As New Yorkers mourned the victims of a mass shooting last week in a midtown Manhattan office building, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, inserted himself into the discourse.

His comments concerned a photo taken Thursday of Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York, a Democrat, sitting on a folding chair inside a mosque, next to Mayor Eric Adams. To her left, men in kurtas and police uniforms kneel on a carpeted floor. Hochul wears a dark pantsuit, a somber expression and, on her head, a black scarf looped over her hair.

After an anonymous social media user posted the photo and asked — appending an expletive — why the governor was “wearing a hijab,” Cruz shared the post Friday and added, “Um, wut?”

The photo was taken at the funeral of Didarul Islam, a New York City police officer who was among those killed in the shooting last Monday at 345 Park Avenue. Islam, 36, who was awarded a posthumous promotion to detective, was Muslim, and his hourslong funeral was held at his mosque in the Bronx, with separate viewings for women and men. Before entering, women donned headscarves in accordance with Muslim religious tradition. Many men wore skullcaps.

Hochul Responds to Cruz’s Post

Hochul responded sharply to Cruz’s post Saturday, saying that for her, wearing a head covering was a simple matter of honoring the fallen officer.

“Respecting a grieving family’s faith is ‘wut’ leaders and anyone with basic decency would do,” she wrote on the social platform X.

Eulogized at the funeral for his commitment to his faith, his family and the Police Department, Islam immigrated to the United States from Bangladesh roughly 16 years ago and became a part of a sizable and growing group of Bangladeshi officers in the nation’s largest police department. He had been working an extra shift providing security for the Park Avenue building on the day of the attack, New York City’s deadliest single shooting in more than two decades.

During the funeral, Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch emotionally addressed mourners from a lectern, her hair also covered by a black headscarf. Outside the building, more than 100 women, most of them uniformed police officers, waited to be admitted for the viewing. All wore headscarves.

In a statement Saturday, the Council on American-Islamic Relations called on the senator to apologize to Hochul and to Islam’s family, describing his posts as “despicable and disrespectful.”

The group also noted that Cruz had been photographed wearing a skullcap at a campaign event with Jewish community leaders, which the group said “makes his attack on Governor Hochul for similarly respecting a Muslim space all the more hateful and hypocritical.”

On Sunday morning, Cruz doubled down, replying to Hochul, “You should wear a hijab every day because you are so damn decent” and suggesting that she was unconcerned about the rights of women in New York.

Imam Dr. Zakir Ahmed of the Islamic Cultural Center of New York said at the funeral that Islam had lived at a time when people like him were vilified and “made to feel like outsiders.”

“To our city, our nation, you cannot ask us to serve and then silence us,” Ahmed said. “You cannot take our sacrifice and ignore our suffering.”

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Alyce McFadden/Vincent Alban
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