(L to R) JD Vance and Zohran Mamdani.
Credit: Reuters
Vice President JD Vance attacked Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic front-runner in the New York City mayor’s race, using a social media post Saturday to taunt him for his comments about his aunt feeling unsafe after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
Mamdani, who is running to become the city’s first Muslim mayor, gave a 10-minute speech Friday to address what he and others have characterized as a rise in Islamophobia during the campaign. In his speech, he grew emotional as he recounted how his aunt stopped taking the subway after the Sept. 11 attacks “because she did not feel safe in her hijab.”
Vance and Republicans pounced on his comments, arguing that his focus should be on the victims who died during the attacks.
“According to Zohran the real victim of 9/11 was his auntie who got some (allegedly) bad looks,” Vance wrote on social media, posting a video of Mamdani’s comments.
Vance’s attacks follow similar ones regularly hurled by President Donald Trump, who has threatened to arrest Mamdani and has called him a communist. (He is a democratic socialist.)
Vance also criticized Mamdani last week for meeting with a well-known imam in New York’s Brooklyn borough. The imam, Siraj Wahhaj, who leads Masjid at-Taqwa in Bedford-Stuyvesant, was an unindicted potential co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center terrorist bombing. (The imam was never charged in the case, and The New York Times reported that the list Wahhaj appeared on was criticized by some former terrorism prosecutors as being overly broad.)
Mamdani said in an interview on MSNBC on Saturday that Vance’s comment about his aunt was inappropriate.
“This is all the Republican Party has to offer,” Mamdani said. “Cheap jokes about Islamophobia so as to not have to recognize what people are living through, attempts to pit peoples’ humanity against each other.”
Mamdani attended the Sept. 11 memorial last month and has expressed sorrow over the people who died in the attacks. He has also talked about what it was like growing up in New York City after the attacks, when Muslims faced racial profiling, police surveillance and hate crimes.
Mamdani compared Vance to his closest rival in the race, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, arguing that they practiced the same “politics of division.”
Trump had a conversation with Cuomo about the race, according to three people briefed on the call. Trump has also criticized Curtis Sliwa, the Republican candidate, and said that he would prefer a one-on-one race between Mamdani and Cuomo, who is running as an independent.
After Mamdani gave his speech Friday outside a mosque in the Bronx borough, he posted a nearly seven-minute video on social media sharing a similar message. It was viewed more than 9 million times.
His speech touched many Muslim Americans across the country, with some comparing it to former President Barack Obama’s speech on race in 2008. Mamdani said it was painful to hear Cuomo laugh when a radio host said that Mamdani would “be cheering” if there were another Sept. 11-style terrorist attack on New York City.
Mamdani said that Muslims had long faced bigotry in the shadows.
“I will not change the faith that I’m proud to belong to,” he said. “But there is one thing I will change: I will no longer look for myself in the shadows. I will find myself in the light.”
Mehdi Hasan, a Muslim journalist, said that it was wrong for Vance to mock Mamdani for talking “publicly and emotionally about their experience of racism,” especially when Vance’s wife is the daughter of Indian immigrants.
The tone of the mayor’s race has grown increasingly tense during its final weeks. Rep. Elise Stefanik, a Republican and ally of Trump’s, called Mamdani a “jihadist” for failing to urge Hamas to give up their weapons on Fox News. He later clarified during a debate that he believed that they should do so.
On Saturday, Ellie Cohanim, a former U.S. deputy special envoy to combat antisemitism under Trump, posted a photo on social media of the twin towers burning on Sept. 11 and a man falling from one of the buildings.
“Never Forget,” she said. “Vote Andrew Cuomo and save our city.”
Democrats criticized her post, calling it “cruel” and an effort to politicize the tragedy.