🔥 9/11 CONTROVERSY ERUPTS AROUND MAMDANI — AND THE “GLOBALIZE THE INTIFADA” DEBATE JUST BLEW WIDE OPEN AGAIN… |
9/11 FAMILIES SPLIT OVER MAMDANI AT GROUND ZERO - VIRAL CLAIMS ABOUT HIS ELECTION, 'INTIFADA' RECORD AND 9/11 COMMENTS NEED MAJOR CORRECTIONS
ad-free version here: New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is heading toward one of the most emotionally charged moments of his young administration: the 25th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks.
A petition organized by some relatives of 9/11 victims is demanding that Mamdani stay away from the Ground Zero remembrance ceremony. The petition has drawn tens of thousands of signatures and reflects genuine anger over his past rhetoric, his refusal during the 2025 mayoral campaign to condemn the phrase 'globalize the intifada,' and associations that critics say are deeply troubling in the context of terrorism and Israel.
Mamdani nevertheless intends to attend. Other 9/11 family members have publicly defended his right - and, as mayor, his civic responsibility - to stand at Ground Zero and honor those murdered on September 11, 2001.
That dispute is real. But the viral post surrounding it mixes legitimate controversies with badly distorted election math, an inaccurate claim that Mamdani himself used 'globalize the intifada' as a campaign slogan, an unsupported claim of an 'Islamic takeover,' and a sweeping assertion that he has spent years sympathizing with the terrorists responsible for 9/11.
The strongest case against Mamdani does not require any of those exaggerations. His own record provides enough material for serious scrutiny - but it has to be described accurately.
Mamdani's Muslim faith is not evidence of extremism or disloyalty. The relevant questions are what he actually said, whom he associated with, what policies he supports, and how he now treats the memory of the September 11 attacks.
A Petition From 9/11 Family Members Is Real - and It Has Grown Dramatically
The petition urging Mamdani not to attend the 25th anniversary ceremony is real.
It was organized by relatives of people killed in the attacks, including Giovanni Galante, whose wife Grace Catherine Galante was killed while working at Cantor Fitzgerald in the North Tower.
By early September, reporting put the petition above 98,000 signatures. Organizers say they plan to deliver it to City Hall before the anniversary.
The petitioners argue that Mamdani's previous comments and political associations make his presence at the ceremony disrespectful to families who lost loved ones.
Some relatives have said that if Mamdani attends, they plan to ignore him or turn their backs rather than create a confrontation at the memorial.
It is accurate to say that some 9/11 families want Mamdani to stay away. It is not accurate to say 'the families of 9/11 victims' as though the thousands of relatives share one position.
Other 9/11 Families Want Mamdani There
The family community is divided.
September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, an organization founded by relatives of people killed in the attacks, has publicly said it 'firmly supports' the presence at Ground Zero of anyone who comes to mourn the dead and pay respects.
Elizabeth Miller, whose father was killed on 9/11, has said Mamdani should be allowed to honor the victims and noted that mayors and other elected officials have attended the ceremony year after year.
That division matters because the annual commemoration is not owned by one political faction. The people whose lives were shattered by 9/11 do not all hold the same views about war, Israel, Islam, immigration or Mamdani.
The petition therefore represents a substantial and emotionally significant protest, but not a unanimous instruction from 9/11 families.
Mamdani Did Not Use 'Globalize the Intifada' as His Campaign Slogan
The viral post says New Yorkers elected a man who 'used the slogan globalize the intifada.' That wording is false.
Mamdani did not campaign under that slogan and there is no evidence that he adopted it as his own campaign message.
What he did do was repeatedly decline to condemn the phrase when challenged during the 2025 Democratic mayoral primary.
In a June 2025 interview, Mamdani said different people understood the phrase differently. He said that what he heard in many uses of such language was 'a desperate desire for equality and equal rights' and a call to stand up for Palestinian human rights.
He also argued that the mayor's job was not to police speech. That refusal to condemn the phrase produced intense criticism from Jewish leaders, Democratic politicians and his electoral opponents.
The accurate criticism is that Mamdani declined to condemn 'globalize the intifada' and offered a nonviolent interpretation of it. Saying it was his own campaign slogan goes beyond the record.
Why the Phrase Is So Explosive
The controversy cannot be understood by translating one Arabic word in isolation.
'Intifada' literally refers to an uprising or shaking off. But in Israeli and Jewish historical memory, the term is inseparable from the Palestinian intifadas, especially the Second Intifada, during which suicide bombings and other attacks killed large numbers of Israeli civilians.
