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CUOMO EMBRACES ISLAMOPHOBIA IN WANING DAYS OF MAYORAL CAMPAIGN  
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Yoav Gonen and Claudia Irizarry Aponte
October 23, 2025
The City
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_ The former governor participated in a radio interview on Thursday
where he laughed with the cohost imagining mayoral frontrunner Zohran
Mamdani, a Muslim, cheering on a future 9/11 attack against the city.
_

Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo gives his mayoral campaign kickoff speech at
a carpenters union headquarters in SoHo, March 2, 2025, Credit: Ben
Fractenberg/THE CITY

 

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At the final mayoral debate of the general election late Wednesday,
former Gov. Andrew Cuomo vowed to end the “hatemongering and
division that is tearing this city apart.”

Not 12 hours later, Cuomo participated in a conversation with the
conservative radio host Sid Rosenberg where the two laughed about a
hypothetical Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a Muslim state Assembly member
leading the race for mayor, cheering on another Sept. 11 attack.

“Any given morning there’s a crisis and people’s lives are at
stake,” Cuomo told the radio host in criticizing Mamdani, 34, as
inexperienced. “God forbid another 9/11. Can you imagine Mamdani in
the seat?”

Rosenberg responded, laughing, “Ya, I could. He’d be cheering.”

Cuomo laughed and said, “That’s another problem.”

And at a Harlem event announcing his endorsement
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of the former governor on Thursday, Mayor Eric Adams urged New Yorkers
to reject Mamdani by invoking Islamophobic dog-whistles: “New York
can’t be Europe, folks. I don’t know what’s wrong with people.
You see what’s playing out in other countries because of Islamic
extremism — not Muslims, let’s not mix this up. But those Islamic
extremists that are burning churches in Nigeria, that are destroying
communities in Germany.”

Cuomo entered the Democratic race for mayor earlier this year as a
perceived favorite, but after losing to Mamdani in the primary and
continuing to trail in polls ahead of the Nov. 4 general election,
he’s been ratcheting up his rhetoric against him.

Over months, Cuomo has repeatedly criticized Mamdani’s stances on
Israel and Gaza. But until recently, Cuomo declined to call Mamdani
antisemitic — saying in interviews
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and at a recent debate that he doesn’t know what’s in Mamdani’s
heart. In an interview on Monday, Cuomo called
[[link removed]] Mamdani’s stance on
Israel “antisemitic.”

He and some Jewish leaders
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have seized on Mamdani’s refusal to condemn the phrase “globalize
the intifada” (a term he himself has not invoked but whose use he
said he would discourage
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and his characterization as Israel’s actions in Gaza as a
“genocide,” as leading scholars on the subject
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groups
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have concluded
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At the same time, Cuomo has also boosted his attacks on Mamdani’s
Muslim bonafides, stirring the pot on longheld tensions
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between Hindus and Muslims, and going so far as to say last week that
he doesn’t think Mamdani “is representative of the Muslim
community.”

On social media, Cuomo’s campaign has been featuring dystopic,
artificial intelligence-created videos of an imagined Mamdani
mayoralty, the latest of which
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featured criminals — including a shoplifting Black man wearing a
keffiyeh — voicing their support for Mamdani’s policies. The video
was pulled down from X shortly after being posted. 

In another campaign
[[link removed]] video,
a group of Cuomo supporters who called themselves “Muslims against
Mamdani” suggested that the Democratic candidate, whose mother is
Hindu, is not Muslim enough because he is of mixed heritage.

Mamdani, who rose the ranks in New York Democratic politics in part
through his work trying to elevate Arabs and fellow Muslims to public
office, called Cuomo’s remarks with Rosenberg “disgusting” and
“racist” in an interview on PIX 11
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Thursday.

“Frankly, it’s not about me, it’s about the fact that there are
more than one million Muslims who live in New York City,” Mamdani
said. “And to have our faith be smeared and slandered by someone who
at one point was considered a leader in the Democratic primary
showcases the fact that bigotry and racism is not exclusively a
Republican problem, it’s also a problem within our own party.” 

Mamdani added, “It’s time to turn the page on Andrew Cuomo and on
those who endorse this kind of rhetoric from him as well.”

