As we close in on the 25th anniversary of 9/11 you may have heard that there is, bizarrely, an apparently small but vocal contingent of people demanding that the mayor of New York not attend the solemn ceremonies planned to commemorate the attack on New York. Among the voices against is a former mayor himself, Rudy Giuliani, whose reputation was burnished by his response to 9/11 and torn down again by pretty much everything he’s subsequently done.
The conversation grew even more bizarre as Mayor Zohran Mamdani fulfilled a longtime demand of 9/11 families, first responders and those who worked in and around Ground Zero to release information on what the city knew and when it knew about the health hazards presented by the site. As expected, the 170,000 pages of documents made public suggest the city misled those workers and others about the danger they were in.
In doing some research on the “controversy” around Mamdani’s attendance at the commemoration, one of the results suggested by the search engine’s autocomplete confused me: “Mamdani 9/11 pen.” I had more or less followed the discussion about the ceremonies since it first emerged a few weeks ago, and thought I was fully familiar with the ostensible arguments against Mamdani’s attendance: he had been insufficiently respectful toward first responders, he had not attended all prior commemorations, his ideology or political stances were somehow inherently incompatible with the American values the terrorists attacked and on and on. I had, not, however, heard about any pen.
It turned out that this particular kerfuffle was around the fact that the mayor had handed the pen that he’d used to sign the executive order releasing the 9/11 documents to Ramzi Kassem, his chief counsel. Mamdani’s detractors have fixated on Kassem as a result of his onetime defense of Guantanamo Bay detainees, including Ahmed al-Darbi, an alleged member of al-Qaeda. While al-Darbi has commonly been described in right-wing media outlets as having been involved in planning the 9/11 attacks, that’s not even something that the U.S. military itself had accused him of. The charges against him related to his alleged training of al-Qaida personnel and involvement in the 2002 attack on the French oil tanker Limburg. Al-Darbi, like many of those held at Guantanamo, was tortured there.
In any case, his personal guilt or moral standing is neither here nor there. The notion that Kassem is by transitive property a terrorist sympathizer is ludicrous, and I’m sure that approximately zero of the people agitating on this point would consider an attorney who represented Exxon in court personally culpable for climate change. The detention of supposed enemy combatants at Guantanamo by the administration of President George W. Bush and his successors has been a test of our willingness to uphold our country’s constitutional protections and the rules of war. 9/11 was a horrific act in and of itself, in terms of the scars it left on our city, and in terms of what it would unleash in our culture, politics and military and clandestine campaigns. But to defend those detained was not to agree with them but to disagree with the idea that the U.S. government could hold people indefinitely outside our own legal system and subject them to inhuman horrors in the name of safeguarding our security. After all, the vigorous defense of unpopular defendants is an honorable tradition that stretches back to John Adams’ representation of the British soldiers accused in the Boston Massacre.
Not that I think Kassem or the pen or any of this is the real reason some people are objecting to Mamdani’s presence. I think these objections are more primal and more obvious. They see in Mamdani a Muslim man who by dint of his own identity must inherently be on the “other side.” His personhood is evidence of guilt, in a way not dissimilar to how a significant swath of Americans were never able to accept that Obama, a Black man, could legitimately be president. This remains something most people don’t feel like they can say out loud, so they have to cast about for pretexts as to why it is that these men are bad leaders or unsuited for their roles. “A Muslim should not be at the 9/11 commemoration, even if he is the mayor of New York” is not quite going to cut it.
At the same time as this hand-wringing was going on, the White House was, on its official government website, posting a series of arcade-style games, including a reskinned version of the popular game Snake — which many readers may remember came preloaded on those Nokia brick phones, and which certainly provided much-needed entertainment at doctors’ offices, on the bus and so on. In the versions posted by the White House, the player is a notably white officer moving around the game screen collecting immigrants of various nonwhite skin tones, who then follow him around like the lengthening tail of the snake in the classic game. The score is presented as how many people the player has “deported,” meaning the game skips cleanly over all of the intermediate steps like immigration court or even confirmation that the person snatched up is deportable.
This is certainly not the first time that this White House and its executive departments have engaged in open white nationalism — who can forget the DHS recruitment ads that featured known racist tropes and troll-y internet white grievance language — but even in that context I was shocked by just how blatant this was. It’s all presented as a “joke,” of course, as if being upset by it means you’re a sourpuss who is “triggered.” The administration and its allies can skirt public accountability, or even having to explain themselves, by pretending they’re not serious, at least until they are. Certainly their white nationalist constituencies don’t think that they’re not being serious. They understand full well that President Donald Trump and his chief domestic policy aide, Stephen Miller, are winking at them, promising to carry out their horrific fantasies at the first chance that’s feasible. If Miller’s shock troops on the ground have not yet rounded up all the nonwhite immigrants in the country, it’s not for any lack of will or intent.
There is a tactical objective in all the gleeful cruelty thrown up online by this White House. The videos of shackled immigrants published on its official account on X, the sizzle reels of immigration raids and the murders of alleged drug traffickers in fishing boats, the Studio Ghibli-style depictions of crying immigrants, these are meant for consumption by not only their base but by the people they are targeting. The goal is to show these people — our own friends and neighbors, our teachers, our families, ourselves — that we will not be saved. It is meant to breed a certain fatalism; they are hunting us and they are laughing about it, and the public will allow it. They will get away with it.
But this is not true. The administration’s depravity on immigration is immensely unpopular. Over and over again, what we’ve seen from people around the country is that when the rubber meets the road, they will turn out for their fellow community, in the streets, at the detention centers, at the ballot box. The fact of Trump’s 2024 election victory was taken by him and his core constituency as a mandate of sadism, but there was no such mandate. Sadism, as it turns out, is so unpopular that people will risk their lives, their health, their prospects just to fight it. This is what we should be remembering on 9/11, not having these inane discussions over whether the mayor of the city should be allowed to pay his respects. A quarter century on, New Yorkers will stick together against any enemy, without and within.
