Mamdani Draws Outrage by Signing 9/11 Order — Then Giving Pen to Worst Possible Person

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani signed an executive order honoring the victims of 9/11 on Friday.

Then he handed the ceremonial pen to a lawyer who once represented an al-Qaeda terrorist.

The surreal ceremony unfolded at City Hall just one week before the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks.

Mamdani gathered senior administration officials to sign two executive orders related to the tragedy.

The first “order” establishes September 11 as an official New York City “Day of Remembrance and Service,” complete with a citywide moment of silence honoring those killed in the attacks and those who later died from 9/11-related illnesses.

Fine. All fairly standard stuff for a mayor commemorating one of the darkest days in his city's history.

Then came the poison pen. After Mamdani finished signing the documents, he handed the ceremonial pen to NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch and quietly instructed her, “Can you pass this?”

Kassem isn't an innocuous City Hall attorney. Before joining the Mamdani administration, Kassem spent years representing detainees at Guantánamo Bay and litigating national-security cases.

His former clients included Ahmed al-Darbi, a Saudi al-Qaeda member who pleaded guilty before a military commission to terrorism charges arising from the 2002 bombing of the French oil tanker MV Limburg off Yemen.

And al-Darbi had a sinister connection to September 11: his sister was married to Khalid al-Mihdhar, one of the five hijackers aboard American Airlines Flight 77, which was flown into the Pentagon.

So, naturally, this was the man who ended up with the ceremonial pen used at the mayor's 9/11 commemoration.

We all know exactly what it is. It's a couple of Islamist fellow-travelers sharing a private joke at the expense of gullible Americans.

The moment immediately drew fury from some 9/11 families and New York City officials.

“It’s bulls–t,” Dennis Warchola, whose firefighter brother Michael was killed in the North Tower, told the New York Post.

“How can you defend a guy like that who wants to do Americans or any innocent person harm?”

Republican Queens Councilwoman Joann Ariola called the episode “breathtakingly tone-deaf and disrespectful.”

“The families who lost loved ones on 9/11 have every right to be outraged,” Ariola told the Post. “On the 25th anniversary, City Hall should be honoring their sacrifice with dignity, not forcing those families to endure yet another insult.”

Retired NYPD detective and John Jay College adjunct professor Michael Alazar went further, telling the Post he believed the gesture was intentional.

“It happened during a ceremony meant to be about the victims, and no one else,” he added. “9/11 families didn’t come to City Hall to watch Mamdani spotlight someone whose work intersects with the very ideology that took their loved ones.”

The sequence was made stranger by the fact that Kassem is the mayor's chief counsel.

Kassem is also a prominent attorney and CUNY School of Law professor who founded the school's CLEAR clinic. According to CUNY, he and his students have represented 15 Guantánamo prisoners, and his litigation has included national-security, wartime-detention and war-crimes cases.

He also served as a senior policy adviser in the Biden White House from 2022 to 2024 before being tapped as Mamdani's chief counsel.

“Twenty-five years may have passed, but for the families who still grieve someone who never came home, or who got sick from the toxic air in the years after, the grief remains fresh,” Mamdani said.

“Every New Yorker knows the words ‘Never forget,’ and the meaning they carry.”

Never forget? That's what they did when they elected this Islamo-communist to the mayor’s office.

Queens Republican Councilwoman Vicki Paladino blasted his presence at the ceremony altogether.

“His participation in anything related to 9/11 is an insult to every New Yorker who survived that day, and indeed all Americans,” Paladino told the Post.

Whatever message City Hall intended to send with Friday's ceremony, it was not the stage-managed one of “honoring” 9/11 victims.

It was the mayor smugly giving the pen to a man who defended a member of Al Qaeda, after his group carried out the deadliest terror attack in U.S. history.

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“So, in a way, this is New Yorkers reaping what they have sown.”

Well….no and yes.

Over half of Gotham’s registered voters stayed home. It’s been that way since 1997.

Mamdani’s 50.78% winning vote tally was the lowest since Bloomberg (he got 50.7% in 2009 and 50.2% in 2001) and Giuliani (50.62% in 1993).

Per Wiki, NYC voter turnout - Mayoral elections (year: % of registered voters; # of votes counted)

2025: 43.47%; 2,218,647

2021: 23.39%; 1,149,172

2017: 25.52%; 1,166,313

2013: 25.96%; 1,102,400

2009: 28.19%; 1,154,802

2005: 33.34%; 1,315,360

2001: 40.93%; 1,520,443

1997: 40.09%; 1,409,347

1993: 57.50%; 1,898,419

1989: 59.67%; 1,899,845

1985: 41.19%; 1,170,904

1981: 55.67%; 1,305,368

1977: 51.48%; 1,486,536

1973: 50.21%; 1,790,053

1969: 81.21%; 2,458,203

Islam this all hangs together.

Do we have the courage to do the awful hard things?

JAMES MITCHELL: No. Eh, here’s what Americans I think don’t know. When they kill people, it’s an act of worship. One of the things that became clear to me when I was talking with these guys is that one way they show their love for Allah and one way they show how powerful Allah is, is by slaughtering people who are helpless to prevent it. So when they, you know, they cut the throat of a Yazidis sex slave and she bleeds out in a bowel, that’s actually an act of worship. It’s not an act of aggression.

You know, when they crucify children or burn people in cages or in KSM’s case when he decapitated Daniel Pearl and then dismembered his [Mark: right] cut his arms and legs off and stacked him a hole, that was not a, an, act of anger. It was an act of love for his god and he feels as though he shows his god how powerful his god is by how helpless innocent people are to prevent their destruction.

JAMES MITCHELL: Well we assume it’s important for them to like us. [Mark: Yeah] And that, and that if they, if they only liked us, if they only understood that we want to live in peace with them, then everything would be okay, but it’s actually the opposite. What KSM told me was that our judicial system, our Bill of Rights, our civil liberties, our desire to have other people in the world like us were all weapons that Allah had placed in our minds so that we could be defeated by the Islamists who were the true, had the true dominion of the world.

MARK STEYN: But, let me bring it back to you personally. When I visited Gitmo, the guys running the joint said one of the problems they’d had there was that the very eminent legal representation that the detainees have...there was a concerted effort to identify people working at the camp and actually find out their names and intimidate their family members and all the rest of it. And, and the one guard told me he said the biggest chill was when one of the prisoners looked at him and said he knew his wife and children’s names.

You were exposed to that. The lawyers for these guys—

JAMES MITCHELL: They put it in their privilege bag [Mark: Yeah] so they couldn’t be searched [Mark: Yeah] and they smuggled the photos of me and several other people who were not even part of the interrogation program. [Mark: Right] But some people who are, who were, who were still undercover smuggled those things in to Guantanamo, gave them to KSM, gave them to – well, they showed them to all of those folks. [Mark: Right] And that case has not been completely resolved. You know it was just recently turned over to some small investigative outfit associated with the Navy. Uh, [Mark: Right] and that case has not been resolved.
......

There is a battle between good and evil being waged and the evidence of that is clearly seen in the daily news reports. Pick up a New York newspaper and you will read reports of innocent people being pushed in front of subway trains or stabbed for absolutely no reason. The cover of yesterday’s New York Post is about a woman shot dead by the NYPD after she stabbed two strangers in Times Square, killing one.

The film Nefarious is basically about a demon explaining how the Devil works on seducing humans into evil by bribing them with whatever we desire. He also explains that demons hate humans because God loves us. and what his plan is for the human race.

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