New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani just signed an executive order designating September 11 as a day of commemoration and service. He also announced he'll personally lead the 25th anniversary memorial — the same ceremony where families of nearly 3,000 murdered Americans will gather at Ground Zero three days from now.
This is the same man who told the New York Times that September 11 "was this horrific day that was also for many New Yorkers the moment at which they were marked an 'other.'"
That's how the mayor of New York City — the city that lost more people than any other on that Tuesday morning — chose to frame the deadliest terrorist attack on American soil. Not the firefighters running up the stairs. Not the passengers on American Airlines Flight 77 who called their families to say goodbye. Not the four hijacked planes that flew into the two World Trade Center buildings, the Pentagon, and a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The takeaway, according to Mamdani, was that some New Yorkers felt uncomfortable afterward.
The backlash to Mamdani's 9/11 description has been immediate and bipartisan in its fury. Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani — who actually led New York through September 11 — didn't mince words. "If he had a little bit of a heart, even with his views, he wouldn't go because he would know he's disturbing the people," Giuliani said.
Conservative podcaster Benny Johnson called it "a slap in the face to victims ahead of the 25th anniversary of 9/11." Businessman and philanthropist Adam Milstein described it as "absolutely grotesque." Queens Republican City Council Member Joann Ariola said the move was "breathtakingly tone-deaf and disrespectful."
Then there's the matter of Mamdani's chief counsel, Ramzi Kassem. Kassem previously served as legal counsel for Ahmed al-Darbi, an al-Qaeda terrorist convicted of charges tied to terror plots against commercial ships. The mayor's top legal advisor defended an actual al-Qaeda operative. That's not guilt by association — that's a hiring decision.
Mamdani, for his part, released a statement saying, "I will proudly honor the families, the survivors, the first responders forever impacted by that horrific terror attack." Standard boilerplate. The kind of sentence any press secretary can write in forty-five seconds.
But words on a page don't erase words on record. This is New York's first socialist mayor. The first mayor whose instinct after the worst attack in American history was to reframe the victims as a story about identity politics. The city that buried firefighters and secretaries and bond traders is now run by a man who looked at that day and saw a narrative about othering.
Giuliani stood in the dust. Mamdani stood in front of a microphone at a Democratic Socialists of America rally.
The families will show up on Thursday because they always show up. They'll read the names because those names matter. The question isn't whether Mamdani will attend — he's already said he will. The question is whether a single word he says will be about the people who actually died, or whether the 25th anniversary of September 11 becomes another platform for the politics that got him elected.
Nearly 3,000 people never came home. The man leading their memorial thinks the real story of that day is who felt "marked."