September 11, 2001, is a day that's burned into my memory. I was 18 years old and a freshman in college. Living on in the dorms, I was in a very bad habit of hitting the snooze button multiple times because I could simply roll out of bed and walk across the small campus to class in about 10 minutes.
On that Tuesday morning my alarm went off and in the few seconds it took me to roll over to hit the snooze button, I heard the morning show hosts say, "And the top of the building is on fire?" It took a moment to process what I'd heard, but then it hit me.
What building was on fire, I didn't know yet. But I was going to find out. Was it a building in Milwaukee? My mom and dad worked in downtown Milwaukee at the time. Were they safe? So I turned on the television, and there it was: the North Tower of the World Trade Center on fire, having been hit by a plane. The noise of the television woke my roommate. It wasn't long after that and we saw something that shook us to the core: Flight 175 hit the South Tower in a massive explosion. This was terrorism, and we both knew it.
"I don't even have my glasses on, and I saw that," my roommate said to me after a very pregnant pause. My first call was to my mom, who worked across from the federal building in Milwaukee. She and her colleagues had no idea what was going on.
Seeking normalcy, my roommate and I both went to class, but it was anything but normal. In the era before smartphones, my classmates kept coming in and out of the room, tracking loved ones who were traveling, getting updates from family in law enforcement. At some point, we moved to work on computers, and the plan was—according to my college's officials—to keep things going normally. That lasted about an hour before a messenger came around and said the campus was closing.
That's when panic set in. I emailed my mom at work and told her school was closing. We weren't sure if there would be more terror attacks, or what would be targeted. I returned to my dorm to find my roommate packing a bag; she was going her grandparents' house because it was likely her relatives who were in the National Guard would be called up. That was confirmed when a friend of mine, in the National Guard, called to tell me he would probably be leaving soon, too. I was numb and sad.
At some point, another student who lived down the hall came to my room and we just sat there. She, on the floor, cross-legged. Me, in my desk chair.
That afternoon, I left campus to pick my younger brother, a high school junior, up from school. As I left the building, I saw an unoccupied cab sitting in the circular drive outside the dorms. As I walked toward my car, my body tensed, expecting it to explode.
My brother only had a vague idea of what happened. So we went home and we ate dinner, and Mom tried to make it special, comforting, by cooking steak and mushrooms and making a salad. That night, I went back to the dorm and woke up at some point in terror: I mistook the fan in my window for the sound of a plane engine. For years afterward, when I saw a plane in the sky, I'd wonder to myself if it belonged there, and I didn't fly anywhere until I was in my early 30s. My first flight was, ironically, to New York, where I visited the 9/11 Memorial and Museum. I cried, especially at the pictures of the children killed that day.
I share all this to show that 9/11 had a profound impact on me, a teenage girl from Wisconsin. I didn't lose a loved one; I didn't know anyone in NYC at the time, but now I know a few people who lived in the Big Apple during that time. I didn't lose colleagues or friends. I was not one of the children who grew up missing one, or in some cases, both parents thanks to that abhorrent act of terrorism.
I can only imagine how much pain and suffering those families have gone through in the last quarter of a century. There are voids in their lives that will never be filled again. Their loved ones, their friends, and their co-workers were stolen from them by Islamic terrorism. They didn't deserve it; it wasn't some justified act of a wronged people. It was evil unleashed.
With the 25th anniversary of that day looming, families and survivors do not want New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to be at the service.
Today’s cover: Families of 9/11 victims want to ban Mamdani from sacred 25th anniversary ceremony at Ground Zero: ‘unwelcome guest’ https://t.co/QzyNItydfE pic.twitter.com/o0guXxk7Cx
— New York Post (@nypost) July 26, 2026
I'm on their side.
That man, that Islamist sympathizer who shills for Hamas and rubs elbows with Imams who want to murder gays, Jews, and non-Muslims, needs to stay away from the 9/11 services. Let me spell out the reasons why.
Years ago, Mamdani defended al Qaeda terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki, who interacted with three of the 9/11 hijackers and tried, unsuccessfully, to blow up an airplane on Christmas Day in 2009 and U.S. cargo planes in 2010. Mamdani criticized the FBI surveillance of al-Awlaki and said they pushed him into terrorism. Mamdani's father, a Columbia professor, said suicide bombings "need to be understood as a feature of modern political violence rather than stigmatized as a mark of barbarism," and added, "we need to recognize the suicide bomber, first and foremost, as a category of soldier." Mamdani co-founded Bowdoin College's Students for Justice in Palestine chapter, which defended convicted terrorist Rasmieh Odeh, who was responsible for bombings in Israel that killed two college students.
In 2013, Mamdani lamented that Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was not mirandized before the FBI interviewed him after he and his brother killed three people, including eight-year-old boy Martin Richard, and wounded hundreds more.
Mamdani also spends time with Siraj Wahhaj, an unindicted co-conspirator of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing that killed six New Yorkers. Wahhaj has urged "jihad" upon New York City. Mamdani called him "one of the nation's foremost Muslim leaders."
8 nearly 3,000 Americans.
Rama Duwaji, Mamdani's wife, shared multiple social media posts glorifying Islamic terrorism, including from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the terror group First Intifada. When pressed about it, Mamdani's official response is that Duwaji is a private citizen. But she's also his wife, and—as I've argued before—you don't marry someone who likes Islamic terrorism unless you do, too. Marriages only work when you agree on major issues, and killing Jews and infidels is one of those major issues.
Just days after an ISIS-inspired terror attack targeted anti-Islam protesters outside Gracie Mansion, Mamdani hosted a Ramadan dinner at his residence. Mamdani also slammed the anti-Islam protesters instead of the literal terrorists who tried to blow them up. And a few days ago, Mamdani hosted an actual terrorist—Motaz Azaiza—at Gracie Mansion.
It would be a slap in the face to the families, the survivors, and to New York City for Mamdani to show up at the 9/11 service and pretend he gives a damn about American victims—or any victims—of Islamic terrorism. He doesn't. In fact, there's enough evidence to argue that he's on the side of the terrorists, and would have been on the side of the 9/11 hijackers were he a little older at the time those attacks took place.
He has no business there, and his role as the Mayor of New York City doesn't give him the right to be there.