New York Gov. Kathy Hochul delivered remarks at the funeral service of NYPD officer Didarul Islam, July 31, 2025. Photo courtesy of Don Pollard/Office of Gov. Kathy Hochul.

JNS

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul clapped back at Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) after he shared an image of the Democrat in a headscarf at the funeral of Didarul Islam, a New York City police officer who was killed in a mass shooting in Manhattan that also claimed the lives of two Jews.

“Um, wut?” Cruz wrote.

“I wore a headscarf to honor a fallen Muslim NYPD officer at his funeral,” Hochul wrote back. “Respecting a grieving family’s faith is ‘wut’ leaders and anyone with basic decency would do.”

Jessica Tisch, the New York City police commissioner who is Jewish, also wore a headscarf at the funeral, during which she also spoke.

Cruz wrote back to Hochul, “I agree. You should wear a hijab every day because you are so damn decent. Never mind the rights of women in New York … not your concern.”

Speaking at the funeral, Hochul said that “our hearts are broken. The pain is searing.”

“There’s a family that expected to see their beloved son, husband, father for many more dinners, birthdays and life celebrations,” she said. “But because of a madman, who traveled 1,000 miles with such evil in his heart to come and destroy all that is good about New York and New York City, with an intention to cause unspeakable pain in a savage way, we are here, instead of a birthday party or dinner or breakfast together.”

“The Quran says, ‘Whoever saves a life, it is as if they saved all of humanity.’ This officer saved lives. He was out front. Others may be alive today because he was the barrier, unexpectedly, but he was there,” Hochul said. “He was there to protect the people in that building.”

Speaking at the funeral, Eric Adams, the New York City mayor, said that he was “not here as the mayor. I’m here as a parent, as a father.”

“If you have never been a parent, you don’t fully understand the relationship between a parent and a child, and throughout my life, for my son’s 29 years of life, I only hope that one day he will have the honor to bury me as his dad,” Adams said.

“Because sons are supposed to bury their dads. Mothers are supposed to be buried by their daughters and their children,” he said. There is nothing more tragic than having a parent bury their child. The pain is so immense. It is so intense.”

Adams added that “if we’re in this room together in this mosque, lifting up our hero, then we can enter the mosques, the synagogues, the churches, the Buddhist temples, the Sikh temples and also cross-pollinate and coordinate on how we can make this city a greater place that a person would not believe violence is an answer to the question.”

“If we are true practitioners of the faith that we have embraced, then we should see God in each other. We saw God in Officer Islam, and now we must take that God-like energy that he offered to allow us to live out his legacy the way he will want to,” he said.

Tisch, the police commissioner, told mourners that “three days ago, time was moving fast for Didarul Islam.”

“His two young boys were growing quickly, getting bigger and more independent every day, and in just a few weeks, another blessing was on the way. His sons were eager to meet their new baby brother, to teach him and to keep him safe,” she said. “But of course, Didarul would be there to help with all that. After all, he was a New York City cop, and protecting people is what he did, so his boys, they wouldn’t have to grow up too fast, their baba would be there.”

“Then, in one shattering, incomprehensible instant, time stopped. A killer on a self-centered, senseless crusade of violence took the lives of four innocent New Yorkers,” the commissioner said. “He tore a father from his children, a husband from his wife, a son from his family and in that moment, he ripped the world away from everyone who knew and loved NYPD police officer Didarul Islam.”

Islam was “the son of two cities,” Sylhet, Bangladesh, where he was born and New York City, where he moved at age 20 with “the promise of a better life,” Tisch said.

“He would build that life and fulfill that promise through service. He joined the NYPD first as a school safety agent in 2019 and became a police officer two years later,” she said. “In his own words, the police were a blanket of the community there to provide comfort and care, and when he joined this department, he made that his personal responsibility.”

“His watch may be over, but his impact will never be, and if there is any grace to be found in this grief, it is knowing that the light that he carried did not go out, it just moved forward and it shines within the family that he worked so hard to build,” she added, announcing Islam’s promotion to detective first grade.