A Republican New York City Council member told a left-wing streamer to “go back to where you came from” on Fox News, then insisted, “Don’t you dare call us racist.”
Council Member Vickie Paladino (R-NY) made the remarks Wednesday during a Fox News interview with host Harris Faulkner, who asked her to respond to a social media post by Twitch streamer Hasan Piker.
Piker had criticized the campaign to keep New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani away from Friday’s ceremony marking the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.
Faulkner introduced Piker to viewers as an “anti-American and antisemitic influencer” before reading his post on X aloud and asking Paladino for a response.
“[H]e’s the mayor of NYC. This demented racist viewpoint isn’t even shared by most 9/11 victim families (many of whom voted for [New York City Mayor Zohnran Mamdani]). At a certain point, if mainstream outlets don’t call this manufactured racial hysteria out by name, one must assume they welcome it, right?” Faulkner quoted Piker as saying before Paladino weighed in.
“Oh, Hasan Piker, I’d love to have you with me in a room for five minutes,” Paladino said. “What’s my response to that? Go back to where you came from.”
“This has nothing to do about Muslim, about religion, about anything,” Paladino continued. “I am sick to death because I just got a filthy, dirty voicemail, threatening voicemail, on my way here. Don’t you dare call us racist just because we are citing the truth.”
“Radical Islam bombed… a terrorist attack on New York City, on the Pentagon, and in Pennsylvania,” Paladino said. “You don’t like the truth? Too bad. Stop calling it racist.”
“You are anti-American. You’ve said it time and again that we deserved 9/11,” she said of Piker. “I want him for five minutes.”
Piker, a liberal broadcaster with millions of followers, was born in New Jersey to Turkish parents, grew up in Turkey, and returned to the United States for college. He told The New York Times last year that he identifies as culturally Muslim.
Piker said in 2019 that America “deserved” the Sept. 11 attacks, a remark Mamdani has denounced, TIME reported. Piker campaigned for Mamdani, the city’s first Muslim mayor, during last year’s race.
In a clash earlier this year, Paladino accused Piker of telling his followers how to build suicide drones, and the City Council’s Ethics Committee charged her with disorderly behavior over Islamophobic posts on X, one of them aimed at Mamdani’s chief immigration officer appointee, Faiza N. Ali, QNS reported.
Piker threatened to sue her for defamation and called her a “flagrantly racist councilwoman.”
The dispute deepened Friday, when Mamdani signed two executive orders ahead of the anniversary, one designating Sept. 11 a citywide Day of Remembrance and Service and the other strengthening the city’s emergency preparedness.
After signing, he handed the ceremonial pen to Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch and quietly asked her to pass it to his chief counsel, Ramzi Kassem, Fox News reported.
Kassem is the first Muslim to serve as the mayor’s top lawyer, according to NY1. He once represented Ahmed al-Darbi, an al Qaeda operative who pleaded guilty to charges stemming from the 2002 bombing of a French oil tanker and whose sister was married to Khalid al-Mihdhar, one of the hijackers who struck the Pentagon.
The mayor’s office told the Daily Caller that Kassem was there because he and his team had drafted both orders.
At a press conference Tuesday with 9/11 families, Paladino said a petition against Mamdani’s attendance had gathered 101,000 signatures and that the mayor should “not show his face at that sacred ground.” She told the crowd the pen handoff was “very cryptic” and “a message to each and every one of us.” Mamdani still plans to attend Friday’s ceremony, TIME reported.
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