimate resistance, and she also liked a post that declared reports of Hamas sexual violence on Oct. 7 as “a mass rape hoax.”She has also used the N-word—the only comment she has ever publicly apologized for.While she is rarely seen in public appearances with her husband, who describes her as a “private person,” a beaming Duwaji was photographed inside her home at Gracie Mansion serving food to her and her husband’s dinner guest Mahmoud Khalil, the notorious organizer of the anti-Israel protests at Columbia University.Last week the Free Beacon reported on Duwaji’s work for an olive oil company dedicated to promoting Palestinian terrorism, whose farmers brag about their olive groves being watered in “martyrs’ blood.”Last month, Gotham’s first lady also served as the artist in residence at a luxury Islamic women’s retreat in Portugal, which has called for the destruction of Israel and for the country’s Jewish “oppressors” to be “cleansed” from the land.The post NYC first lady painted her ‘inspiration,’ a Jew-hating artist appeared first on World Israel News.