David Kaufman: Zohran Mamdani giggles during 9/11 memorial

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There is, of course, Vance’s increasingly vocal disdain for Israel. Then there’s the VP’s headlining address at the first-ever midterm Republican National Convention in Dallas over the weekend. There, yet again, Vance took stabs at Egyptian-American Senate candidate Adbul el-Sayed of Michigan, who’s repeatedly campaigned with Piker and has made the Israel-Gaza conflict an anchor of his campaign.

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Along with hitting back at el-Sayed’s insinuations earlier this month that Vance’s (caucasian) family would have rejected the Vice President’s Indian-American wife for her race, Vance described el-Sayed as embodying a Democratic party that “can find sympathy for the terrorists who perpetrated 9/11.” Vance’s focus on el-Sayed has been so strident that Reuters declared that “Republicans are making Muslims a campaign issue in the 2026 U.S. midterms” earlier this week. Such sentiments could easily have marred the 9/11 memorial events, as Vance and Mamdani officially interact for the first time. Luckily, Vance showed up and remained silent.

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Meanwhile, New York’s Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul, who endorsed Mamdani for mayor, is also coming under increasing scrutiny as she battles for her political survival against her insurgent Republican rival Bruce Blakeman. Late last month, Hochul was photographed attending Friday prayers at a Manhattan Islamic center clad in a traditional hijab. The move sparked heavy criticism from conservatives including Blakeman and Trump, some accusing Hochul of “bending the knee to Islam.”

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Hochul is now just a few points ahead of Blakeman, according to recent polls, reflecting the widespread frustration with the governor over her appeasement to Mamdani’s radical economic agenda. Blakeman, who is Jewish, is also making the most of Jewish frustration with New York City’s still rising antisemitism epidemic, which many have attributed to Mamdani.

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As he has done for years, Blakeman appeared at the World Trade Center events, placing him alongside Hochul and Mamdani as thousands commemorated the most deadly attack by Islamists in U.S. history. The optics were as uncomfortable as they were consequential for all three, who hold the fate of New York’s security and economy in their adversarial hands.

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Then there’s former New York mayor Rudolf Giuliani, who arrived to the memorial in a wheel chair. He said little, but everyone there already knew what he was thinking. Giuliani, who was infamously crowned “America’s Mayor” in the wake of the terror attacks, joined those victims’ families in demanding that Mamdani stay home. So has former New York Governor George Pataki, who like Giuliani was in office a quarter-century ago.

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Mamdani, as ever, knows how to play this melee to his advantage, and has released some 170,000 documents indicating politicians from all parties purposely misled the public about the severity of the air quality following the Twin Towers’ collapse. More people have died from airborne illnesses since the terror attacks than from the attacks themselves, said Mamdani earlier this week.

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It’s a masterstroke in political calculation and obfuscation, positioning Mamdani as the arbiter of New York’s moral consciences rather than its moral decay. Ultimately, yet again, the mayor — who was just a kid on September 11 — had the last laugh at Ground Zero today, literally. Even before the crowds began to thin, social media was outraged and abuzz with images of the mayor chuckling alongside Queens Congresswoman (and fellow Democratic Socialist) Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez while the names of the terror victims were read out.

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Tacky and tone-deaf, Mamdani once again hogged all of the headlines for all of the wrong reasons. Is it any wonder so many wanted him to stay home?

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National Post

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