US Vice President JD Vance on Sunday mocked New York City mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani, after the Democrat focused on the fears and indignities suffered by Muslims in the US after the September 11, 2001 attacks.
“According to Zohran the real victim of 9/11 was his auntie who got some (allegedly) bad looks,” JD Vance wrote on X.
Vance’s comment came after Mamdani on Friday vowed to further embrace his Muslim identity in response to growing attacks by former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and his surrogates that Mamdani characterized as “racist and baseless.”
Encircled by faith leaders outside a Bronx mosque, Mamdani spoke in emotional terms about the “indignities” long faced by the city’s Muslim population, choking back tears as he described his aunt’s decision not to ride the subway after the September 11 attacks because she didn’t feel safe being seen in a religious head covering.
Earlier, appearing on a conservative radio station, Cuomo appeared to laugh along at host Sid Rosenberg’s suggestion that Mamdani would “be cheering” another 9/11 attack. “That’s another problem,” Cuomo said in response to the host’s comment.
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At a news conference later Friday, Cuomo accused Mamdani of “playing the victim” for political purposes and denied that Islamophobia existed on a wide scale in New York.
According to Zohran the real victim of 9/11 was his auntie who got some (allegedly) bad looks https://t.co/UGeKANSAH2
— JD Vance (@JDVance) October 25, 2025
In a separate video published on Saturday, Mamdani — who has previously mourned the victims of the 9/11 attack and attended the annual memorial service for them — said: “The dream of every Muslim is simply to be treated the same as any other New Yorker. And yet, for too long, we have been told to ask for less than that and to be satisfied with whatever little we receive. No more.”
Political commentator Mehdi Hasan, who is Muslim, denounced the vice president for his tweet attacking Mamdani, and alluded to Vance’s Indian-American wife, writing: “Imagine being married to a Brown woman and having mixed-race kids and then publicly mocking other Brown people as they talk publicly and emotionally about their experience of racism. Vance is just a bad person.”
Scott Jennings, a right-wing pundit who frequently appears on CNN, posted: There was one big thing missing from Zohran Mamdani’s emotional remarks about 9/11: Any mention of the VICTIMS of the worst terror attack on US soil. What are we to infer from this?”
Mamdani, a state lawmaker who, backed by the Democratic Socialists of America group, won the Democratic nomination for mayor this year, has been accused throughout the campaign of equivocating about Islamist terror attacks, as Israel’s war against the Hamas terror group in Gaza — which Mamdani has characterized as a “genocide” — has taken an outsized role in the race.
Mamdani has said he got his start in politics by organizing pro-Palestinian activism and that the Palestinian cause is “central to my identity.” Before running for mayor, he identified as an anti-Zionist and voiced support for the so-called Holy Land Five, activists who are in prison for funding Hamas.
The state lawmaker was widely criticized for declining to condemn the chant “Globalize the intifada!”, though he later said he would “discourage” it. Similarly, he initially declined to call for Hamas’s disarmament when prompted, then later said he “of course” thought the terror group should disarm.
He has also distanced himself from chapters of the DSA that celebrated Hamas’s October 7 attack, in which terrorists invaded Israel, killing some 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages, starting the Gaza war. Mamdani’s own statement in the wake of the attack declined to name the terror group, and only levied specific criticisms at the Israeli government. He later condemned Hamas and described the onslaught as a “horrific war crime.”
Pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel demonstrators rally near Columbia University in New York on November 15, 2023. (Bryan R. Smith / AFP)
In recent days, Mamdani has also been criticized for a photograph with Brooklyn imam Siraj Wahhaj, who was named as a potential co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, after several of those involved in the attack were found to have attended his mosque.
Wahhaj, a prominent figure in the New York Muslim community, has met with previous mayors and even delivered an opening invocation in the US House of Representatives in 1991, which some have cited as evidence of a double standard applied to the Democratic nominee.
Mamdani also took criticism for appearing with leftist streamer Hasan Piker, who once said that “America deserved” 9/11. Mamdani, confronted at a debate about Piker’s comment, said it was “reprehensible.”
In addition to raising the issue of anti-Muslim bigotry, his campaign has largely split the New York Jewish community. Some Jewish leaders have decried Mamdani as a threat to Jews’ safety, but other Jewish organizations have endorsed him and mobilized to support his campaign. The election will be held on November 4, and early voting has already begun.
Luke Tress contributed to this report.
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