Zohran Mamdani stood at a City Hall podium on Friday and signed a 9/11 remembrance order, a week out from the 25th anniversary of that fateful day. I’m sure there were plenty of people who were fooled by his performance.
"Twenty-five years may have passed, but for the families who still grieve someone who never came home, or who got sick from the toxic air in the years after, the grief remains fresh," he said at the ceremony. "Every New Yorker knows the words 'Never forget,' and the meaning they carry."
Knowing who he is, it would have been easy to assume he wouldn’t have done anything to acknowledge 9/11 as a dark day in our history. But, as mayor of New York City, even Mamdani knows he has to keep up appearances.
So, I don’t give him credit for that. Especially after what he did next.
Once the ink dried, Mamdani turned to NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch and asked, "Can you pass this?" Tisch handed the pen off, and it ended up with Ramzi Kassem, Mamdani's chief counsel, who grinned as he took it.
Here's why that matters.
As my PJ Media colleague Robert Spencer previously reported, Kassem teaches law at CUNY, where he built the CLEAR legal clinic from the ground up. By the school's own count, that clinic has taken on 15 Guantánamo detainees, handling national-security, detention, and war-crimes cases. Among those clients: Ahmed al-Darbi, a Saudi national tied to al-Qaeda who admitted before a military commission to terrorism charges stemming from the 2002 bombing of a French oil tanker, the MV Limburg, off Yemen's coast. His sister, for what it's worth, married Khalid al-Mihdhar, one of the five men who hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 and flew it into the Pentagon. And before all that, Kassem spent from 2022 to 2024 as a senior policy adviser inside the Biden White House.
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This was entirely foreseeable. Last month, family members of people who were killed on 9/11 started an online petition calling for Mamdani to skip the 25th annual 9/11 remembrance ceremony.
Widower Giovanni Galante and a woman who lost her husband on 9/11 launched the petition. Galante's wife, Grace Catherine Galante, was 29 years old and working on the 105th floor of the North Tower when it fell. "We felt that having Mamdani there would show a disrespect to our family members because of the people he supports," Galante said.
As of this writing, the petition has accumulated just under 100,000 signatures and has the support of Michael LaRosa, the former spokesman for First Lady Jill Biden and special assistant to President Joe Biden.
“I spent my career in Democratic politics helping elected officials find the spotlight. That's why I signed this Change.org petition,” LaRosa said. “The 25th anniversary of 9/11 is one morning that must stay free of politics. Mayor Mamdani's presence at Ground Zero will be a lightning rod that diverts attention away from the only people that morning belongs to: the victims of this heinous attack and their loved ones. The mayor and the organizers should do the right thing, keep the focus on the families, and keep the politics out.”
This was a deliberate insult. Mamdani clearly thinks a few rehearsed lines about “Never Forget” will be enough to hide his true feelings. When will his supporters wake up?
