Twenty-five years after the Sept. 11 attacks, a fight over how the anniversary is remembered has broken out between two media outlets — with The Federalist publishing a sharply critical piece accusing The New York Times of framing Muslims as “the real victims” of the day.
At issue are two Times stories tied to the anniversary, both written or co-written by reporter Maya King. The first, with Jeffrey C. Mays, is headlined “Facing Islamophobia, Mamdani Keeps Focus on 9/11 Victims.” The second, with Liam Stack, is titled “After 9/11, Islamophobia Shaped a Generation of Muslim New Yorkers.”
The Federalist’s critique centers on what it says those articles omit. As the outlet points out, 2,977 people were killed that day in 2001 by 19 terrorists, and the families who lost parents, spouses and siblings still live with that absence. The Federalist argues, in effect, that the Times has inverted the story by making the aftermath for Muslim Americans the emotional core of the anniversary, while giving little or no space to the dead or grieving.
The Times’ framing, as described
According to The Federalist’s account of the first article, King and Mays describe how Mamdani — New York’s first Muslim mayor — has had to ‘navigate a delicate dynamic.’ The Times reporters write that he must address Sept. 11 as the city’s top elected official and also as a member of a religious group that has faced suspicion and hostility since the attacks. The piece quotes Husein Yatabarry, executive director of the Muslim Community Network, who alleges a right-wing push to bring back open anti-Muslim sentiment against prominent Muslim political figures and ordinary people alike.
King and Mays also write that Mamdani was nine years old when the attacks occurred, and had been in the United States for two years after his family moved from Uganda. The Times piece says he has called the day a horrific tragedy for all Americans and says a Muslim like him was officially marked as an “other.”
The Federalist’s counterargument
The Federalist rejects the framing outright and argues that any scrutiny Mamdani faces has specific, documented causes rather than prejudice.
According to the outlet, Mamdani once publicly praised Imam Siraj Wahhaj as ‘one of the nation’s foremost Muslim leaders and a pillar of the Bed-Stuy community.’ The Federalist writes that Wahhaj testified as a character witness for Omar Abdel Rahman, who was convicted of planning the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and raised money for the legal defense of El Sayyid Nosair, convicted of seditious conspiracy tied to that attack.
The outlet also cites Mamdani’s relationship with leftist streamer Hasan Piker, noting Eid dinner and Piker’s statement that ‘America deserved 9/11.’ It further points to Mamdani’s father, Mahmood Mamdani, whose 2004 book “Good Muslim, Bad Muslim” argued that suicide bombing should be understood as a feature of modern political violence and that suicide bombers should be recognized as a category of soldier rather than stigmatized as barbaric.
To The Federalist, that record makes the Times’ reading — that objections to Mamdani’s role at memorial events are simply Islamophobia — hard to take seriously.
The second Times piece draws the sharpest objections
The second article, by King and Stack, opens by describing how, after 9/11, neighbors kept their distance from Muslim New Yorkers, undercover officers monitored community events, and passers-by harassed people in hijabs and other religious garb. The Times reports that many American Muslims have faced a quarter-century of suspicion and hostility since the attacks, which reshaped life for all Americans, and that anti-Muslim prejudice endures, echoing the Islamophobia of the earliest days after Sept. 11.
The Federalist’s central complaint is that the article says 9/11 ‘left many Muslim American communities scarred’ without ever mentioning the 2,977 people murdered that day. The Federalist notes that the piece includes no testimony from families who lost loved ones and no reference to the firefighters and police officers who died trying to save others.
In The Federalist’s telling, that omission is the point: a quarter-century later, the outlet argues, the Times has decided who deserves to be remembered as the true victims, and it has decided it was not the people in the towers, the Pentagon or the planes.
Two competing accounts of who suffered most
Both outlets are operating from distinct factual universes about what the anniversary should center. The Times stories, as summarized by The Federalist, are built around the lived experience of Muslim Americans in the years since the attacks — surveillance, suspicion and harassment — and the political pressures on New York’s first Muslim mayor as he leads the city’s commemoration.
The Federalist piece is built around the claim that those stories leave out the actual atrocity, and that grievances voiced by Muslim political figures must be weighed against their associations and family writings. It closes by saying plainly that the murdered innocents and their families, ‘not Mamdani and the Muslims so beloved by the Times,’ are the true victims of 9/11.
The dispute is a reminder that the 25th anniversary of the attacks is itself a contested political terrain, with mainstream and conservative outlets telling the same day’s story from opposite moral starting points.
Source: thefederalist.com — https://thefederalist.com/2026/09/11/nyt-25-years-later-the-real-victims-of-9-11-are-muslims/