Zohran Mamdani is going to Ground Zero on Friday.
He announced it himself, matter-of-factly, standing near a parade that had already seen three people stabbed before lunchtime. He’ll be there for the 25th anniversary of September 11th, he says, to honor “the families whose loved ones were stolen from them.”
He’ll be the first Muslim mayor of New York to attend the ceremony.
That’s a real thing, a historic thing. And it’s happening under a cloud he built himself.
Rudy Giuliani doesn’t want him there. Neither does George Pataki. Giuliani says he’d take it personally. Pataki wants Mamdani to either denounce the extremists in his orbit or stay home out of respect for the families.
These aren’t fringe voices shouting into the wind. These are two men who led this city and state through that day, who buried friends, and who know exactly what September 11th felt like.
When men like that ask you to think twice, you think twice. Mamdani didn’t.
And here’s why the objection has teeth.
Mamdani’s chief counsel, Ramzi Kassem, once defended an al Qaeda operative at Guantanamo Bay — a man whose brother-in-law helped fly a plane into the Pentagon.
Friday, Kassem stood beside the mayor as Mamdani signed an executive order creating an annual “Day of Remembrance.” Then Mamdani handed him the pen. The ceremonial pen. A gesture of honor, on this of all days, to this of all men.
City Councilwoman Vicki Paladino said Kassem doesn’t belong in this country, let alone in city government.
She’s not wrong to be furious.
It isn’t a one-off.
Mamdani once posed with Imam Siraj Wahhaj, a man named an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, a man who’s called America “filthy” and spoken warmly of jihad. Mamdani called him “one of the nation’s foremost Muslim leaders.”
You start to see a pattern, and patterns are the thing New Yorkers trust more than press releases.
So the mayor will stand at Ground Zero Friday, JD Vance beside him, the president absent, fences and checkpoints going up around lower Manhattan like it’s a place under threat — which, this week, in this city, with this mayor, in a way it is.
The families who lost people that day deserve a ceremony about them.
Not about him.
We’ll see which one they get.
