Zohran Mamdani chose a lawyer who represents a convicted al-Qaeda war criminal to receive his 9/11 signing pen.
On the eve of the 25th anniversary of September 11, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani signed an executive order intended to honor the victims of that day. After signing, he directed Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, on camera, to hand the ceremonial pen to his chief legal counsel, Ramzi Kassem.
Kassem’s client list is what makes that moment matter. One of his clients is Ahmed al-Darbi, who was convicted of war crimes connected to al-Qaeda plots targeting commercial shipping. Al-Darbi is also the brother-in-law of Khalid al-Mihdhar, one of the hijackers who flew American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.
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As originally reported, the mayor had no shortage of options. Thousands of people work in New York City government. Mamdani chose that person, at that ceremony, with cameras running. That is not an accident. That is a decision.
Defense attorneys will correctly point out that everyone is entitled to legal representation, and that principle holds. But nothing in that room was a courtroom. No one’s rights were on the line. A ceremonial pen is a symbol, and who receives it is a deliberate choice. Picking symbols is a central part of what any mayor does, every single day.
The pen moment did not come out of nowhere. Mamdani’s record on how he marks September 11 follows a consistent pattern. His 2023 anniversary post devoted just seven words to the New Yorkers killed by al-Qaeda before pivoting to the hundreds of thousands who died in the wars that followed and the millions displaced in their aftermath. His 2024 post followed the same structure. The victims of that September morning appear briefly, almost as an obligation, before the focus shifts to American foreign policy and its consequences.
That framing is a choice too. Every word in a public statement from an elected official is a choice. The order of those words is a choice. What gets seven words and what gets hundreds of words is a choice.
Taken together, the pen handoff and the years of anniversary posts tell a consistent story about how Mamdani relates to September 11. The victims of that morning are present in his public statements, but they are rarely the point. They are the starting line before the race heads somewhere else entirely.
A mayor signing an order in honor of 9/11 victims while directing the ceremonial pen to a lawyer who defended al-Qaeda-linked war criminals is not a neutral act. Whether it was a statement or simply a striking lack of awareness, the image it produced was entirely of Mamdani’s own making.
