Is the Mayor Whitewashing Terrorists?

A VINNEWS OP-ED

(NEW YORK (VINNEWS/Shira Miller) On the eve of the twenty-fifth anniversary of September 11, the mayor of New York City took the deadliest terrorist attack in American history and turned it into a story about Rudy Giuliani.

Zohran Mamdani released roughly 170,000 pages of city records on the air over Ground Zero and offered a sentence that should have silenced the room: “Close to 25 years later, more people have died from 9/11-related illnesses than were killed on the day itself.”

That sentence should have been followed with the obvious truth: 

The men who brought down the towers are still killing New Yorkers a quarter century later.

Instead, Mamdani followed it with this: “People got sick because the leaders they trusted lied and told them they were safe to breathe in toxic air.”

The mayor has just conceded that Islamist terrorism killed more people in the years after the attack than on the day of it, a toll now well beyond twice 2,977 and still climbing. And in the same breath he handed the blame to American officials. Not to Osama bin Laden. Not to Al Qaeda. Not to the ideology that trained nineteen men to fly airliners into buildings full of secretaries and busboys. To “the leaders they trusted.”

The word “terrorism” did not carry the press conference. The word “lied” did. With Jerry Nadler and Jon Stewart flanking him, and grieving families behind him, the mayor of the city that was attacked spent his moral capital prosecuting the people who tried to reopen it. That is not accountability. That is whitewashing, and it was performed in front of the very people who have the most right to be furious about it.

Consider what the mayor’s own numbers establish. The 9/11 Memorial & Museum counts more than 400,000 people exposed to the contaminants of the collapse. Some 140,000 were enrolled in the World Trade Center Health Program as of March 2024. Roughly 49,000 responders and survivors have been certified with cancers tied to their exposure. A report issued this month by the city and the FDNY found more than 10,000 members of the department certified with a 9/11-related physical illness. Every one of those cases traces back to a single cause, and that cause was not a memo. It was a hijacked Boeing. The government that misjudged the dust, if it did, is guilty of negligence. But make no mistake:  The men who made the dust are guilty of mass murder. A mayor who cannot keep those two categories straight on the anniversary of the attack is not confused. He is choosing.

And when a reporter tried to make him own the choice, he ran from it. Asked point-blank whether Giuliani lied, Mamdani said: “I leave it to New Yorkers to make their judgements.” He was willing to say “lied” from the podium and unwilling to say it under questioning. He wanted the accusation in the headline and his fingerprints off of it. That is the maneuver of a politician who knows precisely where he wants the blame to fall and would rather the public do the aiming for him.

The release was staged as an indictment, and the defendant in the dock was the United States. The perpetrators were not even called to the stand.

None of this should surprise anyone who has watched this mayor handle the subject of Islamist terror. His method is now familiar enough to describe in a sentence: acknowledge the atrocity briefly, then redirect the full weight of the indictment onto the democracy that was attacked.

On the second anniversary of October 7, 2023, then-candidate Mamdani issued a statement that opened by calling the Hamas massacre a “horrific war crime” and mourning the more than 1,100 Israelis murdered and the 250 dragged into Gaza. That was the preamble. The body of the statement accused Israel of waging a “genocidal war,” declared the American government “complicit through it all,” and closed by demanding an end to “the occupation and apartheid.”

Hamas, which started the war, was not asked to end anything.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry replied that he had chosen to act as a “mouthpiece for Hamas propaganda” and that he stands with Jews only when they are dead. It is a harsh line. It is also hard to refute on the evidence of the statement itself.

During the campaign he was asked whether Hamas should lay down its arms and relinquish control of Gaza. He said he did not really have opinions on the matter beyond insisting that all parties follow international law. A candidate for mayor of the largest Jewish city outside Israel had no opinion on whether a genocidal terror organization should disarm. He was slow to disavow “globalize the intifada,” and only after sustained public pressure did he say that chants supporting a terrorist organization have no place in the city.

As mayor, in July of this year, he was asked whether October 7 was an attempted genocide. He would not answer.

In the same breath he stated as settled fact that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. He explained that a universal humanity requires him to condemn both sides, and then reserved his categorical language for one of them, the Jewish one. He commissioned a legal review of whether New York City could arrest the prime minister of Israel, a review that a normal mayor would never have ordered and that his own lawyers told him was impossible under applicable law. The UJA-Federation of New York called his remarks rife with distortion and said they left Jewish New Yorkers feeling targeted in their own city. City Hall’s response is that the mayor has been clear and consistent that Hamas is a terrorist organization. His record shows a man who says so when cornered and changes the subject when not.

If we place side by side Tuesday’s press conference next to that record and the shape is identical. Hamas is the preamble to an indictment of Israel. Al Qaeda is the preamble to an indictment of Giuliani. The terrorists are treated as weather, unfortunate and impersonal. The democracies they attacked are treated as defendants.

That is what whitewashing looks like in practice. It does not require praising the killers. It requires only that they never be the subject of the sentence.

The families of the 2,977, and the families of the tens of thousands who have died since, deserve the records. They also deserved a mayor who could stand at that podium and say plainly what the records prove: that the cloud over Lower Manhattan was not an act of G-d and not an act of Congress. It was an act of Islamist terror, and the men and movements who celebrated it then, and celebrate its imitators now, own every death that Mamdani’s own figures have just added to the ledger.