With just over a week until Election Day in New York City, mayoral front-runner Zohran Mamdani hit back at JD Vance, accusing the vice president and members of his party of pushing “cheap jokes about Islamophobia.”
On Friday, Mamdani delivered an emotional address on Islamophobia outside a mosque in the Bronx. During his remarks, he referred to his late aunt, whom he said had stopped taking the subway after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, because she felt unsafe wearing her hijab.
Vance then reposted a video of Mamdani’s address on X, writing, “According to Zohran, the real victim of 9/11 was his auntie who got some (allegedly) bad looks.”
During an exclusive one-on-one interview with Ayman Mohyeldin on Saturday’s “The Weekend: Primetime,” the democratic socialist said the vice president was attempting “to pit people’s humanity against each other.”
“This is all the Republican Party has to offer,” Mamdani told Mohyeldin. “Cheap jokes about Islamophobia, so as to not have to recognize what people are living through.”
Mamdani’s Friday address came shortly after one of his opponents, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, laughed along as a conservative radio host joked that Mamdani would cheer on another Sept. 11–style attack.
“Whether it’s JD Vance or it’s Andrew Cuomo, it is the same kind of politics,” Mamdani said. “It’s a politics of division. The reason that I called Andrew Cuomo Donald Trump’s puppet is not just because they share the same billionaire donors. It’s not just because they see themselves in each other. It’s also because their vision of leading a city, or a country, is one where you are only able to build a constituency by pitting it against another one, and that’s what we’re seeing in this moment.”
He said the comments give people “a glimpse into reality for Muslims across the city each and every day.”
Mamdani said that throughout the campaign, his religion has been used by his opponents to “terrify New Yorkers as to the prospect of having a Muslim mayor,” and that Friday’s speech came about after he “decided that it was simply too much.” “It was too much to think of these as the acts of desperate men looking to salvage the little power that they still had,” Mamdani continued. “It was, in fact, a reflection of Islamophobia within our political system that has become so endemic that when we hear it, we do not know from which party it comes. We just know that it is a fact of life in our city’s politics.” Mamdani said he chose to address the comments head-on because “if we do not allow ourselves to be shocked by this kind of racism, then we are, in fact, accepting it as a fact of life, and that is something that I will never accept.” You can watch Mohyeldin’s full interview with Mamdani in the clip at the top of the page.
Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW.
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