Everyone who was in New York on 11 September 2001 has their 9/11 story. My husband and I were at JFK, boarding a plane to San Francisco. Our two sons were home in lower Manhattan, a block away from my 85-year-old mother. They watched the towers fall from our corner. The weather was radiantly beautiful.
For a long time, the faces of the missing were everywhere. Their eyes seemed to follow us from the makeshift shrine outside St Vincent’s hospital to the window of our local bodega. We cried at random moments. We slept badly.
No one who lived downtown could possibly be surprised by the recently released report about the toxicity of the air during those weeks and months. We inhaled it with every breath. Nothing else has ever smelled like that. I never want to smell that again.
But I also recall the powerful sense that New Yorkers were in this together. Every firehouse was a memorial. We brought flowers, awkwardly expressed our gratitude, paid our respects. Taxis with passengers in them slowed down and gave people rides. People asked strangers if they were OK when they obviously weren’t OK. It was a kind of a joke: if, weeks after the towers fell, you still remained too scared to be in a crowd or an elevator or to take the subway, it meant that the terrorists had won. But like so many jokes, it had a serious undercurrent.
I know that those days weren’t the same for everyone. South Asian and Middle Eastern kids were isolated and bullied at school, their families harassed on the street. A Sikh gas station owner was shot by a gunman who thought he was Muslim. But mostly I recall the tenderness with which people in the city treated one another.
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That’s why I found it so painful to read, over the last few weeks, that more than 100,000 people had signed a petition designed to prevent the New York mayor, Zohran Mamdani, from attending the official 9/11 commemoration ceremony. Among the reasons offered by rightwing politicians and by the families of some victims was the claim that the mayor should be barred from participating because of “public positions, associations and responses to rhetoric”.
The flimsiness, vagueness and illogic of these charges only reveals the obvious. In the eyes of some, the reason why the mayor’s presence would dishonor the dead is not about anything he did. It’s about the fact that, like the men who flew their planes into the towers, Zohran Mamdani is Muslim.
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Doesn’t it matter that Mamdani was nine years old at the time of the attack on the World Trade Center? Doesn’t it matter that he has never advocated state-sponsored terrorism? Doesn’t it matter that during the election and while in office he promised and has subsequently tried to make life more livable for every New Yorker, regardless of faith, race and ethnicity? Doesn’t it matter that the mayor of New York belongs at an event commemorating something historic that happened in his city?
To blame all Muslims for the crimes of a very small faction is like blaming every Christian for the evils of Hitler, Stalin and Ted Bundy, like blaming every Jew for the illicit activities of the mob boss Meyer Lansky, like holding writer Arundhati Roy responsible for India’s periodic anti-Muslim riots.
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On September 11, Mayor Mamdani, who had spent the previous days visiting firehouses, talking with victims’ families, hearing about the persistent health problems of first responders and people who lived near Ground Zero, and releasing the long-secret air quality report, attended the solemn ceremony. There he did what he always does. He radiated human decency, grace, honesty and kindness, qualities in notably short supply among our current politicians. Rudy Giuliani had condemned Mamdani’s attendance, telling Newsmax: “All of the Muslims he supports are murderers” – but Mamdani shook his hand, a gesture of dignity, fellowship and forgiveness, virtues honored by every religion.
Any chance that the openness with which the mayor rose above his critics and greeted his opponents might serve as an inspiring example of maturity and reconciliation, any expectation that his presence might heal the wound being deepened by anti-Muslim agitators was more or less dashed (at least for me) when a disturbing video appeared on my phone. It documented a recent anti-Mamdani protest in Manhattan, which turned violent.
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Given our troubled economy, given the loss of so many jobs, the sacrifice of so many lives to the opioid crisis, it’s not that hard to understand the roots of so much bitterness and frustration. But it’s dispiriting to see it so misdirected. And it’s scary that the anti-Muslim bigotry and propaganda seem destined to persist beyond this latest round of demonstrations.
The good news is that approximately three-quarters of New Yorkers supported Mamdani’s presence at the memorial ceremony. Perhaps some of them remember that day, as do I. I like to imagine they share my sense that those whose who died and those who survived would not want their experience used to fuel the vitriolic bigotry that, in one video clip, prompts a furious protester to spit on a reporter. The reporter is only trying to do his job, to film a response to a catastrophe in which we lost so many of every religion, every color, every age, so many innocent people who believed that they were simply going to work on a gorgeous but otherwise ordinary September morning.
