This week, on the eve of the 25th anniversary, Zohran Mamdani signed an executive order meant to honor the victims of September 11. Then he handed the ceremonial pen to Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch and, on camera, directed her to pass it along to his chief legal counsel, Ramzi Kassem.

Kassem’s client list includes Ahmed al-Darbi, convicted of war crimes over al-Qaeda plots against commercial shipping — and the brother-in-law of Khalid al-Mihdhar, one of the hijackers who flew American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon.

There were a thousand people in New York City government who could have taken that pen. The mayor picked that one, at that signing, with the cameras rolling. Nobody stumbles into a gesture that precise.

Yes, the defense bar will object that everyone gets a lawyer, and they’re right — that principle is worth more than any single case. But nobody was on trial in that room. A ceremonial pen isn’t a due-process guarantee. It’s a symbol, handed to a chosen person, in a chosen moment, and choosing symbols is roughly ninety percent of what a mayor does.

The pattern didn’t start there. Look at how Mamdani has marked the day for years. His 2023 anniversary post spent seven words on the New Yorkers murdered by al-Qaeda, then rolled straight into hundreds of thousands killed in the wars that followed and millions more displaced. The 2024 version ran the same structure. The dead of that morning appear as an opening formality before the subject changes to America’s sins.