For many Jews, the instruction to 'globalize' an intifada sounds like a call to export that violence beyond Israel and the Palestinian territories.
Pro-Palestinian activists who use the phrase often say they mean worldwide resistance, protest or solidarity rather than attacks on civilians.
Those competing meanings are exactly why Mamdani's refusal to condemn the phrase became such a major political issue in New York. A mayor cannot control private speech, but voters are entitled to judge what language a mayor chooses to discourage, defend or leave ambiguous.
Mamdani Later Changed His Public Position
The viral post stops at the most damaging point in the 2025 controversy and omits what came next.
After weeks of criticism, Mamdani said he would not use the phrase himself and would discourage other people from using it.
He described conversations with Jewish New Yorkers who explained why they heard the slogan as a threat rather than a generic call for Palestinian rights.
That did not satisfy every critic because he still resisted declaring the phrase inherently antisemitic or equivalent to a direct call for violence.
But it is materially different from saying that, as mayor, he continues to promote the slogan.
The Election Numbers in the Viral Post Are Badly Mixed Up
The post claims that voters with no memory of 9/11 had a 41.9 percent turnout in 'the mayoral election,' lifted Mamdani to victory in the primary by roughly 129,000 votes, and therefore allowed about 2 percent of New Yorkers to put him in office.
Those figures combine different elections and different denominators.
The 2025 Democratic primary had a citywide turnout of 29.9 percent among registered voters, not 41.9 percent.
Under ranked-choice voting, Mamdani finished the final round with 573,169 votes to Andrew Cuomo's 443,229 - a final-round margin of 129,940 votes.
The 41-percent figure belongs to the November general election. NYC Votes reports general-election turnout of 41.6 percent, the highest city-election turnout in more than 50 years, with about 2.2 million voters participating.
The viral post takes Mamdani's roughly 130,000-vote primary margin and combines it with the general election's roughly 42 percent turnout. They are not statistics from the same contest.
Mamdani Won More Than a Million Votes in the General Election
The claim that 'about 2 percent of New Yorkers' lifted Mamdani into office is also misleading.
Official election returns show Mamdani received roughly 1.11 million votes across the Democratic and Working Families ballot lines in the November 2025 general election.
Comparing a candidate's vote total with the city's entire population is not a standard measure of democratic legitimacy because the population includes children, noncitizens and other people who are not eligible to vote.
Even if one makes that crude comparison, Mamdani's general-election vote total was nowhere near 2 percent of the city's population.
The more meaningful fact is straightforward: he won the legally constituted citywide election after first winning a competitive ranked-choice Democratic primary.
The '800,000 New Yorkers Weren't Born on 9/11' Claim Is Far Too Low
The demographic claim is also wrong in the opposite direction.
Census Bureau estimates for 2024 put New York City's under-18 population at roughly 1.66 million. Every one of those residents was born after September 11, 2001.
The city's 18-to-24 population adds hundreds of thousands more people, most of whom were also born after the attacks.
Using the Census age bands, the number of New Yorkers who were not yet born on September 11, 2001 is well above two million, not approximately 800,000.
The broader point - that a large and growing share of New Yorkers has no personal memory of 9/11 - is true. The number used in the viral post is not.
A Generation Without Firsthand Memory Is a Real Civic Challenge
The fact that millions of New Yorkers were born after 9/11 is not evidence that they are indifferent to the attack or that they voted for Mamdani because they do not understand terrorism.
But it does create a real civic challenge for New York.
As firsthand witnesses age, the city increasingly depends on schools, families, memorial institutions, first responders and public officials to transmit what happened: 19 al-Qaeda hijackers seized four commercial airliners, attacked the World Trade Center and Pentagon, and caused the crash of Flight 93 after passengers fought back.
The National September 11 Memorial & Museum records 2,977 people killed in the September 11 attacks, including 2,753 in New York.
Ensuring younger New Yorkers understand that history should be a nonpartisan obligation.
Mamdani's Older 9/11 Messages Are Fair Game for Criticism
Critics do have a real record to examine when they question Mamdani's tone toward September 11.
In a 2023 anniversary post, Mamdani wrote that nearly 3,000 New Yorkers 'died on 9/11' and then immediately broadened the mourning to the hundreds of thousands who died in the wars that followed and the millions injured or displaced.
