Zohran Mamdani faces a political attack that lets the terrorists win
By Elena Rossi · Reporting from Rome ·
The drones over New York Harbour are precise, painting 2,977 lights against the dark—one for every soul lost on that Tuesday in 2001. It is a beautiful, sterile geometry.
The drones over New York Harbour are precise, painting 2,977 lights against the dark—one for every soul lost on that Tuesday in 2001. It is a beautiful, sterile geometry. But as America marks the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, the symmetry of the memorial is betrayed by the jaggedness of the politics. We are witnessing a society that has forgotten how to use a tragedy as a load-bearing wall for its institutions, choosing instead to use it as a battering ram against its own citizens.
The Seventh Silence and the First Lie
The rituals are, as always, meticulously timed. According to PBS, the National September 11 Memorial and Museum observed its usual six moments of silence, but this year added a seventh. This new pause is for those who did not die in the fire or the collapse, but in the slow, suffocating years that followed. The reporting is grim: more than 9,400 deaths from 9/11-related illnesses, a number that now surpasses the original death toll in lower Manhattan.
Here is where the "never forget" vow, cited by CEO Beth Hillman, crashes into the reality of the piazza. While the American Legion Family leads a sprawling network of remembrances—from the "Healing Fields" in Illinois to bell-ringings in Wisconsin—the memory is being curdled by a lingering resentment toward the state. Mayor Zohran Mamdani, New York’s first Muslim mayor, did not use the anniversary to offer the usual platitudes of unity. Instead, he reminded the city that "people got sick because the leaders they trusted lied and told them they were safe to breathe in toxic air."
It is a devastating observation. When institutions lie to protect their image, they do not save the institution; they merely ensure that the eventual truth will be used as a weapon.
The Architecture of Intervention
To understand the weight of this moment, one must look past the drone lights to the mechanism of the American psyche. The September 11 attacks functioned exactly like the Attack on Pearl Harbor: a surprise strike on domestic soil that acted as a violent catalyst, snapping a reluctant, isolationist nation into a posture of global military interventionism. In both cases, the shock of the "unthinkable" was used to justify a total reorganization of the state's relationship with the world.
The result of that 2001 snap was a quarter-century of blood and sand. We saw the geopolitical shift of the Iraq War (2004), a conflict born of the same security paradigm, and the grueling, twenty-year arc of the Afghanistan War (2021). Even the tactical success of the Abbottabad raid (2011), which eliminated Osama bin Laden, could not cure the internal rot. The tragedy of 9/11 did not just launch a war abroad; it launched a war of suspicion at home.
The most capable advocate for the current American mood would argue that this suspicion is a necessary immune response—that in an era of asymmetric threats, the state must be vigilant about who holds the keys to its cities. They would say the petition against Mayor Mamdani, which RTÉ reports has garnered over 100,000 signatures, is not about bigotry, but about a legitimate concern for national security and the symbolic weight of the office.
This is a coward’s argument. To suggest that a democratically elected leader is a security risk simply because he shares the faith of the enemy is not "vigilance"; it is the very instability that Al-Qaeda sought to sow. If the American center cannot hold a Muslim mayor in its embrace on the anniversary of a terrorist attack, then the terrorists have won a victory far more enduring than the collapse of two buildings.
A Petition for the Purgation of the Other
The cruelty of the timing is not accidental. By leveraging the 25th anniversary to fuel a campaign against Zohran Mamdani, his opponents are attempting to turn a site of mourning into a site of purgation. Council member Shahana Hanif is correct: the mayor is being treated differently because he is Muslim.
We are now at a point where approximately 100 million Americans are too young to remember the attacks. For them, 9/11 is a history lesson, not a trauma. They are the only ones not burdened by this ancestral grudge. Meanwhile, the political class is spending down the social capital of the tragedy to settle partisan scores.
The pattern is clear: the U.S. is treating its history not as a guide, but as a wardrobe of costumes to be worn for political theatre. They wear the flag to signal patriotism, then use that same flag to shroud the democratic process.
If the United States continues to treat its diverse citizenry as a latent threat, it will find that the only thing it has successfully preserved from 2001 is the fear. The tragedy of the 25th anniversary is not that America is forgetting, but that it is remembering only the parts that allow it to hate.