We wrote earlier this week about blatant Islamophobia from sentient cigar lounge urinal cake Rudy Giuliani and forgettable New York ex-governor George Pataki, who want New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to skip a ceremony at Ground Zero on Friday. Unfortunately, and predictably, the situation has grown uglier as the 25th anniversary of 9/11 has drawn closer.
While Giuliani and Pataki's objections to Mamdani's attendance at Friday's event variously cited a bogus Change.org petition that purported to represent "thousands" of families of 9/11 victims (real number: 10) or the fact that Mamdani hired an attorney, Ramzi Kassem, who once represented a client imprisoned on Guantanamo Bay, these shockingly flimsy pretenses for rank bigotry against New York City's first Muslim mayor almost look substantive next to the breathtakingly moronic new "scandal" cooked up over the last few days.
On Friday, as Mayor Mamdani signed two executive orders recognizing the 25th anniversary of 9/11, he had the gall to hand out commemorative pens to the City officials attending the event—something the mayor regularly does when he signs executive orders—including Kassem, his chief legal counsel.
Why is this a big deal? Obviously, it isn't. But because Kassem once represented a Guantanamo Bay detainee whose sister later married one of the 9/11 hijackers, the New York Post seized on the gesture as a QAnon-coded act of disrespect to the New Yorkers who lost loved ones on 9/11. (The fact that NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch had to help pass the pen to Kassem was deemed an extra measure of disrespect aimed at 9/11 families, for some reason.)