Reporter: What do you think of Sid Rosenberg using the term cockroach?
Mamdani: So Muslims in this city, for almost as long as we have been in this city, have had to deal with those with power and platform dehumanizing us — to be called animals, insects, to be called a jihadist mayor….
This language is both painfully familiar to me as a Muslim New Yorker, but also as someone who was born in East Africa, and it is difficult to hear. There’s also a reminder that the silence that often greets this kind of bigotry, this kind of Islamophobia, is what allows it to fester — the temptation to treat it as politics as usual.
And I want to be very clear that I have far more urgent work in front of me than indulging the provocations of a man who trades in outrage and, frankly, fears the city that we are looking to build — one where every single New Yorker who lives here can call it their home.
I am not ashamed of who I am. I am not ashamed of my faith. I am not ashamed of being the first Muslim mayor in the history of our city. And there’s no amount of racism that will change the way in which I lead or the commitment that I hold to each and every New Yorker in this city.