NYC Mayor’s 9/11 Remarks Spark Fury: ‘We Forgot What Happened’

Nearly a quarter-century after the September 11 attacks, a new generation of political leaders is reshaping how America remembers—and in the eyes of many critics, deliberately forgetting—the worst terrorist assault on U.S. soil.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a Democrat who took office in 2026, sparked outrage this week with a social media post marking the 25th anniversary of the attacks. In his message, Mamdani described 9/11 as a day when ‘3,000 New Yorkers died randomly,’ and immediately pivoted to mourn ‘the hundreds of thousands who died in the wars that followed’ and ‘the unknown millions injured & displaced.’

The mayor framed the anniversary as a call to ‘work toward a better world’—but his framing, critics say, erased the deliberate, ideological nature of the attacks and turned the perpetrators’ victims into an afterthought.

A ‘Random’ Day? Critics Push Back

The attacks of September 11, 2001, were the work of 19 Islamist extremists tied to Al Qaeda, who hijacked four commercial airliners and crashed two into the World Trade Center towers in Manhattan, one into the Pentagon, and a fourth into a Pennsylvania field after passengers fought back. Nearly 3,000 Americans were killed in a span of hours.

Mamdani’s characterization of that day as ‘random’ struck many as a profound betrayal. In a blistering response, an editorial published by The Daily Wire argued that the political left—and Mamdani specifically—has not merely forgotten what happened, but has ‘forfeited’ the country’s collective memory. The piece accused him of handing ‘the box cutters, forged identities, and fake bombs right back to the terrorists’ by reframing Muslim Americans as the real victims and minimizing the atrocity.

‘To say he is a piece of sh*t would be courteous,’ the editorial said, a measure of the raw anger the mayor’s remarks have ignited.

A Pattern of Left-Wing 9/11 Revisionism

Mamdani is not alone in the left’s new canon of 9/11 commentary. The Daily Wire piece points to several prominent figures who have, in recent years, questioned America’s culpability for the attacks or framed them as an inevitable consequence of U.S. policy:

• Hasan Piker, a popular left-wing streamer, has said America ‘deserved’ 9/11 and has also expressed support for violence against Israel.
• Melat Kiros, a socialist congressional candidate, recently called 9/11 ‘inevitable.’
• Mehdi Hasan, a former MSNBC host and prominent leftist, posted a provocative message on X that read ‘Make American Planes Crash Again’—a grim parody of Trump’s slogan.

Critics note that many of these figures, including Mamdani and Piker, are not native-born Americans. Mamdani, the son of postcolonial theorists, has spoken about being raised with a worldview that sympathized with resistance movements, including those that employ suicide bombings. The Daily Wire editorial argues that these influencers—often from privileged backgrounds—have ‘fled toward this flawed republic’ only to ‘prosecute the experiment’ by adopting narratives of original sin and Western guilt.

The Danger of Forgetting

For two decades after 9/11, the attack served as a unifying trauma—a moment that ‘severed and cauterized the twentieth century’ and put the country on guard against those who wished it harm. The enemy was clear: Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, and a ‘satanic cult’ that had declared war on the West. The resolve was unanimous: never again.

But memory fades, and a new generation has grown up without having watched the towers fall. The empathy that once extended to victims has, in some quarters, been redirected toward the perpetrators—or toward the American empire that responded with two decades of war. Hundreds of thousands died in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the human cost is real. But for Mamdani’s critics, that reality has been twisted into a moral equivalence that erases the original sin.

‘This was barbaric,’ the Daily Wire editorial insists. ‘This was a deliberate mass murder of almost 3,000 Americans because 19 men’s religion told them to.’

The editorial warns that allowing figures like Mamdani to shape public memory is a slow capitulation—one that hands the terrorists a victory they never won on the battlefield. ‘Zohran Mamdani is disgusting,’ it concludes. ‘And it’s disgusting that we forgot.’

What’s Next?

The controversy shows no sign of subsiding. At the 25th anniversary of 9/11, New York City is once again in the spotlight—but this time, the discussion is as much about how America remembers as it is about what it remembers. Mayoral offices typically release solemn statements marking the day; Mamdani’s was anything but typical.

For many New Yorkers, especially those who lost loved ones, the mayor’s words were a painful reminder that the country’s political divides now extend even into the hallowed ground of a national trauma. The question, as the Daily Wire puts it, is whether the nation will allow a new leadership class to redefine that trauma out of existence.

Source: www.dailywire.com — https://www.dailywire.com/news/we-forgot-what-happened-on-9-11