A WABC host called Mamdani a cockroach and a jihadist — and the backlash revealed fault lines in the city’s public discourse
Words That Cut Deep
On the evening of March 2, 2026, Sid Rosenberg — a conservative radio host on WABC 77 and a longtime supporter of President Donald Trump — posted a message on X directed at the president. In it, he asked Trump to stop “complimenting and giving credibility to our Jihadist America hating mayor.” He called Mayor Zohran Mamdani an “America hating, Jew hating, Radical Islam cockroach running our once beautiful city” and described him as a “terrorist sympathizer.” The post has since been deleted. But the damage — and the conversation it forced — was not so easily removed.
The Mayor’s Response
When reporters asked Mamdani about the comments on Tuesday, the mayor did not name Rosenberg directly. He spoke instead about what it means to be a Muslim New Yorker, and about the weight of a specific kind of language — language that compares human beings to insects. “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,” Mamdani said. “It is difficult to hear, but there is a reminder that the silence that often greets this kind of bigotry, this kind of Islamophobia is what allows it to fester.” The mayor declined to treat the incident as routine politics. He called on New Yorkers to recognize the difference between political disagreement and dehumanization, and to refuse to normalize the latter. His remarks drew widespread attention and support, including from Governor Kathy Hochul, who called Rosenberg’s comments “hateful, racist, and disgusting,” and from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who called them “a disgusting display of bigotry and Islamophobia that should receive universal condemnation.”
The Apology and Its Limits
On Wednesday morning, Rosenberg returned to the air on WABC to issue an apology. “I apologize this morning for the name-calling,” he said. “Not nice to call somebody a bug, I get it.” He claimed the comment “had nothing to do with anyone’s religion or faith,” a framing that many observers rejected, given that he had specifically used the phrase “Radical Islam” in the attack. Rosenberg did not address his use of the word “jihadist.” WABC CEO John Catsimatidis weighed in, stating: “Personal attacks on individuals is not acceptable at WABC. We are glad Sid Rosenberg, a good friend, agrees and acknowledges WABC’s policies.” When asked by reporters at a childcare event in South Richmond Hill whether he accepted the apology, Mamdani measured his words carefully. “Time will tell how sincere of an apology it is,” he said. The New York chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, known as CAIR-NY, called on WABC to drop Rosenberg entirely, citing what it described as “a long history of such comments.” Executive Director Afaf Nasher said Rosenberg had “a long history of such comments, from comparing Black women to apes to now comparing New York’s first Muslim mayor to a cockroach.”
The Broader Stakes
The Rosenberg incident arrived in a broader context: Mamdani is New York City’s first Muslim mayor, the first from the African continent, and the first South Asian to hold the office. His election was historic not only politically but culturally, signaling a shift in the city’s sense of who can lead. The dehumanizing language directed at him — the comparison to insects, the invocation of jihad, the framing of a democratically elected official as an enemy agent — is a pattern that Muslim Americans across the country recognize and have documented extensively. The Southern Poverty Law Center has tracked the use of insect metaphors as a historical tool of dehumanization across multiple contexts of racial and religious persecution. The mayor’s willingness to name that history, without flinching and without reducing the moment to a talking point, gave his response a moral clarity that many in his city found powerful. The controversy also surfaced a separate awkward detail: a dinner that Rosenberg claimed to have had with Mamdani’s Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, even after Rosenberg and Andrew Cuomo had publicly suggested during the campaign that Mamdani would be indifferent to a terrorist attack. The mayor declined to address that directly, saying he had more important work to do.
