The families who lost loved ones on September 11 still carry the weight of that morning. Twenty-five years later, they are being told to shut up.
A Change.org petition started by widows and widowers of the 2,977 murdered by al-Qaeda has surged past 62,000 signatures. Its demand is simple and sacred. Keep New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani away from the 25th-anniversary memorial at Ground Zero. The organizers do not want a man who pals around with people who excuse or minimize the slaughter standing on the hallowed ground where their spouses, parents, and children died.
Now a small nonprofit that claims to speak for 9/11 families has stepped in to scold them. September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows issued a statement accusing the petition of “anti-American accusations and Islamophobic sentiment.” The group all but insisted the real problem is that Mamdani is the city’s first Muslim mayor.
Giovanni Galante, who lost his 29-year-old wife Grace when the North Tower fell, is not having it. “This has nothing to do with Islam or Mamdani being Muslim,” he told the New York Post. “It has to do with who he associates with and who he represents. We’re against people who are against America — who want us to suffer or be murdered.”
Those associations are not subtle. Mamdani campaigned with Brooklyn Imam Siraj Wahhaj, an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing who once served as a character witness for the Blind Sheikh.
He has maintained ties to left-wing streamer Hasan Piker, who openly declared that America “deserved” the 9/11 attacks. He has shown repeated reluctance to clearly condemn the chant “globalize the intifada.” His own father wrote that suicide bombers should be understood as a feature of modern political violence rather than marked as barbarism.
These are not invented grievances. They are public record. And thousands of 9/11 family members have signed the petition because of them.
Enter George Soros. Records show the Open Society Foundations have poured $525,000 into September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows since 2016. The group is an affiliate of the Tides Center, a longtime clearinghouse for radical left causes. The same Soros network previously steered roughly $37 million to the Working Families Party and other outfits that helped Mamdani defeat Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary.
Councilwoman Joann Ariola, whose Queens district buried many of its own after the attacks, put it plainly. “The voices of 9/11 families should not be drowned out by billionaire-backed activists and those engulfed by their propaganda campaign. The mayor needs to stay home and sit this one out.”
Charles G. Wolf, who lost his wife Katherine that day, was even more direct. “Anything that is backed by George Soros is illegitimate. This is not the people speaking. This is George Soros and his billions of dollars trying to cause public strife in America. Don’t let George Soros make a monkey out of us.”
The pattern is familiar. When ordinary Americans who paid the highest price speak with moral clarity, the professional left reaches for the checkbook and the smear. Accuse the grieving of bigotry. Fund a compliant counter-group. Demand that the sacred yield to the political.
Scripture does not treat the memory of the murdered as optional. “He that justifieth the wicked, and he that condemneth the just, even they both are abomination to the Lord”
The families asking Mamdani to stay away are not inventing darkness. They are refusing to pretend it is light.
Ground Zero is not a campaign backdrop. It is a graveyard. The men and women who still feel the empty chairs at their tables have every right to insist that those who traffic in excuses for terror remain outside the fence. No amount of Soros money or carefully worded statements about “Islamophobia” changes that simple truth.
The petition keeps growing. The families keep speaking. And the billionaire’s preferred narrative keeps running into the one thing it cannot buy: the unfiltered grief of people who refuse to forget.
