Four days before the 25th anniversary of September 11, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani stood in the Blue Room at City Hall, signed a Day of Remembrance executive order with a ceremonial pen, and then handed that pen to his Chief Counsel — a 48-year-old attorney named Ramzi Kassem who once represented an Al Qaeda operative detained at Guantánamo Bay.
The operative's sister was married to one of the hijackers.
Kassem's most notable former client was Ahmed al Darbi, an Al Qaeda member connected to the 2002 bombing of a French oil tanker. Al Darbi's sister was married to Khalid al Mihdhar, one of the terrorists aboard American Airlines Flight 77 — the plane that crashed into the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. Kassem represented al Darbi through a legal clinic he ran at the City University of New York. Now he's the top lawyer for the mayor of the city that lost the most that day.
Kassem arrived approximately 15 minutes late to the press conference where the signing took place. Retired NYPD detective Michael Alcazar, now an adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, didn't think the timing was an accident. "It was calculated," Alcazar said.
Queens Republican Council Member Joann Ariola put it more directly: "It shows exactly where his loyalties truly lie." Ariola added, "The families who lost loved ones on 9/11 have every right to be outraged. On the 25th anniversary, City Hall should be honoring their sacrifice with dignity, not forcing those families to endure yet another insult."
Dennis Warchola knows what those families are feeling. His brother Michael Warchola was a Ladder 5 firefighter who died in the North Tower. "How can you defend a guy like that who wants to do Americans or any innocent person harm?" Warchola asked.
It's a reasonable question. Kassem didn't stumble into terror defense work on a random Tuesday. He built a legal clinic around it at CUNY. He chose that specialty the way other lawyers choose tax law or real estate closings — deliberately, repeatedly, as a career.
Queens Republican Council Member Vicki Paladino framed it in terms the mayor's office probably won't address: "His participation in anything related to 9/11 is an insult to every New Yorker who survived that day, and indeed all Americans. But I suspect that's the point."
The standard defense here writes itself — everyone deserves legal representation, and defending someone in court doesn't mean you endorse their actions. Fine. But we're not talking about courtroom procedure. We're talking about a ceremonial pen, signed on a Day of Remembrance order, handed over like a gift, to a man whose legal career included defending someone whose own family participated in the murder of nearly 3,000 people. The ceremony isn't the courtroom. The pen isn't a legal brief. It's a symbol — and Mamdani chose who received it.
This is the same New York that arrested Columbia University pro-Palestinian encampment leader Mahmoud Khalil, the same city where Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch has been navigating post-October 7 tensions on a weekly basis. The political lines in New York aren't blurry right now. They're sharp. And Mamdani just told everyone exactly which side of those lines he's standing on — four days before the anniversary of the worst attack on American soil.
A Day of Remembrance pen, given to a man who made his career defending the people we're supposed to be remembering against. The ceremony honored September 11. The pen honored something else entirely.
