NEW YORK (RNS) — As New York City prepares to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Mayor Zohran Mamdani has faced growing criticism from conservatives and others who demand he not attend the ceremony at ground zero on Friday. While some have referred to Mamdani’s politics and past statements, others have also pointed to the mayor’s Muslim faith to justify his exclusion. 

“The reality is this ceremony is for the families and for America to remember historically,” former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani told NewsMax last week before drawing parallels between Mamdani and the al-Qaida terrorists who plotted the 9/11 attacks. Giuliani also repeated unverified claims that Mamdani was part of a Muslim-led plot to take over “certain parts of America and certain parts of Europe.” 

Though Mamdani has declined to comment on Giuliani’s remarks, he said he will attend the commemoration event and that the focus should be on the families of the victims and first responders.

On Tuesday (Sept. 8), Mamdani released 170,000 documents kept in a city government office for years, incriminating city officials — including Giuliani — for improperly assessing health risks for New Yorkers and responders after 9/11.  

Still, debates on whether he should be welcomed at the ceremony, which have rallied some of the mayor’s longstanding opponents, have dominated some talks about 9/11 commemorations this week. 

The ceremony, which Vice President JD Vance will also attend, will be held at the 9/11 Memorial, where the Twin Towers once stood. After observing a moment of silence at 8:46 a.m., the time the first plane hit the North Tower, the event will proceed with a name-calling ceremony, reading aloud the names of each of the 2,977 victims killed in the attacks. 

On Tuesday (Sept. 8), New York Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul took to X to share her support for Mamdani’s presence at the event. “Division should not prevail over the spirit of unity that brought us together after September 11th. The Mayor of New York City will be there, as he should be,” she wrote. 

Efforts to exclude Mamdani from the commemoration started in July, when a petition reportedly created by family members of 9/11 victims began circulating. The petition on Change.org earned 110,000 signatures as of Thursday afternoon. It says the signers reject Mamdani’s presence because they believe he doesn’t uphold values paramount to the event — of respecting the victims, recognizing the gravity of the attacks and condemning the ideologies that contributed to it.

“For 9/11 families, this is not simply a public ceremony — it is a deeply personal day of mourning. The presence of individuals whose words or associations are perceived as conflicting with the solemn purpose of the event risks detracting from that focus and causing additional pain,” read the petition started by Giovanni Galante, whose 29-year-old wife, Catherine Grace Galante, was killed in the North Tower. 

The petition points to Mamdani’s refusal to condemn chants like “globalize the intifada” during his mayoral campaign as evidence he shouldn’t be part of the event. The mayor later said the phrase had multiple interpretations and that he saw it as “a desperate desire” for Palestinian human rights, but that he would discourage its usage.

It also raised concerns about Mamdani endorsing Aber Kawas, a Democratic Socialist of America candidate running for the New York State Senate’s 12th district, who said the attacks happened in the context of “U.S. capitalism, racism, white supremacy, and Islamophobia.”

Former New York Republican Gov. George Pataki echoed such concerns in an interview with City & State last week. “I think anyone who doesn’t intentionally distance themselves from Hasan Piker, who has said that America deserved the attacks of September 11th, should not be there,” said Pataki, who was in office from 1995 to 2006. 

Piker later said his comment was “inappropriate” in making a point about U.S. foreign policies. Mamdani also referred to Piker’s 9/11 comment as “objectionable and reprehensible.”

Critics also cited Mamdani’s appointment of civil rights attorney Ramzi Kassem as the city’s chief legal counsel as a reason the mayor shouldn’t attend the ceremony. Kassem, who represented pro-Palestinian Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil against deportation, also led the defense of Ahmed al-Darbi, a convicted Al-Qaida member. 

And on Tuesday, the #EndJewHatred movement and other groups held a rally in front of New York’s DSA headquarters denouncing the mayor’s attendance at the event. Reported in The Forward, a flyer associated with the rally depicted Mamdani next to the words, “Islamist ideology was not defeated. It was normalized. In 2001 they needed planes. Today the DSA hands them a platform.”

“I’m not asking politely to the mayor not to come to 9/11, to that ceremony; I’m demanding that he not show his face at that sacred ground. He does not belong there,” said Vickie Paladino, a conservative New York City Council member, at the rally. 

Paladino — who was the subject of a now-dropped disciplinary case after she wrote on social media that Muslims should be removed from Western countries — said the mayor’s public signing of an executive order establishing 9/11 as a day of remembrance alongside Kassem was concerning. “That was a message to each and every one of us, cryptic as it is. But read through the lines what’s going on here in City Hall,” she said. 

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights group, condemned the criticism directed at the mayor. 

“Mayor Mamdani is the leader of New York City,” wrote Afaf Nasher, executive director of CAIR’s New York chapter, in a statement. “He has a right and a duty to participate in the annual ceremony honoring the victims and first responders of September 11th attacks. Mayor Giuliani’s remarks are precisely the kind of un-American religious bigotry rejected by the people of New York City, who overwhelmingly want and expect their mayor to attend the memorial.”

The Jewish Council for Public Affairs, a Jewish civil rights group, also dismissed the calls to exclude Mamdani from the 9/11 ceremony as Islamophobic hate. “This is coded language to smear all Muslim leaders as terrorists to hold them accountable for 9/11,” the group’s CEO, Amy Spitalnick, told The Forward. “The same way that we as a community rightfully push back when we hear people using ‘Zionist’ as a pejorative — that’s what’s happening here. We should be calling it out if we expect people to call it out when it happens to us.”