Critics object that the wording used a passive verb - 'died' - rather than saying the victims were murdered in a terrorist attack, and that pairing the victims with casualties of later wars diluted the moral clarity of the commemoration.
That criticism is a legitimate interpretation of his rhetoric.
It is not the same as proving that Mamdani minimized the victims because he sympathized with the al-Qaeda terrorists who murdered them.
Mamdani's earlier wording can fairly be criticized as passive and politically reframed. The public record does not establish that he supported the 9/11 attacks or the hijackers.
The Anwar al-Awlaki Tweets Are a More Serious and Specific Vulnerability
A separate controversy involves posts Mamdani wrote in 2015 about Anwar al-Awlaki, the U.S.-born cleric who became a leading figure in al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
Mamdani questioned the FBI's surveillance of Awlaki and asked why there was not more discussion of whether Awlaki's knowledge of surveillance contributed to his eventual path into al-Qaeda.
Those comments can reasonably be criticized for placing significant analytical weight on U.S. surveillance while discussing a man who later became an influential al-Qaeda propagandist and operational figure.
Awlaki was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Yemen in 2011 after the government linked him to AQAP and terrorist plotting.
But even here, precision matters. Awlaki was not one of the 19 September 11 hijackers, and Mamdani's posts do not show him praising al-Qaeda, endorsing terrorism or celebrating the murder of Americans.
Mamdani's Awlaki posts are a legitimate subject for hard scrutiny. They are not proof that he supported the terrorists who carried out 9/11.
His 2026 Record on 9/11 Is Much More Explicit
Whatever one thinks of Mamdani's earlier language, his official rhetoric as mayor in the run-up to the 25th anniversary has been unmistakably clearer.
At an FDNY memorial ceremony on September 2, he referred to the 'horrific terror attacks of September 11th.'
On September 4, he signed an executive order establishing September 11 as an annual Citywide Day of Remembrance and Service.
The order explicitly calls the victims people killed in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, honors first responders and families, and directs the city to help future generations understand what happened and the sacrifices made that day.
In remarks accompanying the order, Mamdani said 'Never forget' is not merely a slogan but an obligation to remember those lost and preserve their example.
Mamdani Is Also Strengthening City Emergency Preparedness
The mayor paired the remembrance order with a second initiative focused on continuity of government and emergency readiness.
City Hall says the changes update New York's continuity planning and create an interagency structure aimed at keeping essential services operating through major emergencies.
Earlier in the week, Mamdani joined state officials in demanding the release of federal counterterrorism funding for New York.
Those actions do not erase legitimate arguments about his earlier rhetoric or foreign-policy views.
They do make it inaccurate to claim that his current mayoral posture treats 9/11 as unimportant or refuses to identify it as terrorism.
Mamdani's Religion Is Not the Same Thing as Al-Qaeda's Ideology
The viral post repeatedly substitutes 'Muslim' or 'Islamic' identity for evidence of political extremism.
That is a category error.
Al-Qaeda was an Islamist terrorist organization. Its 19 hijackers acted on behalf of a violent extremist movement, not on behalf of the world's Muslims as a religious population.
Mamdani is Muslim. That biographical fact neither connects him to al-Qaeda nor answers whether his political positions are wise, radical or offensive.
The FBI itself has emphasized that Osama bin Laden was a mass murderer whose organization killed Muslims as well as non-Muslims.
Critics can attack Mamdani's actual words, affiliations and policies as aggressively as the evidence permits. Describing his election as proof of a 'Muslim takeover' is political rhetoric, not a factual conclusion.
Association Claims Need Their Own Evidentiary Limits
Some petition supporters also cite Mamdani's relationships with controversial activists and religious figures.
Those associations can be politically relevant, especially when a public official praises or works with someone whose past raises serious questions.
But labels such as 'unindicted co-conspirator' are not criminal convictions, and a lawyer's representation of an accused terrorist is not proof that the lawyer shares the client's ideology.
The same rule should apply regardless of party: association can justify questions, but guilt cannot simply be transferred from one person to another.
A defensible article should describe the actual relationship, the other person's documented record, Mamdani's own words about that person, and then let readers judge the significance.
The Ground Zero Ceremony Has a Civic Tradition Larger Than One Mayor
The annual Ground Zero commemoration is centered on the victims and their families, not on speeches by politicians.
Family members read the names of the dead, and moments of silence mark the attacks, collapses and other key moments of September 11.
