On September 10, 2001, my then-girlfriend and I were at the Three of Cups Lounge in the East Village. We didn’t realize it, but we were celebrating the final day of the 1990s. It was well after midnight when we left, the start of a new day we didn’t imagine would have any historical weight. We were both in our 20s so having more than a few drinks on a Monday night and then going to work the next day was still a common practice. On our way out, some disheveled, clearly disturbed man shouted hateful antisemitic slurs at us. My then-girlfriend was presumably the target. She’s not Jewish — not that it should matter — but hate rarely makes people smarter. It was still a disturbing experience for her.
A week or so later, after the world had changed, my then-girlfriend’s former classmate heard this story and concluded that the random lunatic shouting at us on the street might have been “one of the 9/11 terrorists!” She’d just graduated from Columbia University but that apparently doesn’t necessarily make you smarter, either. She’d already started looking for enemies everywhere, all part of the terrorist plot against the United States. The seed of hatred was real, but that didn’t justify what grew from it.
The Three of Cups Lounge closed in 2018, a victim of rising rents in the East Village. Hatred still endures, though. Tomorrow is the 25th anniversary of 9/11, and “patriotic” bigots can’t stand the fact that the current mayor is Muslim. They are acting as if Zohran Mamdani was the deranged man screaming epithets on the street and then apparently went on to commit 9/11. He wasn’t, of course. He was nine years old in 2001 and wouldn’t have been out that late, even for a New York child. Hatred doesn’t acknowledge such innocence, though, and bigotry demands collective blame for the 9/11 attack, one that Muslims have endured for decades.
Muslim New Yorkers died on 9/11. They were among the office workers and maintenance staff that keep the city running. Unlike Donald Trump, they were among the first responders who rushed into danger and lost their lives saving others.
It’s appalling, if not surprising, to see prominent bigots demand that Mayor Mamdani stay away from all 9/11. This obviously includes slime trail Rudy Giuliani, who you might’ve heard was mayor on September 11, 2001. He claims Mamdani’s presence at 9/11 events would be “inappropriate,” and he’s someone who attempted to overturn the 2024 election, tacitly encouraged the January 6 attack, and passed gas in a woman’s face.
New York City Council Member Vickie Paladino said out loud, “I’m not asking politely for the mayor not to come to 9/11 ceremony. I am demanding he not show his face at that sacred ground. He does not belong there. We, the people, do not care for Zohran Mamdami.”
Mamdani is actually quite popular, for a politician, but even if he weren’t, he’s the elected mayor. He’s also a citizen and resident of New York. He’s free to go wherever he wishes.
Paladino later claimed on Fox News that if Mamdani visits 9/11, it’s a message to “Osama bin Laden that, look, we conquered New York.”
Osama bin Laden was killed in 2011. President Barack Obama oversaw that successful mission so I get why Republicans want to pretend it didn’t happen. Still, the only way anyone can send a message to Osama bin Laden is through a medium. The racist statement that “we conquered New York” reflects the bigoted fury that a Muslim was ever elected mayor of the greatest city in America that’s not New Orleans.
Chris Miller at Vanity Fair wrote, “But there’s also an inchoate, emotional, and Islamophobic component that sees the city’s first Muslim mayor as a stand-in for the 19 Muslims who hijacked four planes and turned them into deadly weapons, part of the “them” who attacked ‘us.’”
That’s a lot of words to say “these people are gutter racists.” Fox News host Kennedy gave away the game when she gloated that right-wingers had put Mamdani in an “impossible position” where he’s damned if he doesn’t show up and damned if he doesn’t. Of course, she wants Mamdani at the 9/11 commemoration so that the families can “turn their backs on him” in silent protest. She wants this moment of shared grief weaponized against a political enemy. It’s small, petty, and predictably in character.
Kennedy and others claim this is all justified because Mamdani is friendly with Hasan Piker, who’s made controversial statements about 9/11. Of course, as I must often point out, so did Bill Maher, who lost his ABC series Politically Incorrect when he said just a week after 9/11, “We have been the cowards lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That’s cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it’s not cowardly.”
When Piker accused Paladino of blatant racism for her anti-Mamdani rants, she responded on Fox News, without any self-awareness, that Piker “should go back where he came from.” He was born in New Jersey, though he grew up in Turkey. Either way, he’s a citizen. (She also demanded “five minutes” alone in a room with Piker, which … I mean, he’s not my type. Still, she might want to keep that to herself. She was on national television.)
During his address to Congress on September 20, 2001, President George W. Bush offered his explantation for the 9/11 attack.
“Americans are asking, why do they hate us? They hate what we see right here in this chamber — a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms — our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.”
Bush’s argument was obviously simplistic and facile, but Americans couldn’t even act as if they truly believed it. Instead, too many embraced a self-defeating circular argument: “The terrorists hate our freedoms so we must disregard all those freedoms or the terrorists will have won.” It’s 2026, and Republicans in particular have little respect for a democratically elected government. The political right and left can both struggle to tolerate freedom of speech from anyone who disagrees with them. Instead, we continue looking for enemies, either in elected office or on a random street in the East Village.
I think the bigotry has gotten worse since then. There was a lot of anti Muslim bigotry at the time but most prominent conservatives took the effort to differentiate between regular Muslims (theres a billion of them worldwide) and terrorists. National Review even canned Ann Coulter for her comment that America should “kill their leaders, invade their countries and convert them to Christianity”—today that would get her a prime time slot at the GOP Convention. Bush, for all his faults, made sure to emphasize that this was a war on terror and that Islam was a religion of peace (try to imagine Trump saying that now).
The bigots are more open now, and more influential. To say you can’t show up at a 9/11 memorial simply because you’re Muslim is fucked up and even in late 2001 that would have been a jarring comment to hear even on Fox News.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Islam is not a problem. Radical Islam is. Zionism is not a problem. Radical Zionism is. Christianity is not a problem. Radical Christianity is. You get the point.