Rudy Giuliani says he’s ‘offended’ by NY Mayor Zohran Mamdani attending 9/11 memorials in city
Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani unleashed a series of anti-Muslim statements on a right-wing media network in recent days as he called for Mayor Zohran Mamdani to skip this week’s 25th anniversary events to mark the September 11 terror attacks.
“It offends me that he’s coming,” he told Newsmax Sunday. Giuliani then baselessly claimed that Mamdani, who is Muslim, supports a plot to “take us over” and compared him to al-Qaeda terrorists who killed nearly 3,000 people in the city that day.
“They have every desire to take us over,” he said. “This is not, ‘they want to be just another religion.’ They want to dominate us. … Mamdani is a clear — a clear — supporter of that. All of the Muslims he supports are murderers.”
September 11 hijackers “weren’t trying to hide it like Mamdani is trying to hide it,” he said.
Giuliani, once seen as “America’s mayor” in the wake of the attacks, has spent the last several years in courtrooms across the country battling criminal indictments, bankruptcy and a defamation lawsuit in the volatile aftermath of the 2020 presidential election as he became consumed by baseless conspiracy theories.
In a separate interview on Newsmax a day earlier, the 82-year-old former mayor said that if Mamdani “had a little bit of a heart, even with his views, he wouldn’t go, because he would know he’s disturbing the people who are the most important people at that celebration.”
“He stands in direct support of the movement that killed their children,” Giuliani said. “You’d have to be a fool to resist that.”
His remarks on the network are the latest calls from right-wing figures pushing Mamdani to skip this week’s memorial events, pointing to petitions that news outlets have falsely claimed collected thousands of signatures from the families of 9/11 victims.
Conservative critics have argued against the mayor’s appointment of Ramzi Kassem as the city’s chief legal counsel after he formerly represented a man whose brother-in-law was among those who hijacked the plane that struck the Pentagon.
A group of roughly 250 family members of 9/11 victims, however, have defended Mamdani’s participation in memorial events.
“Mayor Mamdani has consistently affirmed his intention to bear witness and honor the families, survivors, and first responders, whose lives were forever changed by the attacks,” September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows said in a statement this summer.
“In doing so, he will be carrying out the same responsibility that New York City mayors before him have undertaken: to stand with all New Yorkers in remembrance and honor those we lost,” the group said.
“We strongly condemn the anti-American accusations and Islamophobic sentiment underlying the effort seeking to prevent him from being at Ground Zero.”
Mamdani, who was nine years old and attending school on the Upper West Side at the time of the attacks 25 years ago, has established an annual “Citywide Day of Remembrance and Service” to memorialize the attack and recognize the victims.
