“Rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep.” – Romans 12:15
Patricia Heaton, in New York on September 11, 2001, boosted a Change.org drive that asks organizers of the 25th anniversary ceremony to keep Mayor Zohran Mamdani away from Ground Zero. Her line was short: “Keep it going New Yorkers.” The petition was started in early July by Giovanni Galante, whose wife, Grace Catherine Galante, 29, was killed in the attacks. By early August it had climbed past 60,000 signatures, and later reporting put it above 72,000. That is a real swell of public anger. It is not, by itself, the voice of every family that lost someone that morning.
The petition’s case is not vague mood. It lists Mamdani’s reluctance to give a clean condemnation of the slogan “globalize the intifada,” his campaign appearance with Brooklyn imam Siraj Wahhaj (named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing), praise and associations that families read as soft on extremism, and a post-9/11 book by his father, Mahmood Mamdani, that treated suicide bombing as a feature of modern political violence rather than simple barbarism. Galante has said the objection is the public record, not the mayor’s faith. Other relatives, including Monica Iken-Murphy and Meryl Mayo-Marshall, signed for the same reason. That record is fair game in politics. Turning it into a gate pass for a civic memorial is a different move.
Mamdani has refused to step aside. He said he will “proudly honor” families, survivors, and first responders by standing with them, and that the day belongs to the city and the country. He was nine when the towers fell. He is also the city’s first Muslim mayor, and some critics treat that fact as the whole story while others pretend associations never happened. Both shortcuts are lazy. A mayor who skipped this year’s 1993 World Trade Center bombing memorial in February, sending a deputy while he pitched housing money in Washington, does not get to act shocked when families question how he ranks remembrance. A petition that treats the elected mayor of New York as an “unwelcome guest” at the city’s own wound does not get to claim it has depoliticized the day.
The families are not a bloc. September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, a smaller group with Open Society funding in its history, condemned the drive as carrying anti-Muslim sentiment and said Mamdani should be there. Elizabeth Miller, whose father died in the attacks, said the focus should stay on the dead, not on who is barred. Survivor Jennifer R. Glass said attendance is acceptable if he has no formal role and no forced contact with grieving relatives. City Council Speaker Julie Menin later called the exclusion push “absolutely inappropriate.” Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Blakeman floated the opposite theater: attendees turning their backs if the mayor shows. That is the same disease from the other aisle, grief used as a prop.
Nobody elected Heaton to run the ceremony. Nobody elected a Change.org counter to replace the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. Families who do not want a photo-op next to a politician they distrust are not villains for saying so. A sitting mayor who insists on standing in the official line while leaving other memorials empty is not a victim of fate. The 25th anniversary will be cheapened if it becomes a loyalty test, a boycott, or a campaign stop. The names are supposed to be read. The rest of this fight is about who gets to stand close enough to be seen doing it.