Mamdani Draws Outrage by Signing 9/11 Order — Then

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani signed an government 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.

Yes, actually.

The surreal ceremony unfolded at City Hall just one week before the twenty fifth anniversary of the September 11 assaults. 

Mamdani gathered senior administration officers to signal two government orders associated to the tragedy. 

You just knew this was going to be a fiasco. And it was.

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

The second updates town’s emergency preparedness and continuity plans.

Fine. All pretty commonplace stuff for a mayor commemorating one of the darkest days in his metropolis’s historical past.

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

Tisch then gave the pen to Mamdani’s chief counsel, Ramzi Kassem.

Kassem is not an innocuous City Hall attorney. Before becoming a member of the Mamdani administration, Kassem spent years representing detainees at Guantánamo Bay and litigating national-security circumstances. 

His former purchasers included Ahmed al-Darbi, a Saudi al-Qaeda member who pleaded guilty before a navy commission to terrorism fees 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 5 hijackers aboard American Airlines Flight 77, which was flown into the Pentagon.

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

Video of the event exhibits Kassem grinning as he accepted the pen.

🚨 NOW: Ugandan Mayor Mamdani is going through major backlash from victims’ households after he signed a 9/11 government order and gave the honorary pen to a lawyer who REPRESENTED an AL-QAEDA TERRORIST linked to the Pentagon assault — NYP

The enemy is inside the gates.

The pen was… pic.twitter.com/AnfVXamkfM

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) September 5, 2026

We all know precisely what it’s. It’s a couple of Islamist fellow-travelers sharing a non-public joke at the expense of gullible Americans.

The second immediately drew fury from some 9/11 households and New York City officers.

“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 additional, telling the Post he believed the gesture was intentional.

“It was calculated,” Alazar said.

“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 outstanding attorney and CUNY School of Law professor who based the varsity’s CLEAR clinic. According to CUNY, he and his college students have represented 15 Guantánamo prisoners, and his litigation has included national-security, wartime-detention and war-crimes circumstances. 

He also served as a senior coverage 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.”

This is an insult to Americans and to the reminiscence of those who died on 9/11.

Never neglect? That’s what they did when they elected this Islamo-communist to the mayor’s workplace.

So, in a approach, this is New Yorkers reaping what they’ve sown.

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 meant to ship 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 assault in U.S. historical past.

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