It should be a somber and powerful scene. On the afternoon of September 9, as many as 7,000 current and former members of the New York City Fire Department, most wearing their dark blue formal dress uniforms, will gather in a minor league baseball stadium on Staten Island, a location chosen specifically for its panoramic view of lower Manhattan, where 25 years ago the FDNY lost 343 firefighters in the al-Qaida terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. There are likely to be tears, maybe a few laughs. And also, jarringly, potentially some loud boos.
Part of that sound will be an expression of pain. Part will come from a less sympathetic place. Mayor Zohran Mamdani will be onstage with the FDNY’s leadership, and City Hall is bracing for a hostile reception, even though Mamdani won’t be speaking at the ceremony. “The focus should remain on the memories of those we lost, their families, and the heroes who put their lives on the line to save their fellow New Yorkers,” says Dora Pekec, a mayoral spokesperson. “This day should not be about politicians.”
In early August, Mamdani attended a Staten Island event in support of the NYPD’s “Night Out Against Crime” and made it through all of 26 seconds of his remarks before profane heckling drove him offstage. An online petition that calls on Mamdani to stay away from 9/11 ceremonies has lodged 100,000 signatures as of Tuesday morning. “He wants to change our values,” says Giovanni Galante, the petition’s co-author, whose wife was killed at the World Trade Center. Bruce Blakeman, the Republican running for governor of New York State (who recently called the sitting governor “Hijab Hochul”), has urged attendees of the 9/11 Ground Zero ceremony to turn their backs on Mamdani. “He’s not welcome there because he has yet to say anything in opposition to the global intifada,” Blakeman told reporters, invoking language used to describe Palestinians’ uprising against Israel. (Mamdani’s refusal to explicitly condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada” was a point of contention during his campaign, though he did say, “That’s not language that I use.”)
Other specific criticisms of Mamdani include his associations with the left-wing streamer Hasan Piker, who said in 2019 that “America deserved 9/11” (a comment Piker later walked back, and Mamdani has called “objectionable and reprehensible”), and Siraj Wahhaj, who US Attorney Mary Jo White listed as among those “who may be alleged as co-conspirators” in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, though he was never indicted and has denied any involvement. (Michael Bloomberg also met Wahhaj as mayor, and Eric Adams met him as Brooklyn Borough president.) But there’s also an inchoate, emotional, and Islamophobic component that sees the city’s first Muslim mayor as a stand-in for the 19 Muslims who hijacked four planes and turned them into deadly weapons, part of the “them” who attacked “us.” “People have the right to express their opinion,” says Robert Eustace, the president of the city’s Uniformed Firefighters Association. “The ceremony is apolitical. We’re there to honor and memorialize the members that we’ve lost.”
Mamdani, who was nine years old when two of the planes struck the Twin Towers, has tried to defuse some of the tension by making himself present and visible to first responders. In the lead-up to the 25th anniversary of the attacks, the mayor has visited seven of the firehouses that were hit hard in 2001. He has sat down with the de facto dean of the City Hall press corps, WCBS television’s Marcia Kramer, for an extended conversation about 9/11. He is releasing documents, long withheld by his predecessors, regarding what the city knew in 2001 about the air quality at Ground Zero. And Mamdani, like previous mayors, spoke at an event at FDNY headquarters in Brooklyn, where the names of 36 firefighters who died of World Trade Center-related illnesses in the past year were added to a memorial wall.
