Zohran Mamdani has come under fire after a speech he delivered outside a Bronx mosque, in which he said he wanted to “speak to the memory of my aunt who stopped taking the subway after September 11th because she did not feel safe in her hijab.”
Some took the comment to indicate he did not properly consider the nearly 3,000 who died during the terrorist attacks.
Mamdani began his speech by directly addressing commentary from fellow New York mayoral candidates Andrew Cuomo and Curtis Sliwa, who he said have each made Islamophobic statements in recent days.
“And every day, Super PAC ads imply that I am a terrorist or mock the way I eat,” he added. “Push polls that ask New Yorkers questions like whether they support invented proposals to make halal food mandatory. Or political cartoons that represent my candidacy as an airplane hurtling towards the World Trade Center.”
Instead, he chose to focus on something else: his experiences, and those of people he knows.
“I want to speak to the memory of my aunt who stopped taking the subway after September 11th because she did not feel safe in her hijab. I want to speak to the Muslim who works for our city, whether they teach in our schools or walk the beat for the NYPD,” Mamdani said. “New Yorkers who all make daily sacrifices for the city they call home, only to see their leaders spit in their face. I want to speak to every child who grows up here, marked as the other, who is randomly selected in a way that never quite feels random, who feels that they carry a stain that can never be cleaned.”
The note about his aunt struck a negative chord with many, including Lux Capital cofounder Josh Wolfe, who wrote via X, “The moment Mamdani crashed his campaign with this bulls–t. We are new yorkers. This is phony as s–t,” and a man named Greg Price, who sarcastically noted on the same platform that Mamdani’s aunt “was the real victim of 9/11.”
His comment also caught the attention of JD Vance, who wrote on X, “According to Zohran the real victim of 9/11 was his auntie who got some (allegedly) bad looks.”
“To be Muslim in New York is to expect indignity, but indignity does not make us distinct. There are many New Yorkers who face it. It is the tolerance of that indignity that does,” Mamdani also said. “Since I announced my candidacy for mayor one year ago yesterday, I have sought to be the candidate fighting for every single New Yorker, not simply the Muslim candidate. I’ve carried these indignities with me each moment of this race, doing so all the while as the first major Muslim candidate in the history of our city.”
Watch Mamdani’s speech in the video above.
