Mamdani Asked to Stay Away From 9/11's 25th Anniversary

The morning

It was a beautiful day in New York. A high-pressure system had pushed in behind a cold front, and the sky over Manhattan on the morning of September 11, 2001, was the kind of cloudless, saturated blue that people still describe, twenty-five years later, as if they are describing something they saw yesterday. It was warm for early September, clear enough to see for miles, the kind of morning that made no promises about what was coming.

Nineteen men boarded four domestic flights that morning. Fifteen were from Saudi Arabia, two from the United Arab Emirates, one from Egypt, one from Lebanon. American Airlines Flight 11 left Boston for Los Angeles. United Airlines Flight 175 left Boston for the same destination less than half an hour later. American Airlines Flight 77 left Dulles for Los Angeles. United Airlines Flight 93 left Newark for San Francisco. None of the passengers or crew on any of those planes had any reason, when they boarded, to think that morning would be their last.

At 8:20 a.m., flight attendant Betty Ong picked up an airphone on Flight 11 and called American Airlines reservations on the ground. She stayed on that line for 23 minutes, calm enough to be understood, describing what was happening around her in real time. "The cockpit is not answering. Somebody's stabbed in business class, and, um, I think there's Mace and we can't breathe," she told the ground crew, according to the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. "I don't know, I think we are getting hijacked." She was still on the phone when Flight 11 hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46 a.m.

Seventeen minutes later, at 9:03 a.m., Flight 175 hit the South Tower. Anyone still watching the first fire on live television watched the second impact happen in real time, and that is the moment most people alive that day describe as the one where they understood this was not an accident. At 9:37 a.m., Flight 77 hit the Pentagon. At 10:03 a.m., Flight 93, the plane whose passengers had learned by phone what was happening to the other three and fought for control of the cockpit, went down in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, short of whatever target it had been aimed at in Washington.

Both towers collapsed within the next hour. Nearly 3,000 people were killed that morning across four crash sites, including 343 New York City firefighters and 37 Port Authority police officers who went into the towers as everyone else was coming out. It remains the deadliest terrorist attack in world history, and it was the first time since Pearl Harbor that the United States had been attacked on its own soil.

Twenty-five years later

This year's anniversary is the 25th. That number is doing real work in New York right now, and it is worth understanding why before getting to what has actually been said and done around it.

On August 14, the Port Authority Retired Police Association, representing officers who survived the day their 37 colleagues did not, sent letters to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Governor Kathy Hochul asking them to stay away from this year's ceremony. "For us, September 11 is not a political occasion, a photo opportunity, or a platform for public officials," association president John McDevitt wrote. "It is a solemn day of remembrance for those who were murdered, those who responded, those who survived, and the families who have carried these losses for twenty-five years." The letter to Mamdani went further: "We do not believe you have earned the privilege to stand at Ground Zero alongside us." A separate letter to Hochul objected to her decision to illuminate One World Trade Center for Muslim American Heritage Month in January, calling it "extremely tone-deaf, insensitive, and an affront to us," according to Fox News. Mamdani said he plans to attend regardless and intends to "proudly honor" the families, survivors and first responders.

That letter didn't come out of nowhere. Last October, Mamdani told a crowd he wanted to speak "to the memory of my aunt who stopped taking the subway after September 11th because she did not feel safe in her hijab." Within days, people online noted that his actual aunt, Dr. Masuma Mamdani, was working in Tanzania during that period and had been photographed without a hijab. On October 27, Mamdani clarified to reporters that he had actually been referring to "Zehra fuhi, my father's cousin, who passed away a few years ago," using a term that can loosely mean paternal aunt, according to Fox News. The underlying claim, a relative afraid to wear hijab on the subway after 9/11, may well be true of someone in his family. But the person he first named, in public, as living that experience was not the person who actually lived it, and it took a week of public pressure before he said so.

This isn't the first time a public figure's words about that day have drawn scrutiny for how casually they treated it. In March 2019, Rep. Ilhan Omar told a CAIR banquet, "CAIR was founded after 9/11 because they recognized that some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties," according to FactCheck.org. In fairness, she was talking about the erosion of Muslim Americans' civil liberties after the attacks, not the attacks themselves, and the full quote makes that clear. But "some people did something" is still how she chose to describe nineteen men murdering nearly 3,000 people, and no amount of context fully explains away how small that phrase makes an enormous day sound.

None of this is really about any one politician. It's about a pattern this country has struggled with since the week of the attacks themselves: how to hold two true things at once, that the men who did this were Muslim, and that the overwhelming majority of Muslim Americans had nothing to do with it and did not deserve what came next. The government's early response leaned hard into warning the country against blaming an entire religion, which was the right instinct. But somewhere between that instinct and the way it got enforced in public life, plenty of people came away feeling like the message was less "don't blame your neighbor" and more "don't ask questions at all," and that anyone who did would get the word Islamophobic thrown at them before they finished the sentence. That approach didn't build trust. It built a reflex, on both sides, and twenty-five years later the reflex is still firing every time this anniversary comes back around.

What doesn't need an asterisk

Betty Ong stayed on the phone for 23 minutes so the people on the ground would know what was happening in the air. Firefighters walked up the stairs of two burning buildings while everyone else was walking down. Passengers on a fourth plane, having learned by phone what had already happened to two towers and a building full of their fellow Americans, fought back rather than let it happen a fifth time. None of that needs debate, translation, or fact-checking. It happened, it is documented, and it is the actual reason this day gets marked every year.

Twenty-five years is long enough that most schoolchildren today have never lived through a September without a war attached to it, and most adults who were children that morning now have children of their own who only know it as history. That's exactly why how it gets remembered, and by whom, and with how much care, still matters. Never forget was never just a slogan. It was a promise to get the story right, every single year, especially the years when it would be easier not to.

Sources:

National September 11 Memorial & Museum: Remembering 9/11 Hero Flight Attendant Betty Ong

Encyclopedia.com: Transcript of Flight Attendant Betty Ong

AccuWeather: The weather of 9/11

History.com: 9/11 Attacks

Fox News: Retired Port Authority officers tell Mamdani, Hochul to stay away from Ground Zero on 9/11

Fox News: Mamdani forced to clarify relative invoked in viral Islamophobia anecdote

CNN: Zohran Mamdani faces pushback over his story about a family member's post-9/11 fears

FactCheck.org: Rep. Ilhan Omar's 9/11 Comments in Context

19th News: Mamdani spoke of his aunt's fear after 9/11