‘Unwelcome Guest’: 9/11 Families Say Mamdani Associates With Those Who Claimed America ‘Deserved’ Attacks

A group of September 11 families wants New York’s first Muslim mayor kept away from the ceremony marking a quarter-century since the attacks, an extraordinary demand aimed at a sitting mayor who has already stood at Ground Zero in mourning three times this year.

The families are circulating a petition urging the organisers of the 25th-anniversary commemoration to exclude Mayor Zohran Mamdani, calling him an ‘unwelcome guest’ whose past statements and associations, they argue, are incompatible with the solemnity of the day.

Mamdani has not responded directly; the ceremony is controlled not by City Hall but by an independent non-profit, and his allies and defenders cast the campaign as an Islamophobic attempt to bar the city’s first Muslim mayor from a civic rite he is entitled to attend.

The dispute has become the sharpest test yet of how a Mamdani mayoralty and the memory of 9/11 will coexist.

The Petition and the Families Behind It

The effort was detailed in an exclusive New York Post interview with Giovanni Galante, whose 29-year-old wife Grace Catherine Galante was among the 2,977 people killed on 11 September 2001.

‘Our objection is based on his public record, his failure to meaningfully acknowledge the horror of that day, and his employment of, support for, or association with individuals who have minimized 9/11, defended terrorists, or even suggested America deserved the attacks,’ Galante said.

He framed the request as personal rather than political. ‘It is not political, and it is not a platform for those connected to such views,’ he said. ‘His presence would be deeply hurtful and inappropriate, like an unwelcome guest at a deeply personal ceremony.’

The Change.org petition, according to its organisers, had gathered more than 1,100 signatures within days of launching, a figure they say includes at least 300 relatives of victims. Those numbers are the organisers’ own and have not been independently verified.

The petition itself is more carefully worded than the campaign around it, asking organisers to ‘carefully consider whether Mr Mamdani’s participation would align with the intention of the ceremony’. Queens Council Member Joann Ariola told the Post she was prepared to help the organisers bring their concerns before the City Council.

The Associations the Petitioners Point To

Much of the case rests on people the mayor has stood near rather than words he has spoken. Petitioners cite his past association with the left-wing streamer Hasan Piker, who once said America ‘deserved’ the 9/11 attacks, and his praise during the campaign for the Brooklyn imam Siraj Wahhaj, who was named an unindicted co-conspirator, a designation that is not a criminal charge, in the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing case.

They also object to his appointment of Ramzi Kassem as a chief counsel at City Hall. Kassem is a civil-rights attorney and law professor who has represented detainees including one who pleaded guilty before a US military commission, work that his supporters characterise as the ordinary business of a defence lawyer rather than an endorsement of any client.

The petition further invokes writings by the mayor’s father, the Columbia University professor Mahmood Mamdani, who argued after 2001 that suicide bombing should be analysed as a form of modern political violence.

These are the petitioners’ characterisations, and each carries context they omit. Association is not endorsement, an academic’s analysis is not his son’s policy, and legal representation is a constitutional guarantee rather than a political statement. The petition presents them instead as a pattern, and it is that framing, rather than any single documented act by the mayor, that carries its argument.

A Ceremony the Mayor Is Unlikely To Be Barred From

For all its emotional force, the petition faces a practical wall. The commemoration is run by the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, an independent non-profit rather than a city agency, and nothing obliges it to act on a public petition or to exclude a sitting mayor from a ceremony mayors traditionally attend.

News reports on the campaign have noted that it is unlikely to affect Mamdani’s attendance, and organisers have not indicated that they intend to exclude him.

The likeliest outcome is that the mayor stands among the officials on the anniversary while the families who object stand apart from him, a tableau of a city still arguing over who is permitted to grieve in public.

Twenty-five years on, the ceremony was meant to be about the dead. Instead, it has become another front in the argument over the living man the city elected to lead it.

Originally published on IBTimes UK