The daughter of a man killed in the South Tower on September 11 is telling New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to stay away from Friday's 25th-anniversary ceremony — and more than 110,000 people agree with her. The stakes are plain: the same government that failed to stop the attacks, then lied to New Yorkers about the air they were breathing at Ground Zero, now wants a mayor with documented ties to figures connected to those attacks to lead the mourning.
Jeannette Puccio-Pick was nine when her father, Joseph Pick, was murdered in the South Tower. "We don't want you to come. We don't want you there," she told Breitbart News. Her objection is specific and sourced: Mamdani has "affiliated himself politically, personally and professionally with those who have minimized and justified the murdering of my father."
The record backs her up. During his 2025 campaign, Mamdani campaigned alongside Brooklyn imam Siraj Wahhaj, praising him as "one of the nation's foremost Muslim leaders and a pillar of the Bed-Stuy community." Wahhaj was named by federal prosecutors as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and served as a character witness for the "Blind Sheikh," Omar Abdel-Rahman, convicted of plotting terror attacks in New York.
Then there is Mamdani's appointment of Ramzi Kassem as the city's chief counsel. Kassem previously represented Guantanamo detainee Ahmed al-Darbi, who pleaded guilty before a U.S. military commission to charges from the 2002 al-Qaeda bombing of the French oil tanker Limburg off Yemen. Al-Darbi is the brother-in-law of Khalid al-Mihdhar, one of the 9/11 hijackers aboard American Airlines Flight 77.
The petition opposing Mamdani's attendance also cites his refusal to "clearly and unequivocally condemn" the phrase "globalize the intifada," his past comments blaming U.S. foreign policy for radicalizing al-Qaeda propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki, and writings by his father, Mahmood Mamdani — whom the mayor credits with shaping his worldview — arguing that suicide bombers should be "understood as a feature of modern political violence rather than stigmatized as a mark of barbarism."
The Guardian's coverage of the ceremony buries all of this. The outlet notes Mamdani's expected attendance as a routine fact alongside former presidents Bush, Obama, Clinton, and Biden, and mentions Trump's expected appearance at the Pentagon. What The Guardian does report is that the Mamdani administration just released more than 170,000 documents showing New Yorkers were misled about air quality after the attacks — a damning admission from the same permanent government that told first responders the air was safe.
So the picture is complete: the national security state failed to prevent 9/11, lied about the air at Ground Zero, weaponized the attacks to build the surveillance state and launch forever wars that killed more Americans than the hijackers did — and now expects the families of the dead to sit quietly while a mayor with ties to the ideological lineage of their murderers presides over the memorial. Puccio-Pick and 110,000 signers are refusing.
The open question is whether any institution in New York will listen.
