Staff Reports
Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s small, ceremonial move at City Hall — handing the pen used to sign a 9/11 remembrance order to his chief counsel — has exploded into a full‑blown controversy. The handoff, combined with a resurfaced interview line about how Sept. 11 shaped anti‑Muslim sentiment, has many families and observers saying the mayor picked the wrong moment and the wrong symbol.
The pen, the players, and the problem
Video and the City Hall transcript show the sequence plainly: Mayor Zohran Mamdani signed two executive orders establishing a citywide Day of Remembrance and updating emergency policies. He handed the ceremonial pen to NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch and asked her to pass it on. The pen wound up in the hand of Ramzi Kassem, Mamdani’s chief counsel — a longtime law professor and former defense lawyer who once represented Ahmed al‑Darbi, a Guantánamo detainee tied to an al‑Qaida maritime plot. That client’s family link to one of the 9/11 hijackers is why the optics are raw and why people are furious.
Why families and critics are angry
Grief is not a prop and public symbols matter. Families of victims started a petition asking that Mayor Mamdani be excluded from official Ground Zero ceremonies. Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani — a figure many still associate with steady leadership on that day — urged Mamdani to stay away. Conservative outlets, pundits, and elected Republicans piled on. To them, giving a 9/11 commemorative pen to a lawyer who once represented someone connected by marriage to a hijacker feels like a slap, intentional or not.
The mayor’s answer — and the legal caveat
The mayor’s office says Kassem helped draft the executive orders and that Mamdani will attend the commemorations to honor victims, survivors, and first responders. That is technically accurate. It is also true that defense lawyers represent clients; doing so is not the same as endorsing their crimes. But legal nuance won’t calm people who see a symbol and remember a grave loss. Leaders must choose their gestures carefully. If you want unity on a solemn anniversary, you don’t hand a pen to someone with an obvious and painful public link to the attacks.
What real leadership would look like
Call it a tone‑deaf moment or call it worse — the fix is simple. Mayor Mamdani should offer a clear, public explanation and apologize for the hurt the image caused. Better yet, offer an olive branch to victims’ families: meet privately, explain the drafting role Kassem played, and then step back from the most sensitive stages if families ask that of him. Symbols matter on anniversaries. If the mayor wants genuine respect for the 25th anniversary of 9/11, he’ll put the city’s healing ahead of a clever personnel moment and stop feeding a partisan fire over a day meant to mourn and remember.