Cuomo’s remarks on Thursday drew swift condemnation from elected
officials from Gov. Kathy Hochul
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Jerry Nadler [[link removed]],
as well as Muslim leaders — including the leaders of a Bronx mosque
who welcomed the former governor to their congregation last month.

“We condemn his remarks completely, it’s very hurtful to hear,”
said Zahra Thiam, a spokesperson for Imam Mohammed Ndiaye of the
Masjid Ansarudeen Islamic Center, which hosted Cuomo on Sep. 20. The
imam later endorsed Mamdani, Thiam said.

“What Mamdani said — that it was Islamophobic — is what we all
feel. Sept. 11 was such a horrific event, it impacted all of us,”
said Thiam, noting the NYPD’s Muslim surveillance program
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and hate crimes against the community that took place as a result of
the attacks on the World Trade Center. “Mamdani is a New Yorker and
was also impacted, like all New Yorkers.”

The executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a
leading national Muslim civic group, condemned Cuomo’s remarks as
“despicable, dangerous, and disqualifying.”

“By agreeing with a racist radio host who suggested a Muslim elected
official would ‘cheer’ another 9/11, Cuomo has crossed a moral
line,” CAIR executive director Basim Elkarra said in a statement.
“This rhetoric is not only deeply Islamophobic — it’s reckless
and life-threatening to Muslim, Arab, and South Asian New Yorkers who
still live with the trauma of the post-9/11 backlash.”

At a press conference later in the day Thursday, where he received
Adams’ endorsement, Cuomo said he wasn’t the one who made the
comment. 

“That’s the host,” he said. “Go talk to the host about
that.”

Cuomo said his response about there being “another problem”
referred to an issue he’s been highlighting for weeks concerning
Mamdani’s recent appearance on the podcast of Hasan Piker, an
influencer who during a 2019 critique of U.S. foreign policy said that
“America deserved 9/11.”

“I did a press conference weeks ago and asked him to denounce that
statement and he refused. He refused,” said Cuomo. “That is an
insult to New Yorkers, and yes, I have a problem with that.”

Piker’s name never entered the conversation between Cuomo and
Rosenberg, and Mamdani did condemn Piker’s comments as
“reprehensible”
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last week at the first general election mayoral debate.

At the same time that Cuomo has ratcheted up his rhetoric against
Mamdani, he has courted conservatives
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appearing on Fox News and Rosenberg’s show several times in the past
week and openly calling on Republicans to vote for him instead of
Curtis Sliwa, the GOP candidate, claiming that a vote from Sliwa is a
vote for Mamdani. 

In turn, several prominent conservative figures — including
Rosenberg and billionaire grocery magnate John Catsimatidis, a major
GOP donor — have called on Sliwa to drop out and clear the field for
Cuomo.

Sliwa’s campaign didn’t respond to a request for comment about
Cuomo’s remarks on Rosenberg’s show.

Just as backlash was brewing over Cuomo’s comments about Mamdani, a
political action committee that’s backing Cuomo, For Our City,
unveiled a new ad that attacked Mamdani for a recent photo-op with a
controversial imam. 

The 30-second piece features the phrase “Jihad on NYC
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all caps under Mamdani’s smiling face.

The phrase is ripped from a recent New York Post headline that claimed
the imam, Siraj Wahhaj, had called for a “jihad” of Muslims in the
city in the 2000s. 

The story notes that Wahhaj specified that he was actually calling for
a gun-free march of hundreds of thousands of New York’s Muslims to
rally support for Muslims in other countries.

Mamdani wrote on X
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Thursday that one of the PAC’s biggest donors, Joseph Gebbia — who
contributed $1 million — has retweeted anti-immigrant messages.

_Additional reporting by Samantha Maldonado._

Yoav Gonen [[link removed]] is a senior
reporter for THE CITY, where he covers NYC government, politics and
the police department. [email protected]
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Claudia Irizarry Aponte
[[link removed]] is a senior
reporter covering labor and work for THE CITY. [email protected]
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* Zohran Mamdani
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* Andrew Cuomo
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* Islamophobia
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* New York City
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* elections
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