Mamdani Handed the 9/11 Pen to Al Qaeda's Lawyer to Declare “Mission Accomplished”

This was a calculated, disgusting message being sent to the city, the nation, and the world.

Most are calling Zohran Mamdani’s actions at a 9/11 ceremony a “snafu” or a meaningless gesture with no significance. They clearly do not understand Islam or the process of military, cultural, and political jihad.

He did not drop the souvenir. He did not get confused about the guest list. New York City’s Mayor signed a pair of September 11 executive orders at City Hall on Friday, then whispered to Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, “Can you pass this?”

Tisch handed the ceremonial pen to chief counsel Ramzi Kassem. Kassem, who had slipped into the Blue Room late, took it with a smirk and left almost as fast as he arrived.

That is not a clerical accident. That is a staged insult to the dead, delivered one week before the 25th anniversary of the massacre that tore this city open. More importantly, it’s a declaration of conquest, less than 25-years since the attacks, as a “secret” Islamist camouflaged by Marxism now runs the very city they hit hardest.

Fox News and the New York Post both documented the handoff. City Hall’s excuse only makes it worse. Officials told the Post that Kassem and his team drafted both orders as part of his job. So the man who wrote the city’s official remembrance paper was also the man chosen to keep the relic. The police commissioner was reduced to a courier.

The victims were reduced to a backdrop.

The Man Who Got the Relic

Kassem is not some anonymous staff lawyer who once took an unpopular case. He spent years as civilian defense counsel for Ahmed al-Darbi, a Guantanamo detainee and admitted al Qaeda operative who pleaded guilty to war-crime charges tied to the 2002 bombing of the French oil tanker MV Limburg off Yemen. One sailor died. A dozen more were wounded. The plot was part of al Qaeda’s campaign to choke the oil trade after the towers fell.

Al-Darbi’s sister was married to Khalid al-Mihdhar, one of the five hijackers aboard American Airlines Flight 77. That plane hit the Pentagon. One hundred eighty-four people died. The man who got the 9/11 pen once sat at the table for a terrorist whose family was bound by marriage to a Pentagon hijacker.

That is not the whole file. The Daily Wire notes Kassem also represented Mohammad al-Qahtani, the so-called 20th hijacker held at Guantanamo for two decades, and helped send him back to Saudi Arabia in 2022. He later represented Mahmoud Khalil, a leader of the Columbia pro-Palestinian encampment detained by ICE. He founded a CUNY clinic offering free representation to Muslims. Mamdani still made him chief counsel.

Shall the throne of iniquity have fellowship with thee, which frameth mischief by a law?

They framed the remembrance in ink, then handed the instrument to a man whose career has been a long defense of the network that made the remembrance necessary.

Families Heard the Message

Dennis Warchola’s brother Michael, a firefighter with Ladder 5, died in the North Tower. Warchola did not reach for the soft language City Hall prefers.

It’s bulls--t. How can you defend a guy like that who wants to do Americans or any innocent person harm? It shows exactly where his loyalties truly lie.

Retired NYPD detective Michael Alcazar, now teaching at John Jay, called the scene calculated. He said 9/11 families did not come to City Hall to watch Mamdani spotlight a lawyer whose work intersects with the ideology that murdered their people.

Joyce Cohen Day, whose mother died in the South Tower, said the mayor deliberately gave the pen to “an al Qaeda lawyer.” Queens Councilwoman Vicki Paladino put it plainer still. Kassem, she said, was inspired by 9/11 not to fight the terrorists but to defend them. His presence at anything tied to that day is the point.

Podcaster Benny Johnson called it a slap in the face to the victims. He is right. A ceremonial pen from a day of remembrance is not a corporate swag bag. In ordinary American life, the signing pen goes to the person the moment is meant to honor, or to the official whose office bears the cost of keeping the city alive. Here it went to the counsel who once stood with al Qaeda’s man.

This Fits the Record

The pen did not appear in a vacuum. Families have spent months trying to keep Mamdani off the Ground Zero ceremony. Giovanni Galante, who lost his wife Grace, organized a petition that has passed 98,000 signatures. Relatives told the Post they will ignore the mayor if he shows up Friday.

They already know the pattern. An old Mamdani post mourning “nearly 3,000 New Yorkers” in the same breath as “the wars that followed” treated jihad’s body count as interchangeable with America’s answer. That is the moral flattening families hear every time he speaks the words “never forget.”

He can sign a Day of Remembrance. He can sign an order about future terror threats. Paper is cheap. The spirit of the memorial is not. The memorial exists because 19 men, sent by a religious-political death cult, murdered 2,977 people in a single morning. It exists because firefighters ran up the stairs while the buildings came down. It exists so the city will not pretend the slaughter was weather, or “context,” or a sad chapter that now requires a diversity consultant.

Handing that pen to Kassem is a refusal of that spirit. It tells the families their dead are props. It tells the first responders their sacrifice is a photo opportunity. It tells the jihadists’ lawyers they belong in the frame. It tells every New Yorker watching that the mayor’s loyalty is not to the graves under that plaza.

Most importantly, it tells America that Mamdani and his handlers consider the attacks to have been successful because a quarter century after them, the city is under Islamic control. The attacks sparked justified concern. That concern was reversed into the powerful label of “Islamophobia.” Uses of the label were the building blocks for the Red-Green Alliance. The rise of political jihad is now underway.

Mamdani will still try to stand at Ground Zero this week. The families will try not to look at him. The rest of the country should look straight at the pen. That was the sermon. He meant it.