9/11 Families Revolt — Mamdani Honors Al Qaeda Lawyer

Thousands of 9/11 family members have signed a petition demanding New York City’s mayor skip this year’s Ground Zero ceremony, and he has said flatly that he’s going anyway.

Quick Take

Mayor Zohran Mamdani has repeatedly said he will attend the 25th anniversary 9/11 ceremony to honor victims, survivors, and first responders.
A petition demanding organizers bar him from the event has drawn tens of thousands of signatures from 9/11 families and retired officers.
The National September 11 Memorial & Museum has a long-standing policy of letting all elected officials attend as silent witnesses, without screening them by politics.
No New York City mayor has ever skipped the memorial, making the push to exclude Mamdani a break from twenty-five years of custom.

A Growing Petition Aimed at One Man

Family members who lost loved ones on September 11 started an online petition this past summer asking memorial organizers to keep Mamdani away from the 25th anniversary ceremony. The petition argued his participation might clash with “the intention of the ceremony and the expectations of the families most directly affected by the tragedy”. Signatures climbed fast, reportedly passing 95,000 by late August, fueled by retired Port Authority officers who said his presence would cause “profound pain”.

Mamdani’s Answer Has Not Changed

Mamdani has given the same response every time reporters have pressed him. He told CBS News New York he intends to “proudly honor the families, the survivors, the first responders forever impacted by that horrific terror attack by standing alongside them”. His spokesperson repeated that same pledge word for word months later, even as the petition kept growing. That consistency matters. It shows his position was not a one-time answer to dodge a hard question, but a stated plan he has held to for weeks.

Former Governor George Pataki has publicly said Mamdani should skip the memorial, adding weight from a high-profile Republican voice to what started as a grassroots family campaign. City & State reporting on that call also noted a simple fact that cuts against the entire premise of banning him: no sitting New York City mayor has ever skipped the 9/11 memorial event. That track record turns the ask into something unprecedented, not a return to normal practice.

The Memorial’s Own Rules Cut Against Exclusion

Coverage of the dispute notes the 9/11 Memorial & Museum does not screen elected officials based on their politics, and has let every sitting mayor, governor, and president attend since 2001. Officials sit in a designated area and do not speak. That framework was built specifically to keep the ceremony free of political theater, letting families read the names of the dead without turning the day into a stage for anyone’s agenda.

Why This Fight Looks Bigger Than One Mayor

The 9/11 memorial has weathered fights over politicians before. In 2012, organizers barred elected officials from speaking at the podium entirely, a change made specifically to keep the day from becoming partisan. That history suggests the current dispute isn’t really about one man’s résumé. It’s about whether critics can turn a bear-witness role, open to officials of every party for a quarter century, into a loyalty test decided by petition instead of protocol.

Mamdani’s identity as the city’s first Muslim mayor has been repeatedly foregrounded in coverage of this fight, which raises the stakes well beyond a normal scheduling dispute. Reasonable people can debate whether his past associations and remarks deserve scrutiny. But the memorial’s own stated policy, and twenty-five years of mayors showing up without incident, both point toward attendance being the norm rather than the exception. Petitions reflect real grief. They do not rewrite a ceremony’s rules.

What happens on September 11 will settle the question in practice. Mamdani says he will be there, standing silently among families and first responders, just as every mayor before him has done. The families pushing back deserve to be heard, and their pain is real regardless of the outcome. But changing a twenty-five-year tradition on the strength of a petition, rather than a documented rule change from the memorial itself, sets a precedent that could outlast this one controversy entirely.