Giuliani’s Cynical Ownership Claim on September 11

Rudolph Giuliani says that Mayor Zohran Mamdani should not attend New York City’s ceremonies commemorating the 25th anniversary of September 11. Mamdani’s presence, Giuliani says, “offends” him. He equates the city’s Muslim mayor with the terrorists who attacked it and accuses Mamdani, without evidence, of harboring the same hostility toward America that motivated the hijackers.

A Test Designed to Be Failed

The charge is ugly enough on its face. It becomes still uglier when one considers the alternative. Suppose Mamdani announced that he would not attend the ceremonies. Does anyone doubt what Giuliani would say then? He would call Mamdani unpatriotic. He would say that the mayor had insulted the dead, abandoned the survivors and dishonored the firefighters and police officers who ran toward danger. He would present Mamdani’s absence as proof that a Muslim mayor could not embrace the city or share its grief.

Mamdani is therefore guilty whether he attends or stays away. His conduct is irrelevant; his faith supplies the verdict. That is not criticism. It is a rigged prosecution in which the accusation precedes the evidence and every possible fact is made to confirm it.

The actual facts are these: Mamdani was a nine-year-old New York City schoolchild on September 11, 2001. He has spoken of the attack as a formative experience, of the lives and futures stolen that day, and of the continuing sorrow borne by the victims’ families. As mayor, he has designated September 11 an annual Citywide Day of Remembrance and Service, ordered measures to modernize the city’s emergency preparedness, and scheduled visits to numerous memorial observances, principally at firehouses that lost members in the attack or to illnesses that followed it. His decision to attend the principal commemoration is not a provocation. It is the fulfillment of an obvious civic duty.

Who Owns September 11?

Giuliani behaves as though September 11 belongs to him—as though his widely admired performance during the crisis granted him a perpetual franchise over the memory of the dead and the right to decide which New Yorkers may mourn them. It did not. His conduct in those terrible days deserves its place in the historical record. It does not confer moral infallibility, still less hereditary ownership of public grief. The anniversary belongs to the victims, their families, the survivors, the first responders and the city—not to the former mayor who was once celebrated for leading it.

The Giuliani admired after September 11 bears little resemblance to the man now demanding that New York exclude its sitting mayor because he is Muslim. The distance between Giuliani then and Giuliani now is more than ideological. It is moral.

A Ruinous Familiarity with Falsehood

Giuliani’s attack on Mamdani rests on insinuation presented as fact, a method with which he has acquired ruinous familiarity. After the 2020 election, he falsely accused Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Wandrea “Shaye” Moss of participating in election fraud. These were not bloodless debating points aimed at powerful public officials. They were lies directed at two identifiable citizens doing ordinary public work. The accusations unleashed threats, racist abuse and terror upon them. A unanimous federal jury awarded the women $148.169 million in compensatory and punitive damages for defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

Even that description understates Giuliani’s contempt for accountability. Liability was entered against him after he persistently failed to comply with basic discovery and evidence-preservation obligations. The court described his conduct as an “utter failure” to comply with those obligations and related orders. In other words, the former federal prosecutor and longtime lawyer did not merely lose a trial on disputed facts; he obstructed the process by which facts are tested until the court imposed the consequence the rules prescribe.

Nor did judgment produce contrition. In January 2025, a federal judge in New York held Giuliani in civil contempt for failing to provide information needed to identify assets available to satisfy the judgment. Four days later, a federal judge in Washington held him in contempt again—this time for continuing to defame Freeman and Moss in violation of a court order. A man who demands reverence for civic institutions treated judicial orders as inconveniences and the women he had injured as targets he remained entitled to attack.

The legal profession eventually expelled him. New York’s Appellate Division found that Giuliani had repeatedly made demonstrably false statements about the 2020 election, had given false testimony during the disciplinary process and had shown no genuine acceptance of responsibility. The court concluded that he had “flagrantly misused” his position and “repeatedly and intentionally made false statements,” conduct it found destructive of the administration of justice. It disbarred him; the District of Columbia followed.

This history matters because Giuliani now asks the public to accept another grave accusation on his say-so. He supplies no evidence that Mamdani harbors concealed hostility toward America, supports a Muslim conspiracy to seize parts of the United States, or possesses anything in common with the September 11 murderers beyond a religion shared by nearly two billion people. Giuliani’s record does not require us to presume every statement he makes is false. It does, however, make credulity an act of willful blindness. When a man disbarred in both New York and the District of Columbia for election falsehoods, and twice held in contempt in a single week, offers an evidence-free accusation of treachery, skepticism is not partisan hostility. It is elementary prudence.

Exclusion Masquerading as Remembrance

There is something especially grotesque about using September 11 to portray Muslim New Yorkers as presumptively disloyal. The hijackers did not merely murder thousands of Americans; they also helped make millions of innocent Muslims objects of suspicion. Mamdani has described that aftermath: a day of shared national trauma became, for many Muslim Americans, the moment they were marked as outsiders. Giuliani now reenacts that injury by treating the mayor’s religion as evidence of affinity with mass murderers.

He also degrades the commemoration he claims to protect. A memorial ceremony should recall individual lives, shared loss, sacrifice and courage. Giuliani converts it into a stage for partisan exclusion and himself into its gatekeeper. His objection says less about Mamdani’s fitness to attend than about Giuliani’s inability to distinguish remembrance from ownership, patriotism from ideological conformity, and accusation from proof.

Mamdani should attend. He should honor the dead, comfort the living, and represent the whole city, including Muslim New Yorkers whose grief and citizenship require no certification from Rudolph Giuliani. Had Mamdani stayed away, Giuliani would have used the absence against him. Because Mamdani will be present, Giuliani uses his presence against him. Once that cheap trick is exposed, nothing remains of the criticism but religious bigotry delivered by a man whose own record has made him a particularly unfit lecturer on truth, on duty or on respect for the law.

Giuliani was once called “America’s Mayor.” History may remember that title. But no moment of past service entitles a man to spend the rest of his life drawing upon it as an inexhaustible line of moral credit. Giuliani has overdrawn the account.