On Wednesday, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) officially designated former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani as an anti-Muslim extremist, a move that follows a series of virulently bigoted comments he made during a recent primetime television interview on Newsmax.
During that interview, Giuliani, who served as a senior advisor to former U.S. President Donald Trump during his first term in office, called for New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to be barred from attending the upcoming 25th anniversary 9/11 memorial service this Friday. “It offends me that he’s coming,” Giuliani told the outlet.
The former mayor went even further, pushing unfounded conspiracy theories about global Muslim communities, claiming that Muslims are actively seeking to seize control of regions across the United States and Western Europe. He doubled down on his racist rhetoric by perpetuating harmful religious stereotypes, arguing “They (Muslims) want to dominate us. That’s what they’re taught the day they begin their extremist religious education. Mamdani is a clear supporter of that. All of the Muslims he supports are murderers.”
In an official statement announcing the designation, Corey Saylor, CAIR’s director of research and advocacy, noted that Giuliani has targeted American Muslim communities for decades solely on the basis of their faith. “Mr Giuliani has a decades-long record of targeting our community simply because of our faith, and we are designating him an anti-Muslim extremist as a result of his hateful views,” Saylor said.
Giuliani’s comments are just the latest development in a growing public dispute over Mamdani’s attendance at the memorial, which already has more than 100,000 signatures on a petition calling for the mayor to be excluded. Two New York City Republican councilmembers – Vicky Paladino and Joann Ariola – have spearheaded the petition effort, and Paladino held a press conference on the steps of City Hall Tuesday to reiterate her demand that Mamdani stay away from the ceremony, claiming “he does not belong there.”
Paladino is no stranger to open Islamophobia: last year, she took to social media platform X to call for the mass expulsion of Muslims from Western countries, and in February of this year, she compared Mamdani’s tenure in office to an “Islamic conquest,” repeating the white nationalist “great replacement” conspiracy theory that claims non-white people are intentionally displacing white Westerners.
Afaf Nasher, executive director of CAIR’s New York chapter, pushed back against this coordinated political attack, noting that American Muslims should never be forced to prove their patriotism after politicians exploit the national trauma of 9/11 to target their community. “American Muslims should not have to defend our patriotism every time a deranged politician exploits that tragedy (9/11) to attack our community,” Nasher said.
Mamdani himself has declined to directly engage with Giuliani’s personal attacks, choosing instead to center his work in the lead-up to the 25th anniversary on honoring 9/11 victims and advancing long-overdue transparency around the aftermath of the attacks. When asked about Giuliani’s comments earlier this week, Mamdani said he wanted the week to focus on “the families whose loved ones were stolen from them 25 years ago in the horrific act of terror of September 11, and a focus also on the first responders who did everything they could.”
On Tuesday, Mamdani took a major step toward that transparency, releasing 170,000 pages of previously unreleased government records related to the 9/11 attacks through a public online portal. The release event was attended by first responders, 9/11 victim family members, and comedian and long-time 9/11 advocacy activist John Stewart, host of *The Daily Show*.
The newly released documents confirm long-held allegations that city leadership knew the air in Lower Manhattan was toxic in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, and that inspectors found dangerous asbestos contamination at nearly every test site in the area. To date, more than 140,000 people have enrolled in the World Trade Center health program for 9/11-related illnesses, with 49,000 diagnosed with certified 9/11-linked cancers. Data from the 9/11 Memorial shows that more people have now died from 9/11-related illnesses than were killed in the attacks themselves on September 11, 2001.
Mamdani placed direct blame for these avoidable deaths on the city leaders who were in power at the time of the attacks – a group that includes Giuliani. “People got sick because the leaders they trusted lied and told them they were safe to breathe in toxic air. And then when they began to contend with the symptoms of the illnesses that followed, the government that had not hesitated to send them into harm’s way was nowhere to be found,” Mamdani said.
When asked after the release of the documents whether Giuliani should be barred from the memorial out of respect for the victims of 9/11-related illnesses, Mamdani reiterated that the day should be centered on victims, not political fights. He responded that this day was about the victims and the families, not about any politicians.
In addition to releasing the records, Mamdani signed two executive orders earlier this month related to the 9/11 anniversary: one formally codifying September 11 as an official city day of remembrance, and a second strengthening New York City’s operational and emergency preparedness protocols.