NEW YORK, NEW YORK — Addressing escalating friction with victims’ families ahead of the upcoming Ground Zero 9/11 commemoration, Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced a sweeping municipal initiative Wednesday to overhaul the National September 11 Memorial, demanding that exactly half of the reflective pools and engraved plaques be reallocated to honor the 19 hijackers.
Mamdani said the proposal was necessary to prevent the hijackers from being “historically disenfranchised” and to ensure that the memorial did not become an exclusionary space by recognizing only the nearly 3,000 people who were killed and the thousands of first responders and survivors affected by the attacks.
“We have to ask ourselves whose stories are being centered,” Mamdani said during a press conference outside City Hall. “For 25 years, we have heard extensively from the victims, their families, the firefighters, the police officers, the survivors and the people who were simply trying to go to work that morning. But the hijacker’s perspective has received very little institutional recognition.”
Mamdani dismissed concerns that dedicating half of the memorial to the perpetrators could be viewed as disrespectful to the victims, arguing that such an interpretation reflected an outdated understanding of what memorial spaces should accomplish.
“We cannot allow grief to become an excuse for exclusion,” he said. “There is room at this memorial for everyone.”
Asked whether that included the people who flew the planes into the World Trade Center, Mamdani paused briefly before nodding.
“Especially them,” he said.
