Multiple Democrats condemned a blatantly anti-Muslim social media post from Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) on Thursday.
In a message on X, Tuberville quoted a post from the account @EndWokeness, which featured an image of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers next to a photo of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani seated on the floor during a Ramadan iftar celebration. “Less than 25 years apart,” the post read.
“The enemy is inside the gates,” Tuberville added in a caption, which appeared to suggest that Mamdani, who is the city’s first Muslim mayor, was “the enemy.”
Tuberville has expressed this sentiment before. After learning that Mamdani would be sworn into office using the Quran, Tuberville also stated in a post last December that “The enemy was inside the gates.”
Tuberville was quickly called out for the bigoted statement, with lawmakers including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) blasting his Islamophobia, while Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) urged him to delete the statement.
“This type of Islamophobia is disgraceful and unbecoming of a senator. Delete it immediately and apologize,” Gillibrand wrote in a post on X.
“This is mindless hate,” Schumer also wrote on X. “Islamophobic hate like this is fundamentally un-American and we must confront and overcome it whenever it rears its ugly head.”
Others, including Reps. Grace Meng (D-N.Y.), Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) also denounced Tuberville’s comments.
In a direct response of his own, Mamdani called out Republicans for their fixation on his recent iftar rather than on other substantive policy issues.
“Let there be as much outrage from politicians in Washington when kids go hungry as there is when I break bread with New Yorkers,” Mamdani wrote in a statement on X.
Tuberville, however, declined to apologize or walk back his comment.
“Calling Radical Islam out for being a CULT doesn’t make you an ‘Islamophobe,’” Tuberville argued in a subsequent post. In that post, and others, he emphasized that he wouldn’t be “silenced” and said that he didn’t “give a rip about being politically correct.”
A Tuberville spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Tuberville’s post adds to anti-Muslim comments that Republican lawmakers have made in recent weeks and fuels concerns about the GOP’s normalization of these remarks.
Earlier this week, Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) wrote that “Muslims don’t belong in American society,” which received little pushback from Republican leadership. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) declined to condemn the remarks and only said that the “language that people use is different language than I would use.”
A spokesperson for Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Tuberville’s post.
“[Tuberville] relies on near-weekly racist and bigoted social media posts to stay in the headlines and distract the people of Alabama,” A.Britton O’Shields, a staff attorney for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, told HuffPost. “Senator Tuberville’s critics have compared [him] to former [Alabama] Governor George Wallace, and he is well on his way to proving them correct with his unhinged and un-American diatribes.”