Giuliani told Mamdani to stay home on 9/11. Mamdani came, shook his hand, and stood with four presidents.
Twenty-five years ago nineteen al-Qaeda hijackers murdered 2,977 people, among them 343 firefighters who climbed the towers while everyone else ran down. Osama bin Laden called the killing holy war and justified it with grievances over American troops in Saudi Arabia and U.S. policy in the Middle East.
Muslim leaders from Cairo to Tehran condemned it.
The wars that followed killed hundreds of thousands of people overseas. At home, New York's Muslims paid too.
With help from the CIA, the NYPD built a unit that mapped where they lived, shopped, and prayed, put informants in mosques and student groups, and listened in at their cafes. In 2012 the head of the intelligence division admitted under oath that it had never produced a single terrorism lead. The unit was shut down in 2014.
Last November the city elected a 34-year-old Muslim from Queens as mayor.
This month the men who led New York that day said he should stay away: Giuliani, former Gov. George Pataki, and Thomas Von Essen, the fire commissioner in 2001. A man whose wife died in the attacks started a petition that passed 100,000 signatures.
Giuliani went further. He said the mayor doesn't agree 9/11 was an Islamic terrorist attack, and said of Muslims, "they want to dominate us." Curtis Sliwa, the Republican Mamdani beat, called the push to keep him out "ridiculous."
Mamdani said the day belonged to the families and first responders, and he spent the week with them. On September 2 he stood at FDNY headquarters in Brooklyn as 36 more names went on the department's World Trade Center wall. Those members were killed by what they breathed on the pile.
The wall now holds 438 names, more than the 343 who died on the day. "You ran toward horror so that others could run toward home," he told them.
On Tuesday he released 170,000 pages of city records on that air. They include 68 boxes the city said it couldn't locate for years despite public-records requests. One October 2001 memo to Giuliani's deputy mayor braced for as many as 10,000 lawsuits over toxic exposure and laid out ways to limit the city's liability. "People got sick because the leaders they trusted lied," Mamdani said.
This morning he posted a video. "September 11th was a horrific act of terror," it opens. "2,753 universes gone in an instant."
Then he went to Ground Zero, where four former presidents sat for the reading of the names. He found Giuliani in the crowd and put out his hand. ABC7's camera was rolling. Five days after telling the mayor to stay home, Giuliani shook it.
We will never forget September 11: the 2,977 people murdered, and the firefighters who kept dying of the air long after the towers fell. A Muslim mayor standing with the families this morning is a testament to the spirit of an America that refuses to hand the killers what they wanted, a country divided by fear of its own neighbors.
Five days after telling him to stay home, Giuliani shook his hand.
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