New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani will be honored next Monday alongside the National Iranian American Council, an organization long suspected of being the unofficial lobbying arm of the Iranian government. Both Mamdani and NIAC will receive William Sloane Coffin Jr. Peacemaker Awards recognizing their advocacy for peace and diplomacy.
Mamdani will be recognized “as a former student activist and voice for Palestinian rights on the national stage,” according to the Peace Action Fund of New York State, which is hosting the October 5 event. It wasn’t immediately clear whether Mamdani will attend the award ceremony. None of City Hall, NIAC, and PAFNYS responded to a request for comment before press time.
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Still, the proximity between Mamdani and NIAC—which has been accused of being an unregistered agent of the Iranian government—raises yet more uncomfortable questions about the mayor’s broader social and professional circles. This is especially so because the recognition comes just three months after the revelation of a planned meeting between a City Hall official and Iran’s ambassador to the UN.
NIAC, a Washington D.C.-based nonprofit that has championed a “friendlier U.S. policy toward the Tehran regime” according to the Wall Street Journal, will be receiving its Peacemaker award for “impactful advocacy against the war on Iran.” Launched in 2002 by co-founder and former president Trita Parsi, NIAC is dedicated to “promoting a greater understanding between the American and Iranian People.”
But critics have long questioned NIAC’s relationship with Tehran. In a 2020 letter, Senators Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, and Mike Braun called on then-Attorney General William Barr to launch a Justice Department investigation against NIAC and NIAC Action (its sister organization) for possible violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, identifying a pattern of what they called “troubling behavior.”
The senators pointed to a 2019 internal memo in which NIAC blamed the United States for an Iranian militia’s attack on a military base that killed an American civilian contractor and wounded several others. Kata’ib Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militia that carried out the attack, later stormed a U.S. embassy in Baghdad. The senators also highlighted tweets from NIAC and NIAC Action staffers pushing “conspiracy theories deflecting blame from the Iranian regime for shooting down a Ukrainian civilian airliner, killing 176 individuals.” (NIAC called the accusations “slanderous.”)
Parsi has faced intense scrutiny for past connections to the regime in Tehran. Discovery during a 2008 defamation lawsuit originally filed by NIAC revealed several emails sent by Parsi to then-Iranian U.N. Ambassador Javad Zari attempting to arrange meetings with Congress members. Former FBI officials would later tell journalist Eli Lake that the attempts to arrange those meetings would “require that person or entity to register as an agent of a foreign power; in this case Iran.” A U.S. District Court judge would later rule that Parsi’s statements “were not inconsistent with the idea that he was first and foremost an advocate for the regime.”
NIAC’s stance on Iran’s war with the United States, for which it is being honored, has become increasingly aggressive. One NIAC staffer, Isabella (Bella) Javidan, was spotted at antiwar protests alongside activist groups like the foreign-linked CODEPINK, blaming the war on Israeli “expansionism.” During recent congressional testimony by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Javidan interrupted the hearing, screaming, “you’re murdering my family and the Iranian people.” NIAC promoted video of her protest on Facebook and YouTube pages.
The group has previously condemned successful U.S. actions against Iran. For example, in 2020, NIAC called the assassination of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Quds Force Commander Qassem Soleimani a “profoundly reckless move that will be viewed as an act of war in Tehran.”
Iranian dissident Salman Sima, who was repeatedly imprisoned and tortured in an IRGC-controlled prison amid the government’s crackdown on student activists, told us that NIAC “always took a side in the best interest of the Islamic Republic.”
“I can say that this group doesn’t have the best interest of America in their heart, and they are the enemy of the Iranian people as well,” she said.
The PAFNYS award comes as Mamdani and his administration have faced scrutiny for their posture toward Iran. In July, Ana María Archila, commissioner of the Mayor’s Office for International Affairs, arranged a secret, unauthorized meeting with Iran ambassador and U.N. envoy Amir-Saeid Iravani. The meeting was scrapped after the State Department intervened.
Mamdani said that the meeting was “made in error” and “not one that originated from the office.” Archila remains in her position; City Hall’s delayed response to a FOIL request for her scheduling records is the subject of an ongoing lawsuit brought by Manhattan Institute.
Mamdani has said that he opposes the U.S.–Iran war “on political grounds, on moral grounds, but even just on economic grounds.” He has also described it as a “catastrophic escalation in an illegal war of aggression.” That’s a line similar to the one taken by NIAC, including in a federal lawsuit filed last week against President Donald Trump for “waging an unconstitutional war without authorization from Congress.”
Such sentiments are not unusual in the democratic socialist ecosystem from which Mamdani emerged. On February 28, the DSA’s International Affairs Committee called the Iran war an “unprovoked US-Israeli aggression,” adding that it “unequivocally condemns the attacks on Iran and violations of its sovereignty.” Some have gone further: At the DSA’s “Islamic Revolution Teach-in” in June, City College of New York professor Corinna Mullin claimed Iran’s “indigenous military industry has produced phenomenal results” and praised it for taking “a huge toll on the capacity of the US empire to impose its will.”
Several members of Mamdani’s influencer brigade have also taken sides with the Iranian regime. Christian Divyne, who participated in the mayor’s first influencer-only press conference, described those concerned about Iran’s hostile influence as both “bitch-made and delusional.” Hasan Piker, whom Mamdani previously joined on a livestream, has suggested that the Middle East would be safer if Iran had nuclear weapons. And Matt Bernstein, granted two exclusive interviews with the mayor, has implied that few moral differences exist between Israel and the Islamic Republic.
That Mamdani seems likely to be honored alongside an accused representative of a hostile foreign power is, then, part of a broader pattern. Knowingly or not, the Mamdani administration continues to find itself aligned with those friendlier to America’s enemies than to America itself.