Council Member Hudson condemns Islamophobic attacks on Mayor Mamdani and Muslim New Yorkers

Councilmember Hudson, followed by Brewer.

Thank you.

I generally do not engage with trolls and bigots, particularly online, but there are moments when silence is not an option.

The repeated attacks directed at Mayor Zoran Mamdani, Councilmember Shahana Hanif, Councilmember Yusef-Salaam, and Muslim New Yorkers more broadly, which includes our own staff here at the council,

demand to be called out for what they are, Islamophobic and racist.

It is one thing to disagree with an elected official's policies.

It is another to invoke the horrors of September 11th to smear a Muslim elected official who was nine years old when those attacks took place.

To suggest that Mayor Mamdani or any Muslim New Yorker bears responsibility for the actions of extremists is not political disagreement.

It is Islamophobia, it is racism, and it is dangerous.

Our city knows the devastation of 9-11 too well to allow its memory to be weaponized against an entire faith.

We lived through what weaponization looks like.

Muslim, MENA, and South Asian New Yorkers

surveilled, detained, and harassed in the years that followed, treated as suspects instead of as neighbors, simply for how they looked or prayed.

The victims and survivors of that day deserve to be remembered with dignity, not used as a vehicle for hatred.

My colleagues and their allies cannot continue to disguise their own prejudice as policy disagreement or political partisanship.

You're not fooling anyone.

In fact, you are hurting countless New Yorkers.

Every New Yorker should be able to look at any member of this body, regardless of political persuasion, and see someone who respects them.

Our disagreements as elected officials can be sharp, they can be political, they can be deeply felt, but there is a line between political disagreement

and dehumanizing an entire community.

That line has been crossed time and time again, and this needs to stop.

Thank you.

Thank you.