Mayors, presidents and other public officials have long attended to pay respects, but the ritual deliberately keeps elected officials from becoming the center of the event.
That tradition matters in evaluating Mamdani's attendance.
His presence as the sitting mayor would be institutionally normal. Whether individual families welcome him is a separate and deeply personal question.
Should Mamdani Attend? The Strongest Answer Does Not Depend on His Faith
There is a serious argument for why some relatives do not want Mamdani standing near them on the anniversary.
They can point to his early refusal to condemn 'globalize the intifada,' his older 9/11 wording, his Awlaki comments and other associations they believe show poor judgment about terrorism and antisemitism.
Those families have every right to protest, petition, turn their backs or refuse to interact with him.
But excluding a sitting New York City mayor because he is Muslim would be a fundamentally different proposition. His religion is not evidence that he shares the ideology of the men who attacked the city.
If Mamdani attends silently and respectfully, does not turn the ceremony into a political platform, and honors the murdered victims and first responders, his attendance is consistent with the civic role historically performed by New York mayors.
The strongest criticism of Mamdani is based on his documented political record. The weakest is the idea that a Muslim mayor is inherently unfit to mourn victims of Islamist terrorism.
The Viral Post's Strongest Point and Its Weakest Point
The strongest point is that Mamdani's record on language surrounding Israel, the intifada and terrorism deserves scrutiny before one of the most sacred civic commemorations in New York.
He did refuse repeated opportunities to simply condemn a slogan that many Jewish New Yorkers associate with suicide bombings and mass violence.
His old Awlaki comments and earlier anniversary posts also provide legitimate material for critics who believe he has sometimes framed terrorism and its aftermath through an ideological lens that minimizes the perpetrators' responsibility.
The weakest point is the attempt to turn those controversies into a story about Muslims collectively taking over New York because younger people voted.
That claim is unsupported by election data, demographic data and the basic distinction between a person's religious identity and evidence of extremist conduct.
What Can Actually Be Said With Confidence
Zohran Mamdani is New York City's first Muslim mayor and will be mayor during the 25th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
The 9/11 attacks were carried out by 19 al-Qaeda hijackers and killed 2,977 victims at the World Trade Center, Pentagon and in Pennsylvania.
A petition organized by some relatives of 9/11 victims is urging Mamdani not to attend the Ground Zero ceremony, and by early September it had attracted more than 98,000 signatures according to current reporting.
Other relatives of 9/11 victims, including September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, support his presence and say anyone who comes respectfully to mourn the dead should be welcome.
Mamdani did not use 'globalize the intifada' as his campaign slogan. He repeatedly declined to condemn the phrase during the 2025 campaign, interpreted it in terms of equality and Palestinian rights, and later said he would not use it and would discourage others from doing so.
The viral election math is wrong. The Democratic primary turnout was 29.9 percent; Mamdani's final ranked-choice margin over Andrew Cuomo was 129,940 votes. The general election turnout was 41.6 percent, and Mamdani received roughly 1.11 million votes across his ballot lines.
The claim that only about 800,000 New Yorkers were born after 9/11 is far too low. Census data show roughly 1.66 million residents under 18 alone in 2024, and the post-9/11-born population rises above two million when young adults are included.
Mamdani's 2023 9/11 post used the passive phrase that nearly 3,000 New Yorkers 'died' and immediately connected the anniversary to casualties of later wars. Critics can fairly describe that wording as politically reframing the commemoration, but it does not prove support for al-Qaeda or the 9/11 hijackers.
His 2015 comments about Anwar al-Awlaki questioned whether FBI surveillance contributed to radicalization. Those comments are legitimately controversial, but Awlaki was not a 9/11 hijacker and the posts do not establish that Mamdani endorsed terrorism.
In September 2026, Mamdani has explicitly called 9/11 a horrific terrorist attack, honored the dead and first responders, established an annual Citywide Day of Remembrance and Service, and taken additional steps on emergency preparedness.
There is no factual basis for describing Mamdani's election as proof of a Muslim or Islamic takeover of New York City.
The question of whether individual 9/11 families want him at Ground Zero is emotionally and politically contested. The families themselves are not unanimous.
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The most defensible conclusion is that Mamdani should be judged at the memorial by whether he honors the victims, first responders and families with the solemnity the occasion requires - not by the fact that he is Muslim.
That conclusion does not require anyone to excuse his past rhetoric. It requires holding him accountable for what the evidence actually shows rather than strengthening the case against him with claims that are false.
