Mayoral candidate Bo Dietl on Monday tweeted a picture showing Mayor de Blasio with activist Linda Sarsour, wearing a head scarf, and questioning whether he could be trusted to protect the city from terror.
“Can NYC trust this guy with our homeland security needs?” read the message attached to the photo of de Blasio and Sarsour.
The tweet was immediately derided by many on Twitter as racist, and was deleted — but a campaign spokesperson said the candidate only took it down because it didn’t identify the woman in the photo as Sarsour.
Dietl followed up the deletion with another tweet: “Linda Sarsour is anti-Israel & a proponent of Sharia Law-These values’ don’t reflect the people of my NYC- @BilldeBlasio supports her!!”
The political activist helped organize the Women’s March this year, but is seen by many as anti-Semitic for comments she has made denouncing Zionism and for tweeting a photo of a boy facing Israeli police with rocks in hand and calling it “the definition of courage.”
Sarsour seemed unfazed by Dietl’s tweet.
“What do you expect from a Trump supporter? ‘Twas the night before elections, a desperate man takes desperate measures,” she told the Daily News.
A rep for de Blasio’s campaign used the tweet to take a shot at Dietl and the mayor’s other challenger, Staten Island Assemblywoman Nicole Malliotakis.
“Assemblymember Malliotakis and Bo Dietl have spent this entire campaign trying to out Trump each other, but this is a new low,” campaign spokesman Dan Levitan said.
The original tweet — which didn’t identify Sarsour and may have been viewed by many as simply a photo of the mayor with a random Muslim woman — is not the first time Dietl has suggested a person’s appearance might indicate ties to terror.
Just last week, Dietl called for a return to racial profiling in the wake of a terror attack in lower Manhattan. An Uzbeki national, Sayfullo Saipov, is charged with the deadly assault.
“As far as this profiling thing, worrying about it, well look it — just look at this terrorist? What did he look like? Did he look like the terrorist?” he asked. “If you looked in the dictionary with that beard, the way he had.”
It’s also not the first time the candidate has faced heat for comments about race. At a forum this summer, he said he knew he’d lose a case to get on the Democratic ballot because the judge “looked like” the mayor’s wife. Both the judge and de Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, are black.
Dietl maintains the comments were not about race because he didn’t mention the color of their skin.
