New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani signed executive orders Friday honoring the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks — then immediately turned the moment into a political statement by routing the ceremonial pen to his chief counsel, Ramzi Kassem.
Kassem, who arrived late to the City Hall event with a smirk, once served as lead defense counsel for Ahmed al-Darbi, an al-Qaeda operative who pleaded guilty in the 2002 bombing of the French oil tanker MV Limburg. Al-Darbi’s sister was married to Khalid al-Mihdhar, one of the hijackers who crashed American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon. The connection is not distant or academic. It is family.
After signing the last document, Mamdani handed the pen to NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch and asked her to pass it along. Tisch did so awkwardly and left the room first. Kassem took the souvenir. Video from the mayor’s office shows the exchange. Families who lost relatives that day called it exactly what it looked like: a stunt, not a slip.
“It’s bulls–t,” said Dennis Warchola, whose firefighter brother Michael died in the North Tower. “How can you defend a guy like that who wants to do Americans or any innocent person harm?”
This was not an isolated appointment. Mamdani chose Kassem as chief counsel knowing the résumé. Kassem founded a CUNY legal clinic focused on Muslim clients targeted by national-security cases, represented Guantanamo detainees, and later took on Columbia activist Mahmoud Khalil. He has also written that 9/11 attackers were driven by “resentment towards the United States rooted in political realities shaped by our country’s policies” rather than “intrinsic evil.” That worldview now sits at the right hand of the mayor of the city that was attacked.
Nine-eleven families have already circulated petitions with tens of thousands of signatures asking organizers to keep Mamdani away from Ground Zero ceremonies. They cite his refusal to condemn “globalize the intifada,” his campaign appearance with Imam Siraj Wahhaj (an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing), and the Kassem hire. The mayor still plans to attend. The families say his presence would be an insult, not a tribute.
One week before the anniversary, Mamdani signed orders creating a city Day of Remembrance and updating emergency preparedness. The words on paper were solemn. The photo-op that followed was not. Handing the pen used to memorialize nearly 3,000 murdered New Yorkers to the lawyer who spent years defending a man from the same network is not remembrance. It is contempt dressed up as procedure.
The status quo in New York politics treats this as just another personnel choice. Victims’ families see something else: a mayor who never quite treats 9/11 as an American wound rather than a talking point to be managed.
References:
https://nypost.com/2026/07/25/us-news/families-of-9-11-want-to-ban-mamdani-from-25th-anniversary/
