The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, today announced its designation of former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani as an anti-Muslim extremist following his latest bigoted remarks attacking New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and American Muslims.
SEE: Rudy Giuliani Anti-Muslim Extremist Designation
In a recent Newsmax interview, Giuliani said that Mayor Mamdani should not attend the September 11 memorial ceremony and made various false, bigoted statements about the mayor and American Muslims.
Giuliani claimed, “All of the Muslims that (Mamdani) supports are murderers.” He said of Muslims, “They have every desire to take us over. This is not, they want to be just another religion, they want to dominate us. That’s what they are taught from the day they begin their extremist religious education. Mamdani is a clear, a clear, supporter of that.” He also claimed of Al-Qaeda and Mayor Mamdani, “They (the 9/11 hijackers) weren’t hiding it like Mamdani is trying to hide it.”
CAIR said Giuliani’s latest comments are consistent with a longstanding record of rhetoric and policies targeting New York Muslims and Muslim communities.
“Every American, regardless of faith, deserves to be judged by their character and conduct, not smeared by Rudy Giuliani’s headline chasing,” said CAIR Research and Advocacy Director Corey Saylor. “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.”
“Twenty-five years after the September 11 terrorist attack on our nation, American Muslims should not have to defend our patriotism every time a deranged politician exploits that tragedy to attack our community,” CAIR-New York Executive Director Afaf Nasher. “Mayor Mamdani is the leader of New York City. He has a right and a duty to participate in the annual ceremony honoring the victims and first responders of September 11th attacks. Mayor Giulinia’s remarks are precisely the kind of un-American religious bigotry rejected by the people of New York City, who overwhelmingly want and expect their mayor to attend the memorial.”
BACKGROUND
Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani is an anti-Muslim extremist. Giuliani has a decades-long record of contributing to an environment in which ordinary Americans are judged by their faith rather than their individual conduct. Giuliani is known for portraying Muslims as inherently dangerous, treating mosques and Muslim communities as objects of suspicion, and suggesting that Muslim Americans collectively support terrorism.
Giuliani’s anti-Muslim extremism comes in the context of racism toward other minorities. Giuliani has reportedly said Haitians “shouldn’t have been taken out of the jungle” and asserted that advocating for saving Black lives is “inherently racist.” His “stop-and-frisk program” in New York saw some 4.43 million searches, 80 percent of them of minorities.
In a 2026 Newsmax interview, Giuliani said that New York Mayor Mamdani should not attend the September 11 memorial ceremony and made various false, bigoted statements about the mayor and American Muslims.
Giuliani falsely claimed, “All of the Muslims that (Mamdani) supports are murderers.” He said of Muslims, “They have every desire to take us over. This is not, they want to be just another religion, they want to dominate us. That’s what they are taught from the day they begin their extremist religious education. Mamdani is a clear, a clear, supporter of that.” He also claimed of Al-Qaeda and Mayor Mamdani, “They (the 9/11 hijackers) weren’t hiding it like Mamdani is trying to hide it.”
In an August 2026 Newsmax interview, Giuliani said that Islam is an “ideology that is 1,600 years of mass murder and infanticide.” He added, “I know history too well for you to say that to me. It has elements of mass homicide in it, and it has to be avoided by the good people. Most of them do.”
In a January 2017 interview with Fox News, Giuliani stated that Trump had asked him how to ban Muslim entry “legally.”
According to author Geoffrey Berman, “a former US attorney for the Southern District of New York,” in 2016 “an inebriated Giuliani mistook a Jewish man wearing a yarmulke for a Muslim and called out: ‘I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but the founder of your religion is a murderer.'” In its reporting on Berman’s book, Middle East Eye noted, “Giuliani went on to share a ‘wholly inaccurate, alt-right history of the creation and development of Islam stating that it was an inherently violent religion from its origins to today,’ Berman writes.”
As mayor of New York, Giuliani was responsible for approving the nation’s largest local law enforcement domestic spying program which spied on American Muslims. The Associated Press reported that the New York Police Department’s newly created Demographics Unit “monitored daily [Muslim] life,” used informants known as “mosque crawlers” in places of worship, and “placed informants or undercover officers in the Muslim Student Associations” across the city.
When the program was disbanded in 2014, an NYPD official acknowledged in court testimony that the “Unit never generated a lead or triggered a terrorism investigation.” Giuliani, however, continued to defend it by saying that it was, “Totally ridiculous to interfere with the policy that [NYPD] Commissioner Kelly had in New York of allowing police officers to go into mosques in order to monitor what’s going on inside a mosque.” He added, “That’s a place we should be monitoring. We should be listening. It has been the source of any number of attacks.”
In November 2007, Giuliani said he was “encouraged” when he received the endorsement of Pat Robertson, then chairman of the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN). “His experience and advice will be a great asset to me and my campaign,” said Giuliani. Robertson has repeatedly defamed Islam and Muslims, including making statements such as Muslims are “worse than the Nazis.”
In October 2007, during his presidential primary candidate campaign, Giuliani added Daniel Pipes, an active and prominent part of the U.S. Islamophobia Network, as a foreign policy advisor. Pipes has a history of Islamophobia and xenophobia and has disparaged the “different hygiene habits” of “brown-skinned peoples.” Pipes also supports racial and religious profiling of Muslims. In 2004, Pipes also wrote that he “support(ed) the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II.”
In September 2007, as a Republican Party presidential primary candidate, Giuliani defended his top homeland security advisor Congressman Peter King’s comments that America has “too many mosques.” He said “‘I knew exactly what he meant,” referring to the canard that violence is preached in U.S. mosques. He added, “I know that from my own investigations of Islamic terrorism.”
Rather than removing King as an adviser, Giuliani said he knew what King meant and defended the premise that some mosques should be subject to increased scrutiny. Contemporary reporting noted that CAIR called for Giuliani to drop King and another adviser, Daniel Pipes, over their statements concerning Muslims.
Muslims are not the only target of Giuliani’s bias.
As Mayor, Giuliani approved of the NYPD’s “stop-and-frisk program,” which a federal judge in 2013 ruled had violated the constitutional rights of tens of thousands of the city’s residents. NYPD documents reveal that between 2004 and 2012 police had detained, questioned, and searched some 4.43 million people, and that 80 percent of those stopped were minorities. However, in September 2016, Giuliani continued to defend the practice by penning the op-ed “Trump Is Right About ‘Stop and Frisk’.”
In 2024, Giuliani said Haitians, “shouldn’t have been taken out of the jungle and placed in the middle of small-town America.”
In 2016, Giuliani asserted that advocating for Black lives is “inherently racist.”
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CONTACT: CAIR National Deputy Director Edward Ahmed Mitchell, 404-285-9530, [email protected]; CAIR Government Affairs Director Robert McCaw, 202-742-6448, [email protected]; CAIR National Communications Director Ibrahim Hooper, 202-744-7726, [email protected]; CAIR National Communications Manager Ismail Allison, 202-770-6280, [email protected]