By Justin Baragona|Zeteo
Photos: YouTube Screenshots|Wikimedia Commons
Since even beforehe became New York mayor last year, the right-wing infotainment complex – and, particularly, the media outlets owned by Rupert Murdoch – has obsessively attacked Zohran Mamdani, painting the democratic socialist as a dangerous “antisemite” who will destroy the city with his “communist” policies while calling for him to be denaturalized and deported.
And while there’s always been a consistent undercurrent of Islamophobia flowing through this unending and deranged demonization of Mamdani, the last week has brought forth a more overt stream of anti-Muslim hate that has blared on the front pages of Murdoch’s papers and the screens of cable news.
The situation has grown so blatant that Mamdani’s camp called out the Wall Street Journal this week for using an “incredibly Islamophobic image” in a story about the mayor, only for the editor to reportedly insist there was nothing “racist” about the photo.
The uptick in anti-Muslim rhetoric comes after Mamdani called Benjamin Netanyahu a “war criminal” last week while urging the federal government to arrest the Israeli prime minister on a November 2024 warrant issued by the International Criminal Court, sparking outrage from the pro-Israel crowd and opening the door for Murdoch media to lash out.
As an aside, it should quickly be pointed out that even though it’s portrayed by much of the media (especially Fox) as a radical position, a plurality of Americans believe the U.S. should arrest Netanyahu.
With Fox devoting dozens of segments last week to criticizing the mayor over his stance on Netanyahu, according to media monitoring site TVEyes, the focus soon shifted to suggesting that he was to blame for a Central Park stabbing of an Asian man and a Jewish man. (The alleged assailant has since been charged with a hate crime, and both victims are expected to survive.)
While Fox accused Mamdani of being “silent” on the assault because it was a few hours before he released a statement after it was first reported, the rhetoric began to heat up on the network’s airwaves, culminating in far-right talk radio host Sid Rosenberg’s appearance on ‘Fox & Friends Weekend’ on Saturday morning.
“This guy is a terrorist. That’s the bottom line, I’ll say it. You don’t want to say it, I’ll say it. He’s a terrorist, he’s a jihadist. He hates the Jewish people. He hates America,” Rosenberg, who once labeled Mamdani a “radical Islam cockroach,” ranted. “He maybe has perpetrated the worst American and Jewish hate in the history of this country.”
The hateful tirade was so shocking that it prompted co-host Griff Jenkins to address it later in the hour, noting the use of “terrorist” shouldn’t “be used freely and it’s important we distinguish between strong political criticism and factual allegations.” While doubling down on calling Mamdani a “goddamn terrorist,” Rosenberg later claimed that Jenkins personally confessed that the network “made him” deliver the on-air “apology.”
A source with knowledge of the situation told me that Jenkins never confided to Rosenberg that Fox made him “apologize” for Rosenberg’s comments.
Yet, while Fox may have gone out of its way to condemn a guest’s bigoted rhetoric, it would appear that those who work for the Murdochs are given a bit more leeway to compare Mamdani to a terrorist while taking aim at his Muslim heritage.
The New York Post, after already reporting that Mamdani was “fanning flames of hatred” over the stabbings, followed up with a big Sunday cover story that “thousands” of 9/11 families demanded that Mamdani “STAY AWAY” from the 25th anniversary commemoration of the terror attacks.
That story was roundly debunked by Judd Legum at Popular Information, who pointed out that the petition behind the report had “no actual list of family members who had signed” it, and that organizer Giovanni Galante – whom Legum spoke to – admittedly just gave the Post an “estimate” of how many he believed had participated. “We all know each other, so…think about it,” Galante insisted to Legum. “I don’t go through the list and look at the names.”
In a comment to Zeteo, the Post stood by its reporting, claiming “thousands 9/11 families have signed the petition. The Post has interviewed dozens of these family members.” Anyone can sign the petition, and the spokesperson did not specifically identify the families.
Even though the story was bupkis, it allowed Fox and the rest of Murdoch media to continue to dip their toes in Islamophobic waters. In a Wall Street Journal column titled “Mamdani’s Antisemitic Smoke Signals,” editor Matthew Hennessey linked the mayor’s comments about Netanyahu to the stabbing while noting 9/11 families “don’t want him” at the ceremony, referencing the Post’s report.
