City Council Speaker Julie Menin is facing increasing pressure to take action against a Republican council member with a history of making inflammatory and baseless claims about Mayor Zohran Mamdani and other Muslims, after community leaders said her recent online activity could endanger Muslims in New York.
The council member, Inna Vernikov, was elected by the Council’s Jewish Caucus in January to lead its antisemitism task force, a choice that drew outrage given her past description of the mayor as a “terrorist lover” who wanted to see Jews “burn in an oven.”
Ms. Menin had publicly vowed to push for Ms. Vernikov’s removal from the task force if she continued making anti-Muslim statements. But on Friday, she said she would not follow through on that pledge, despite a widely shared social media post Ms. Vernikov made last month that questioned whether Muslims were praying near a Jewish school in Brooklyn as an “intentional” act of intimidation.
Through a spokesman, Ms. Menin said the Jewish Caucus, of which she is a nonvoting member, bore ultimate responsibility for Ms. Vernikov’s future on the task force.
“Speaker Menin relayed her concerns to the co-chairs of the Jewish Caucus when the tweet was first posted,” the spokesman, Henry Robins, said in a statement. “She and Council Member Yusef Salaam met with Muslim community leaders this week, and she’s working to broker a meeting between them and Council Member Vernikov in the belief that dialogue is the best path forward.”
At a rally outside City Hall on Friday, faith leaders representing Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Hindu and Sikh communities said Ms. Menin’s response to the outcry over Ms. Vernikov demonstrated a double standard in how city leaders respond to hate speech when it targets Muslims versus members of other faith groups.
As they spoke, a truck with screens showing Ms. Vernikov’s photo and a message calling on her to resign was driven past City Hall.
Mr. Robins said on Friday that Ms. Menin had “a decades-long record of standing against Islamophobia,” dating back to her support almost two decades ago for the construction of an Islamic cultural center in Lower Manhattan that critics derisively referred to as the “ground zero mosque.” (The cultural center was never built.)
“As speaker, she has visited mosques, advocated for protections for Islamic schools and houses of worship, and believes that all forms of hate must be confronted consistently and that all New Yorkers deserve equal protection,” Mr. Robins said.
Ms. Vernikov, who represents several neighborhoods in southern Brooklyn, sought to defend herself in an interview on Friday, saying she had posted a video of the men praying in response to “concerns raised by my constituents regarding a large gathering of men outside an all girls’ school.” The video has been viewed nearly 3 million times on X since Ms. Vernikov posted it last month.
“It had nothing to do with religion, and I would have expressed the same concerns had the individuals involved been Jewish, Christian or members of any other faith,” she added. “I am always open to dialogue and have offered to meet with the Imam of the congregation as well as the groups who raised concerns.”
The coalition of faith leaders gathered in front of City Hall on Friday said that city leadership had not done enough to protect the city’s Muslims, especially in the aftermath of an attack last month in San Diego, where two gunmen with anti-Muslim writings in their vehicle killed three people at a mosque.
“What is she waiting for? What are we in the back of this building waiting for?” said Yasser Salem of Ms. Menin. He chairs the OneNYC PAC, which was founded to support Mr. Mamdani and allied candidates. “We will not wait until San Diego happens in New York City to move,” he said.
Ms. Vernikov was elected to the City Council in 2021 and has long been a controversial figure in New York City politics.
In addition to her many comments attacking the mayor, she was arrested in 2023 for bringing a gun to observe a pro-Palestinian protest at Brooklyn College, but was not charged after the weapon was found to be inoperable.
The Council’s Jewish Caucus chose her in January to co-lead its antisemitism task force, a job that Ms. Vernikov has said Ms. Menin promised to her in exchange for supporting Ms. Menin’s bid for the speakership. That account was backed up by another person familiar with those talks.
At the time, Ms. Menin had stern words for Ms. Vernikov, telling reporters she was “appalled” by her “past comments and conduct.”
“I have been very clear to her that if she repeats such disgusting rhetoric and behavior again, I will urge the Jewish Caucus to remove her from the task force entirely,” Ms. Menin said then. “That type of inflammatory rhetoric is unacceptable and completely antithetical to our goal of combating hatred in all its forms.”
Protesters reacted with dismay to Ms. Menin’s apparent refusal to abide by that pledge and said their private interactions with the speaker had been frustrating.
But Nwamaka Ejebe, the general counsel of the New York City Council, said the body had to follow the First Amendment and due process rights when it comes to taking disciplinary action based on political speech and not “unilateral action by the Speaker.”
Afaf Nasher, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations of New York, said she had participated in a meeting Ms. Menin held with Muslim leaders on Thursday during which they asked for an ethics investigation into Ms. Vernikov.
Ms. Nasher said she thought that demand was reasonable because “we know that the Council speaker, of course, exerts massive influence.” So far, she said, the speaker has pledged only to speak to Ms. Vernikov about her posts.
“Use that influence to discipline her with whatever committees and whatever votes can be taken by the Council body, including the Ethics Committee,” said Ms. Nasher, noting that Ms. Vernikov had posted about the Muslim men praying in Brooklyn under her official Council title and social media account.
“Elected servants have a responsibility to those that they serve,” said Ms. Nasher. “But when they’re using their platforms to espouse hate, is it really any wonder that we’re going to see discrimination proliferated every single day in every institution, public and private? Of course it’s not.”
In an open letter published on Thursday, the protesters said Ms. Vernikov’s leadership of the antisemitism task force made “a mockery” of city government. They accused her of “putting us all — Jews, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs and all New Yorkers, at risk.”
They also asked the City Council to publicly commit to measures to fight Islamophobia that “are equally substantive as the recently adopted antisemitism initiatives and action plans advanced by the Council.”
Sally Goldenberg contributed reporting.
Liam Stack is a Times reporter who covers the culture and politics of the New York City region.
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