The 9/11 Families’ Case Against Mamdani Never Needed His Faith

New York’s Mayor Zohran Mamdani stood at Ground Zero last Friday for the 25th anniversary of Sept. 11, over the objections of more than 100,000 people who had signed a petition asking him not to come. He did not merely attend over those objections. As the names of the dead were read aloud, video showed him visibly laughing and chatting with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, drawing a fresh wave of criticism layered on top of the original one. 

Predictably, CNN and others rushed to frame the backlash, both the petition and the reaction to his conduct at the ceremony, as an echo of “post-9/11 Islamophobia.” That broadbrush framing was never accurate. Because the objections to Mamdani’s presence, and now to his conduct once there, stood on their own, built entirely from his own record, and required no reference to his religion at all.

Start with the man he appointed as his chief legal counsel. Ramzi Kassem’s résumé includes representing a convicted al-Qaeda operative whose brother-in-law was among the hijackers who struck the Pentagon. Mamdani made this man his chief lawyer. Contrast that with how Mamdani treated John Leventhal, a retired Jewish appellate judge recommended for his judicial advisory committee, whom Mamdani rejected specifically because Leventhal had once represented Ghislaine Maxwell on appeal.

By Mamdani’s own stated logic, representing a notorious client disqualifies a lawyer from public trust. He applied that standard to a Jewish judge over Maxwell. He never applied it to Kassem over al-Qaeda. Then there is “Globalize the intifada,” which Mamdani has had a year of opportunities to disavow outright and has instead treated as a debate to be managed. It is not an abstraction. Australian officials linked the slogan’s normalization to the massacre of Jewish worshippers at a Bondi Beach Hanukkah celebration last December. Congress cited it in a resolution referencing the Boulder, Colorado firebombing that murdered 82-year-old Karen Diamond in June of 2025.

Then there is Hasan Piker, who in 2019 asserted that America deserved 9/11. To his credit, Mamdani called the remark “reprehensible” in a campaign debate. To his discredit, that is where the accountability stopped. Mamdani appeared on Piker’s show. His campaign touted Piker’s support. A one-line condemnation, offered once, under pressure, is not distance. It’s damage control.

Piker isn’t a one-off, either. Aber Kawas, a state senate candidate Mamdani endorsed and campaigned for, won her primary this year while sitting on a resurfaced clip in which she plainly suggests America deserved the attacks, framed as insufficient atonement next to the scale of “genocide and slavery.” Mamdani’s answer to Piker was that his comment was reprehensible. His answer to Kawas was silence and an endorsement for public office.

Then there’s his own household. In 2017, Mamdani, rapping as Young Cardamom, released “Salaam,” in which he lauded the Holy Land 5, five men convicted of funneling $12 million to Hamas through a sham charity: “My love to the Holy Land Five, you better look ’em up.” Hamas’ own leadership did not condemn the Sept. 11 attacks. Hamas called them a consequence of American “injustice,” a line Aber Kawas would echo decades later almost word for word. Hamas and al-Qaeda share the same current of Islamist supremacism that treats the mass murder of civilians as legitimate “resistance.” That’s not ancient history Mamdani can wave off as a youthful mistake. He was 25 when he lauded men who funneled money to Hamas.

Mamdani’s wife, Rama Duwaji, posted a tribute to Leila Khaled in 2017, captioned with Khaled’s own line that she’d be “happy to accept death” for the cause. Khaled was the first woman to hijack an airplane, in 1969, pioneering a tactic terrorists refined 32 years later into the deadliest attack ever carried out on American soil. In the immediate aftermath of Oct. 7, 2023, Duwaji liked a wave of Instagram posts celebrating the massacre, including one dismissing the rape of Israeli women as a hoax. She has since partially apologized, crediting her age at the time. She was 20 in 2017, not 15, and the explanation for a grown woman liking posts cheering a massacre in 2023 isn’t hard to find: sympathy for Islamist supremacist violence explains it.

Not one item on that list, and nothing about laughing with a colleague while the names of the dead were being read, requires Mamdani’s religion to make its case. A Muslim mayor who had spent the last decade unambiguously rejecting Islamist supremacist terrorism, its apologists and its propagandists, and who then showed the ceremony itself basic solemnity, would not have faced this petition or this backlash, whatever his faith. All it took to prompt the 9/11 families who objected to Mamdani’s presence, and to draw the second round of criticism once he arrived, was his own pattern, documented in his own lyrics, his own wife’s posts, his own appointments, his own campaign endorsements and now his own visible conduct at the memorial itself, of proximity to and indifference toward people, causes, and moments connected to the murder of Americans and Israelis by terrorists animated by that same ideology. Calling that pattern Islamophobia doesn’t just misdescribe it. It tries to insulate it from the scrutiny it has earned on the facts alone.

That pattern hasn’t stayed confined to old social media posts. Mamdani’s first month in office, January 2026, saw antisemitic hate crimes in the city jump 182% year over year, days after he used his first day as mayor to revoke New York’s adoption of the IHRA definition of antisemitism. By August, the cumulative year-to-date rise stood at 8%, enough to make Jews, roughly 10% of the city’s population, the target of well over half of all confirmed hate crimes in New York. Crime has dropped almost everywhere else in the city this past year. It did not for Jews.

And then there was the move the Islamophobia framing was built to protect: Mamdani’s own habit of centering himself and his family as 9/11’s victim. In a 2020 campaign video, he described being pulled out of class as a nine-year-old on the day of the attacks, saying his teacher warned him and another Muslim student that they might face bullying because of what had just happened. He has also invoked an aunt who, he says, stopped riding the subway after 9/11 out of fear for wearing her hijab. Nearly 3,000 people died that day. Mamdani was nine years old, safe in a classroom, and his own accounts of the day center on a warning he received and a relative’s purported discomfort, not a grave anyone in his family had to visit. This year, at the actual ceremony for those nearly 3,000 dead, he could not manage the solemnity his own retold childhood story asks the rest of us to extend to him.

None of this requires invoking Mamdani’s faith, and that is precisely the point. The 9/11 families who asked him to stay away were not judging his beliefs about G-d. They were responding to what he has said, whom he has hired and endorsed and whom he chooses to associate with. Their concerns were realized in how he conducted himself as their relatives’ names were read into the public record. The evidence is there in his own words, and on video. They were paying attention. Everyone else should be, too. 

Micha Danzig is an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former NYPD officer. He writes widely on Israel, Zionism, antisemitism, and Jewish history. He serves on the board of Herut North America.