But it was the paper’s choice of photo accompanying the article, which showed an anti-Mamdani protester holding up a mocked-up image of the mayor suggesting he’s a Hamas militant, that sparked understandable backlash from progressives, Muslim-American groups and Mamdani’s office itself.
Waleed Shahid, who recently joined the mayor’s communications team, called the photo “deeply Islamophobic” while stating that it’s “hard to imagine a major outlet running comparable offensive imagery targeting other communities.” Zara Rahim, who worked as a senior adviser to Mamdani’s campaign in 2025, described it as “one of the most vile images I’ve ever seen published by an American newspaper.”
“I spoke to the [editorial] page editor of the @WSJ, Paul Gigot, about the incredibly Islamophobic image printed alongside this opinion piece,” Mamdani communications director Anna Bahr tweeted. “His take: ‘I don’t see it as racist.’”
The Wall Street Journal and Gigot did not respond to requests for comment.
This isn’t the first time that the Wall Street Journal’s opinion page has come under fire for a grossly anti-Muslim column, either. After the paper published a piece titled “Welcome to Dearborn, America’s Jihad Capital” in February 2024, the city ramped up its police presence as a “direct result” of the op-ed, with the mayor saying the piece “led to an alarming increase in bigoted and Islamophobic rhetoric online targeting the city of Dearborn.”
Over on Fox’s airwaves, business anchor Cheryl Casone casually noted that “if it was 25 years ago,” Mamdani would be “probably supporting the attackers on the World Trade Centers” while saying that’s “why the 9/11 families don’t want him there.” She also promoted another recent WSJ editorial headlined “Globalizing the Intifada in Mamdani’s New York,” which ridiculously argued “the mayor and his ideological groupies are playing with antisemitic fire” because he “accuses Jews of genocide.”
Elsewhere, conservative provocateur Christopher Rufo told Fox Business that Mamdani should be banned from the ceremony because he is, “at a bare minimum, sympathetic to the kind of ideology that drove 9/11” and his agenda shares “a lot of the radical Islamist suppositions that caused the towers to fall.”
New York Post columnist Miranda Devine, referencing the mayor’s office publicly sharing property data as required by law, breathlessly declared that Mamdani was “really inciting the bloodlust of his Marxist revolutionary comrades like Hasan Piker because he’s just a Marxist, Islamist, revolutionary who is bent on destruction and mayhem and he’s driven by hatred.”
A Fox News representative did not respond to a request for comment.
The Post, meanwhile, blared “PIED-A-TERROR” in its cover story on the public property spreadsheet, claiming Mamdani was placing New Yorkers in danger by posting the “rich to be taxed” list – even though the paper admitted halfway through the report that state law requires a public roll to be released whenever a new tax is enacted, such as the city’s proposed pied-à-terre tax.
Of course, it isn’t as if Islamophobic sentiment is just being contained within the confines of Murdoch’s media empire as a part of its normal course of operations in kneecapping a Democratic mayor of New York. (Also, the New York Post’s “spaghetti against the wall strategy” of round-the-clock fearmongering about Mamdani hasn’t exactly worked, considering his sky-high approval numbers with NYC voters and kingmaker status in the Democratic Party.)
Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, proudly copped to his increasingly ugly anti-Muslim bigotry during his recent sitdown with The Economist’s Zanny Minton Beddoes – and later called Beddoes a “traitor to the West” for having the audacity to press him on his Islamophobia.
Ultra-MAGA actor James Woods, in a conversation with serial plagiarist Benny Johnson, said Mamdani’s election was the “most dangerous event” in American history while raging against the “Muslim invasion” of New York City, claiming “they’re gonna kill us.” And over on Newsmax, “America’s most racist congressman” Randy Fine called Mamdani a “terrorist: with “blood on his hands” while hosts just nodded along.
As Mehdi made clear this week amid this onslaught against Mamdani, the “most mainstreamed and amplified racial or religious bigotry in America is not antisemitism, it is Islamophobia.”
