Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, sent New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani a letter this week urging him to skip next month’s 25th anniversary commemoration of the September 11 attacks at Ground Zero, arguing his presence would be “divisive.” Donohue pointed to Mamdani’s absence from the city’s Veterans Day Parade and Israeli Day Parade, along with what he called the mayor’s reluctance to condemn Islamist extremism, as reasons he is unsuited to attend. “It would be best for everyone involved if you skipped the event,” Donohue wrote. “If you attend, the proceedings will be awkward, to say the least, for the surviving family members of the first responders.” Donohue estimated, while acknowledging no official statistics exist, that 85 to 90 percent of first responders killed on September 11 were Catholic, and accused Mamdani of being “infinitely more upset about prejudice against Muslims following 9/11 than the deadly events of that day.”
Donohue’s letter landed as a Change.org petition calling for Mamdani’s exclusion from the ceremony surpassed 74,000 signatures, a total that has climbed steadily since it launched roughly three weeks earlier. The petition was started by Giovanni Galante, whose 29-year-old wife, Grace Catherine Galante, was working on the 105th floor of the North Tower when the towers were struck, along with another woman widowed that day. “We felt that having Mamdani there would show a disrespect to our family members because of the people he supports,” Galante told CBS New York. He has warned that if Mamdani attends, family members may turn their backs on him in protest. “They don’t want to look at him,” he said.
The parade absence Donohue cited was itself a significant break with precedent. Every sitting New York City mayor had marched in the city’s Israel Day Parade since its founding in 1964, and Mamdani became the first to skip it when he stayed away from the May 31 event, telling reporters he had “made my views on the Israeli government abundantly clear” and that he’d promised as much on the campaign trail. Governor Kathy Hochul, Senator Chuck Schumer, and former mayors Michael Bloomberg and Eric Adams marched in his place, alongside NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch, who is Jewish and served as a parade marshal. Representative Mike Lawler called Mamdani’s absence “absolutely disgraceful” for the mayor of “a city that has the largest Jewish population outside of the state of Israel.” Organizers reported record turnout despite, or in response to, the snub, and Israeli UN Ambassador Danny Danon said the public “came in droves” even as Mamdani “turned his back on tens of thousands of Jews and supporters of Israel.”
Other signers have made similar arguments in personal terms. Monica Iken Murphy, whose husband Michael died on the 84th floor of the South Tower, said families simply want space to themselves this year. “I feel anyone who attends this 25th pivotal anniversary for us, we just want a little time for ourselves, and we don’t want someone just coming in, who just came into office, who really wasn’t there,” she said. Meryl Mayo-Marshall, whose husband Robert J. Mayo died after staying behind to help evacuate others from the World Trade Center, and Lori Schertzer Brody, whose brother Scott Schertzer was killed in the attacks, have also signed on, with Brody telling reporters that Mamdani “should do the right thing and stay home.” Longtime 9/11 advocate John Feal put it more bluntly: “Until he does something proactive for the 9/11 community, he should just sit there in City Hall.” Michael LaRosa, a former spokesman for First Lady Jill Biden, is among the petition’s more politically notable endorsers, writing that Mamdani’s presence “will be a lightning rod that diverts attention away from the only people that morning belongs to: the victims of this heinous attack and their loved ones.”
The petition itself frames the objection around the ceremony’s purpose rather than personal animus, stating that the anniversary is “one of remembrance grounded in shared American values: respect for the victims, recognition of the gravity of the attacks, and a clear rejection of the ideologies that contributed to such violence.” Organizers plan to present their case directly to the City Council.
Not every family member agrees with the effort. Dennis McKeon, who organizes a 9/11 survivor group on Staten Island, noted that mayors and governors with poor records on 9/11 issues have attended past ceremonies without being banned. “I think everyone’s entitled to their own opinion,” he said. Survivor Jennifer Glass told reporters she has no objection to Mamdani attending, provided he has no speaking role and no direct interaction with families.
The 9/11 Memorial & Museum, which organizes the ceremony, has said it intends to keep the event apolitical regardless of the pressure campaign. “We have intentionally worked to keep the commemoration free of politics,” a spokesperson said, noting that officials from across the political spectrum have attended over the years simply to bear witness, without delivering remarks, and remain in a designated area during the event. Mamdani has said plainly that he intends to be there. “I will proudly honor the families, the survivors, the first responders forever impacted by that horrific terror attack by standing alongside them at this year’s 9/11 commemoration, reaffirming that we will never forget the solemn day felt by all of us who call this city home and, frankly, by all of us who called this country home,” he told CBS New York.
What Critics Point To
The specific objections driving the petition go well beyond Mamdani’s absence from other city commemorations. Critics have repeatedly cited his praise for Imam Siraj Wahhaj, who was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the investigation into the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and his association with streamer Hasan Piker, who declared in 2019 that “America deserved 9/11” and displayed a framed 9/11-era newspaper during one of his broadcasts. The petition also points to Mamdani’s long reluctance to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada,” and to his choice of Ramzi Kassem, who has previously represented a pilot convicted in an al-Qaeda tanker-bombing plot, as his chief counsel.
The mayor’s family background has also become part of the case against him. His father, Columbia University professor Mahmood Mamdani, argued in his 2004 book “Good Muslim, Bad Muslim” that suicide bombers should be understood “as a category of soldier rather than condemned and stigmatized as barbarism,” a framing critics say the younger Mamdani has never directly repudiated. Taken together, the petition’s organizers argue, the pattern amounts to more than a scheduling complaint. It is, in their telling, a mayor who has consistently found more sympathy for the ideology behind the attacks than for the day itself, standing at a ceremony built entirely around remembering its victims.
