NEW YORK — Right-wing radio personality Sid Rosenberg apologized for calling Mayor Zohran Mamdani a “cockroach,” after the host’s hateful remarks sparked a massive backlash, including from Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch.

Tisch both called Rosenberg out publicly and texted him directly about the post, he said.

“I apologize this morning for the name calling. And I could have made my tweet without doing all that, and I was very sincere, and still am in my apologies, not just to the mayor, but to anybody else I offended,” Rosenberg said on-air. He then launched into a rant about how Democrats get away with calling people names “a lot worse than an insect.”

In the now-deleted post from Monday, Rosenberg called Mamdani an “America hating, Jew hating, Radical Islam cockroach” and a “jihadist.”

Rosenberg said on his show that it’s “not nice to call somebody a bug” and claimed that the post had “nothing to do with anybody’s religion or faith or anything.” He didn’t address calling Mamdani a “jihadist.”

On the show on Wednesday morning, Rosenberg admitted Tisch, who he considers a “very good friend,” texted him about the post and they had a “great conversation, as did former NYPD Chief of Department John Chell.

“Those comments were wholly inappropriate and deeply harmful,” Tisch said in a statement. “I do not share those views in any way, and any rhetoric that seeks to dehumanize and disparage someone’s religion cannot be tolerated.”

Tisch and the mayor have opposing views on many public safety issues, which has been the source of tension during the first days of the Mamdani administration. The commissioner dined with Rosenberg, who had also called Mamdani a “terrorist,” in January.

Mamdani slammed the radio host’s “bigotry” on Tuesday, calling his post “dehumanizing.”

“To be called animals, insects, to be called a jihadist mayor, to be called a cockroach — this language is both painfully familiar to me as a Muslim New Yorker, but also as someone who was born in East Africa,” the mayor said at an unrelated press conference.

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