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Here’s How Mamdani Made the 9/11 Anniversary All About Him and America Hate

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This week, on the eve of the 25th anniversary, Zohran Mamdani signed an executive order meant to honor the victims of September 11. Then he handed the ceremonial pen to Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch and, on camera, directed her to pass it along to his chief legal counsel, Ramzi Kassem.

Kassem’s client list includes Ahmed al-Darbi, convicted of war crimes over al-Qaeda plots against commercial shipping — and the brother-in-law of Khalid al-Mihdhar, one of the hijackers who flew American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon.

There were a thousand people in New York City government who could have taken that pen. The mayor picked that one, at that signing, with the cameras rolling. Nobody stumbles into a gesture that precise.

Yes, the defense bar will object that everyone gets a lawyer, and they’re right — that principle is worth more than any single case. But nobody was on trial in that room. A ceremonial pen isn’t a due-process guarantee. It’s a symbol, handed to a chosen person, in a chosen moment, and choosing symbols is roughly ninety percent of what a mayor does.

The pattern didn’t start there. Look at how Mamdani has marked the day for years. His 2023 anniversary post spent seven words on the New Yorkers murdered by al-Qaeda, then rolled straight into hundreds of thousands killed in the wars that followed and millions more displaced. The 2024 version ran the same structure. The dead of that morning appear as an opening formality before the subject changes to America’s sins.

Then, campaigning in October 2025, he made the day about himself — the suspicion he grew up under, the airport questioning, the indignity of it. Set that beside a childhood spent in rooms with Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, and Jeff Bezos, and the martyrdom is a little hard to locate.

Which brings us to this week. The 9/11 families asked him to stay away from the ceremony at the World Trade Center. More than 100,000 people signed a petition backing them. These are not political operatives. They are people who want one morning a year to say their husband’s name at the place he died, without a politician nearby who treats their grief as a preamble.

Mamdani says he’s coming anyway.

Here’s the thing his defenders will never understand about that date: the job of any mayor on September 11 is to be small. Show up, stand in back, read the names, say nothing clever. Rudy Giuliani earned the right to be a main character on that ground and still had the sense not to claim it forever. Mamdani hasn’t earned an inch of it and is claiming all of it.

He’ll get his photograph. He’ll get his statement about a better world. And a lot of Americans watching — including plenty who don’t follow New York politics and couldn’t name his opponent — will file away exactly what kind of person overrules grieving families to make sure he’s in the frame.

That bill comes due in November. Not his November. Everyone else’s.