Photo: Mark Peterson/Redux
New York just weathered one of the ugliest political seasons of the last 50 years, with multiple public figures pumping out literally thousands of divisive, hateful messages about Muslims that were seen and heard by millions. Unfortunately, the bigotry has continued postelection and will poison our city until and unless a vocal majority demands it come to an end.
On the night of Zohran Mamdani’s election victory, Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, posted congratulations on social media, writing, “New Yorkers faced a clear choice — between hope and fear — and just like we’ve seen in London — hope won.” But Khan, the first Muslim mayor of London, knows all too well that even after hope wins, hatred hangs around like an angry drunk in an alley, spoiling for a rematch.
“Any decent New Yorker, certainly any Jew, should hate this bastard,” WABC radio’s morning host, Sid Rosenberg, recently told listeners in a rant against Mamdani that the station not only aired but excerpted and pushed out on social media. Two days before Thanksgiving, Rosenberg was at it again: “This punk is now the mayor. This little bitch,” he spat. “Now he’s putting together this transition team, which looks more and more like the Iraqi soccer team.”
These comments are typical of the sort of bigotry the station aired throughout the campaign. I asked WABC’s owner, billionaire and former Republican mayoral candidate John Catsimatidis, why he allows it. “You know what I said to Zohran? I said to him, ‘Look, before November 4, there was war. After November 5, let’s settle down and forget about the past and go forward,’” Catsimatidis told me.
I asked whether he plans to rein in the hate speech on his station. “I would not allow any hate speech,” Catsimatidis promised, and I will take him at his word.
It would be nice to believe that New York’s problems are confined to one radio station and a troubled broadcaster who has frequently gotten himself fired, but politicians who know better have generated similar garbage. The losing campaign of ex-governor Andrew Cuomo, who chuckled along when Rosenberg suggested during an interview that Mamdani would cheer if another 9/11 attack happened, created and posted — but then quickly took down — an overtly racist ad that included a Black man wearing a keffiyeh while going on a shoplifting spree.
“It was an ad that was created by a social-media personality, a comedian who came in at the very end, who put it together, and it was put up. And as soon as it was brought to my attention, other senior people on the staff’s attention that it was up, it was immediately pulled down because it hadn’t been approved,” Cuomo’s campaign adviser, Melissa DeRosa, told me. “It hadn’t gone through the right legal channels. And so that was a mistake, and we acknowledged it at the time.” The problem, of course, is that the ad was created in the first place.
“The depth to which they were willing to go to polarize the city, to polarize the Jewish community, to inflict real fear in the Jewish community, I think, is inexcusable,” Morris Katz, a strategist for Mamdani, told me. “Andrew Cuomo, at the top of his lungs, for six months, with millions of dollars behind the effort, was essentially telling Jewish New Yorkers that this person is an existential threat to your safety. And eventually, that’s going to break through, to a degree. It was a real organized, deliberate, cruel misinformation campaign that penetrated certain parts of the Jewish community in New York.”
The political ads were part of a deluge of online messaging, mostly on X, that only accelerated as Election Day approached. “We found a huge spike in online hate and fearmongering targeting Muslims in the aftermath of Mamdani’s primary win, blending racism, anti-Muslim bigotry, red-baiting, and anti-immigrant sentiment into one dangerous narrative,” Raqib Hameed Naik, the executive director of the Washington-based Center for the Study of Organized Hate, told immigrant-oriented news website Documented. The center issued a report after studying 6,669 public social media posts about Mamdani in a 17-day window during the campaign and found that just under 2,000 of the, “frame Islam itself, not any policy detail, as a public threat.”
In posts that racked up hundreds of millions of views and other forms of engagement, “Muslims were portrayed as threats to national security, incompatible with democracy, or as agents of an imagined foreign agenda,” Naik said. He’s talking about messages like the one right-wing agitator Laura Loomer posted the night Mamdani won the primary — “There will be another 9/11 in NYC and @ZohranKMamdani will be to blame” — which got more than a million views.
“We know from experience that this kind of online demonization and dehumanization doesn’t stay online,” Naik told Documented. “It creates a permissive environment for real-world harm.”
Real-world harm is exactly what a Texas man named Jeremy Fistel promised before he was arrested, extradited to Queens, and charged with making a series of graphic, terroristic threats against Mamdani and his family. “I get messages that say, ‘The only good Muslim is a dead Muslim.’ I get threats on my life … on the people that I love. And I try not to talk about it,” Mamdani said at an emotional September press conference, placing some of the blame on his political opponents. “I’m characterized by those same rivals as being a monster, as being ‘at the gates,’ language that describes almost a barbarian looking to dismantle civilization,” he said. “Part of this is the sad burden of being the first Muslim candidate to run for mayor.”
Something similar happened when Khan, the mayor of London, first ran in 2016, defeating a Conservative Party opponent whose closing argument to voters was that “London stands on the brink of a catastrophe,” next to a photo of a bus blown up in a notorious terrorist attack. Khan went on to win by 13 points and has been reelected twice. As one Conservative activist noted, the party was blowing “a dog whistle in a city where there’s no dog.” It must also be noted that Khan continues to require as much security as King Charles III and has recently been the target of a surge in anti-Muslim online hate, according to a report commissioned by the Greater London Authority.
The lesson from overseas is that bigotry’s defeat is never final: People of goodwill must always be ready to speak up, again and again, to drown out the stale rants of the haters with the voice of a diverse, tolerant democracy.
