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.
Yes, really.
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.
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,” complete with a citywide moment of silence honoring those killed in the attacks and those who later died from 9/11-related illnesses.
The second updates the city's emergency preparedness and continuity plans.
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?”
Tisch then gave the pen to Mamdani's chief counsel, Ramzi Kassem.
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.
Video of the event shows Kassem grinning as he accepted the pen.
🚨 NOW: Ugandan Mayor Mamdani is facing major backlash from victims' families after he signed a 9/11 executive order and gave the honorary pen to a lawyer who REPRESENTED an AL-QAEDA TERRORIST connected to the Pentagon attack — NYP
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) September 5, 2026
The enemy is inside the gates.
The pen was… pic.twitter.com/AnfVXamkfM
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 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 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.”
This is an insult to Americans and to the memory of those who died on 9/11.
Never forget? That's what they did when they elected this Islamo-communist to the mayor’s office.
So, in a way, this is New Yorkers reaping what they have 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 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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