Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., is condemning a New York City radio host’s reference to Mayor Zohran Mamdani as a “Radical Islam cockroach.”
Sid Rosenberg, a host on 77 WABC, asked President Donald Trump in a social media post earlier in the day on Monday to “put this little antisemite in his place!”
“Calling @NYCMayor a ‘Radical Islam cockroach’ is dangerous and dehumanizing,” Schumer wrote on X. “It is a disgusting display of bigotry and Islamophobia that should receive universal condemnation. This type of rhetoric has no place in NYC or America.”
Rosenberg also called Mamdani a “Jihadist America hating mayor” who has “spit” in Trump’s face.
“His over the top criticism of the Maduro capture, ICE, Bibi and now this great operation in Iran is too much for most of us,” Rosenberg said. “Bottom line is he’s an America hating, Jew hating, Radical Islam cockroach running our once beautiful city.”
Mamdani told reporters that he has more important work than indulging a man who “trades in outrage,” although he cautioned against dismissing Rosenberg’s comments as “politics as usual.”
“To be called animals, insects, to be called a jihadist mayor, to be called a cockroach, this language is both painfully familiar to me as a Muslim New Yorker but also as someone who was born in East Africa,” the mayor said. “And it is difficult to hear, it is also — there is also a reminder that the silence that often greets this kind of bigotry, this kind of Islamophobia is what allows it to fester.”
The New York chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, in a news release, called on WABC to drop Rosenberg after his latest anti-Muslim attacks on Mamdani. In a statement, CAIR-NY Executive Director Afaf Nasher said:
“Mr. Rosenberg’s latest vile, racist attacks on Mayor Mamdani are completely unacceptable and completely unsurprising. Mr. Rosenberg has a long history of such comments, from comparing Black women to apes to now comparing New York’s first Muslim mayor to a cockroach. WABC should not host the program of such a hateful, slanderous bigot.”
CAIR previously called for Roseberg to be dismissed for his remarks on the 9/11 terror attacks and said Rosenberg never should have been hired because of his past remarks about Black women.
A co-host on the conservative talk radio station’s morning show, Rosenberg has defended his comments in many other X posts.
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