What's documented

A Change.org petition asking organizers of NYC's 25th-anniversary 9/11 ceremony to bar Mayor Zohran Mamdani has grown past 60,000 signatures and is still climbing -- roughly double the count when this piece was first drafted. Mamdani has since said publicly that he intends to attend the ceremony regardless of the petition. Organizer Giovanni Galante, whose wife died in the attacks, told the New York Post an estimated 300 signers are 9/11 family members — but he's also said "we don't have a list" verifying that, and Change.org's "verified" label confirms signatures are from real people, not that any specific number are family members.

The petition itself lists eight numbered concerns. One is too vague and unnamed to independently check — a general line about "associations with individuals whose public statements... are viewed... as dismissive of American institutions." Of the seven specific, checkable items left, six trace to something Mamdani himself said, appointed, or chose to endorse. One — his father's book — doesn't.

The one item that isn't his

His father Mahmood Mamdani, a Columbia professor, published a 2004 academic book arguing suicide bombers should be understood as a feature of modern political violence rather than simply stigmatized as barbarism — language the petition reads as drawing moral equivalence between the US and Al Qaeda. Zohran Mamdani was 12 years old when it was published. It isn't something he's said or written himself, and nothing in the record connects him to its argument.

What's actually his own words or statements

"Globalize the intifada." Asked directly on "Meet the Press" — three times, by Kristen Welker — whether he condemns the phrase, Mamdani declined each time: "that's not language that I use," "I don't believe that the role of the mayor is to police speech." Weeks later, at a closed-door meeting whose remarks later leaked, he said he now discourages the phrase — a real but partial shift, short of the condemnation he was repeatedly asked for.

2015 tweets about Anwar al-Awlaki. At 23, a decade before office, Mamdani questioned FBI surveillance of Awlaki — an American-born al-Qaeda propagandist linked to the 9/11 hijackers — writing "why no proper interrogation of what it means for FBI to have conducted extensive surv. into Awlaki's private life?" and asking how Awlaki "could... have ever trusted FBI to not release surveillance." Those are his own words, hedged as rhetorical questions — a retired FDNY lieutenant, not Mamdani, later called the underlying assertion "ridiculous," a characterization worth keeping separate from what Mamdani actually said.

Praising Imam Siraj Wahhaj, as recently as October 2025. Wahhaj was one of 170 people federal prosecutors named in 1995 as possibly coming up as co-conspirators in the 1993 WTC bombing — never indicted, and he denies involvement. He did serve as a character witness at the trial of Omar Abdel-Rahman, the "Blind Sheikh" convicted of orchestrating that bombing. Praising a religious figure with that specific history, this recently, is Mamdani's own recent choice.

The appointment that's actually the strongest "his own conduct" item in the whole petition

In 2025, Mamdani appointed Ramzi Kassem as New York City's Chief Counsel — the city's top legal role. Kassem was lead defense counsel for Ahmed al-Darbi, who pleaded guilty in 2014 to conspiracy in an al-Qaeda plot to bomb a French oil tanker off Yemen. That's real, and it's a current governing decision, not old history.

It's also worth stating plainly what that fact does and doesn't mean: representing someone charged with a serious crime is a criminal defense lawyer's actual job. The right to counsel exists for unpopular clients precisely because it has to. Kassem also served as a senior immigration policy advisor on the White House Domestic Policy Council under President Biden — a mainstream credential, not just "the al-Qaeda lawyer." Appointing him is a real, checkable choice; whether it should be read as concerning or as putting a credentialed civil-rights lawyer in a legal role is a fair question, and not one this piece is resolving.

The endorsements — his choice to back them, their words in question

Mamdani endorsed Aber Kawas, a New York State Senate candidate who, in a 2017 podcast interview years before running, said 9/11 was a product of America's "capitalism," "racism," "white supremacy," and "Islamophobia" — and who, on an old Tumblr, expressed sympathy for Ahmed Ferhani, convicted in a real plot to bomb a Manhattan synagogue, calling him her "brother." Those are Kawas's own words, not Mamdani's — but endorsing her was his own choice.

Separately, Mamdani stood with Darializa Avila Chevalier, a Democratic Socialists of America primary winner who once tweeted, "I forgot to get napkins so I just wiped my hand on the American flag." Same structure: her words, his choice to stand with her.

What this piece is not saying

This isn't a ruling that any of these choices — the Kassem appointment, the Wahhaj praise, the Awlaki tweets, the Kawas or Chevalier endorsements — are individually disqualifying, or that they're nothing. They're real, and they're his own choices in some form: his statements, an appointment, or people he actively chose to endorse. Reading the petition's actual eight items, rather than a shortened version of it, doesn't support a clean "this is mostly guilt by association" conclusion — six of the seven specific, checkable items trace to some choice of his own. It also doesn't support a clean "the case against him is airtight" conclusion — several of those choices have real, documented context that complicates a simple reading of them (Kassem's mainstream credentials and the nature of defense counsel; the Awlaki tweets being hedged questions from a 23-year-old, not the flat declaration some coverage implies; Wahhaj's actual, never-charged legal status).

It's also not a ruling on whether he should attend the ceremony. The 9/11 Memorial and Museum has said it has intentionally kept the commemoration free of politics, and every sitting president, governor, and mayor has attended since the attacks. Separately, Mamdani's actual record on antisemitism as mayor is genuinely mixed, not one-directional: his administration grew the city's hate-crimes prevention budget nearly ninefold, from $3 million to $26 million, and appointed an executive director for the Mayor's Office to Combat Antisemitism — while his first day in office also included revoking the city's use of the IHRA antisemitism definition, a decision that genuinely angered mainstream Jewish organizational leaders. All of this is part of the same picture. None of it is a single verdict.

What can I do

Read the petition's full text yourself — it's public on Change.org and lists all eight items directly, not a paraphrase of them.

Read Mamdani's actual 2015 tweets and his Meet the Press exchange directly, not a paraphrase of either.

Look up Ramzi Kassem's actual record — both his defense work and his mainstream policy credentials are publicly documented and worth weighing together, not separately.

The Receipts