Mayor Zohran Mamdani has said that “time will tell” if right-wing radio commentator Sid Rosenberg was sincere after the WABC host apologized on-air for calling the mayor a “cockroach” earlier in the week.
In a now-deleted post on social media, Rosenberg had described Mamdani as an “America-hating, Jew hating, Radical Islam cockroach running our once beautiful city.” Rosenberg had also called on President Donald Trump to stop complimenting the mayor.
The comments drew sharp pushback from numerous elected officials, including Mamdani, who described the language as “painfully familiar” and “difficult to hear.”
“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 told reporters on Tuesday.
“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,” Hizzoner added.
Rosenberg issued an on-air apology on Wednesday morning, stating that the post was a “bit over the top.”
“I apologize this morning for the name-calling. And I could have made my tweet without doing all that, and I was very sincere, and still am in my apologies, not just to the mayor, but to anybody else I offended,” Rosenberg said in an on-air apology.
Addressing his comments referring to Mamdani as a cockroach, Rosenberg added that it is “not nice to call somebody a bug” and said the comment had “nothing to do with anyone’s religion or faith.”
Rosenberg did not address his comments referring to Mamdani as a Jihadist.
Mamdani, speaking to WABC’s N.J. Burkett at a child care facility in South Richmond Hill on Wednesday afternoon, said time will tell if Rosenberg’s apology was sincere. He added that Rosenberg has not contacted him directly and that he learned of the apology over social media.
Mamdani also praised elected officials for their statements of support over the past 24 hours.
“This is not about me. This is about the more than 1 million Muslims who call New York City home and who have long had to deal with racist and dehumanizing rhetoric and the absence of any kind of pushback,” Mamdani told WABC. “And what we saw over these last few days is so many leaders across the city standing up and saying that this is not the kind of language we will accept in a city that is home to all of us.”
