WASHINGTON

Republican US Sen. Tommy Tuberville targeted New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Thursday as "the enemy" in an anti-Muslim social media post.

"The enemy is inside the gates," the senator wrote on US social media company X, alongside two images -- one from the Sept. 11 attacks in New York, and one of Mamdani.

Mamdani, for his part, responded by urging politicians to focus on domestic issues affecting Americans.

"Let there be as much outrage from politicians in Washington when kids go hungry as there is when I break bread with New Yorkers," Mamdani, the city’s first Muslim mayor, wrote on X.

In a separate post Wednesday, Tuberville described radical Islam as a “cult of terrorism” and demanded the deportation of what he termed “radical Islamists."

"Extremists want every single freedom-loving, Christian American dead. We need to deport all radical Islamists," he said