Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani is calling on current Mayor Zohran Mamdani to stay away from the 25th anniversary ceremonies honoring the victims of the September 11 attacks, a demand that puts the city's first Muslim mayor at the center of a growing fight over who speaks for Ground Zero.
Giuliani made the remarks during a Friday appearance on the Newsmax program "Finnerty," where he argued that Mamdani's presence at the ceremonies would be an affront to the families who lost husbands, wives, and children in the 2001 attacks. The former mayor, who led New York through the worst terrorist strike on American soil, did not hold back about why he believes Mamdani should not attend.
The broadside lands as Mamdani faces mounting pressure from multiple directions, including from Republican senators who have backed a petition by 9/11 families seeking to bar him from the Ground Zero anniversary altogether. Giuliani's public intervention adds the weight of the man most closely identified with the city's response to the attacks.
Giuliani did not limit his criticism to the question of ceremony attendance. He used the Newsmax appearance to make a broader argument about what he described as an effort to impose Islamic religious law inside the United States. He told Newsmax:
"Why are they fighting about Sharia law in Texas and in Dearborn, Michigan? When the Germans came here, they didn't ask for German law. The Puerto Ricans didn't ask for Puerto Rican law. The Irish didn't ask for Irish law."
He went further, casting the issue in historical terms that tied it directly to the September 11 attacks themselves:
"They want to impose a barbaric foreign code on us, given the advances that we've made as an Anglo-American country. It's a disgrace. They're trying to accomplish by infiltration what they couldn't accomplish by murderous attack."
Those are sharp claims, and Giuliani offered them as his own assessment. The source does not include independent evidence for the specific assertions about Sharia law disputes in Texas or Dearborn, Michigan. But the former mayor was plainly drawing a line: in his view, the ideology behind the September 11 attacks has not disappeared, it has changed tactics.
Giuliani repeatedly returned to the 9/11 victims' families as the people whose wishes should govern the anniversary events. He contrasted his own record and that of his successor, Michael Bloomberg, with what he characterized as a lack of respect under the current administration.
"When I was the mayor, and Bloomberg following me, we just about universally respected the wishes of those families. Because every time we would go to a service and I went to more funerals, than any mayor ever, you had to respect them."
He described the grief of those families in personal terms, framing the anniversary ceremonies as something that belongs to them, not to politicians looking for a photo opportunity.
"You can't imagine going through what they went through, losing your child, losing your husband, losing your wife. It's awful [under] any circumstances, but having them attacked by a foreign force, Islamic terrorism, sacrificed that way, you never get over that."
Mamdani has drawn controversy well beyond the 9/11 question. Israeli leaders across the political spectrum condemned him after he called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a "war criminal," and his record on terrorism-related memorials has drawn scrutiny before.
Giuliani also took aim at former mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa, whom he accused of making remarks that disrespected the families of 9/11 victims. The specific content of Sliwa's comments was not detailed in Giuliani's interview, but the former mayor's displeasure was clear.
"If he's attacking the victims' families, I don't know what's happened to him."
Giuliani's demand does not exist in a vacuum. The current mayor has a documented record of friction with events honoring victims of terrorism in New York City. Mamdani skipped the memorial for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, a decision that drew criticism from families and elected officials alike and that now looks even more conspicuous as the 9/11 anniversary approaches.
The mayor has also faced questions about his associations. Mamdani came under fire for ties to a Qatar-based media outlet that the Anti-Defamation League has flagged as antisemitic, a connection that has fed broader concerns about where his sympathies lie when it comes to the Middle East and the legacy of Islamist violence.
Whether Mamdani has been formally invited to the 25th anniversary ceremonies, or whether he plans to attend, remains unclear. Giuliani's interview did not address that question, and no response from the mayor's office was included in the broadcast or the published account of Giuliani's remarks.
What is clear is that the families of the nearly 3,000 people killed on September 11, 2001, remain at the center of this debate. For Giuliani, the calculation is simple: the anniversary belongs to them, and a mayor who has generated controversy after controversy, from his remarks on Israel to a taxpayer-funded video targeting a Jewish landlord, has not earned the right to stand at Ground Zero and claim to speak for the city's grief.
The 25th anniversary of September 11 should honor the people who were murdered that day and the families still carrying the weight. If New York's mayor cannot command the trust of those families, he has no business standing at the podium.
