Just days before Americans memorialize the 25th anniversary of 9/11, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani released 170,000 documents regarding the air quality around Ground Zero and accused former city leadership of hiding the truth about the dangers of exposure.
“People got sick,” Mamdani said in a press conference, “because the leaders they trusted lied and told them they were safe to breathe in toxic air. And then, when they began to contend with the symptoms of the illnesses that followed, the government that had not hesitated to send them into harm’s way was nowhere to be found.”
On Sept. 18, 2001, former EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman said that she was “glad to reassure the people of New York and Washington, D.C. that their air is safe to breath and their water is safe to drink.”
In 2003, the EPA’s own inspector general said the agency didn’t have enough evidence to make that claim and that the White House influenced it.
Whitman didn’t give a formal apology for her incorrect statements until September 2016.
Today, more members of the New York Fire Department have died from 9/11-related illnesses than from the actual terror attacks, according to the New York Post.
When a reporter asked whether he felt past administrations like those of former Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg should be “restudied” given their reputation for responding to and restructuring the city, Mamdani said he would leave that judgment call to New Yorkers.
A spokesperson for Giuliani responded to Mamdani’s statements.
“Now would be a good time to remind Mayor Mamdani that cowardly terrorists acting in the name of Islam are 100 percent responsible for all of the death and destruction on September 11, 2001, and for all of the suffering and illness that have continued since that day,” Todd Goodman said on behalf of the former mayor, per NBC New York.
He added that the EPA made the call on air quality and deemed it safe, before apologizing and saying “it did the best it could with the knowledge available at the time.”
Goodman continued, “It is a shame that Mayor Mamdani is now attempting to score cheap partisan political points by seeming to blame the local officials who rushed to the scene, rather than radical Islam, for September 11.”
More than 110,000 individuals have signed a petition to bar the mayor from attending this year’s ceremony at Ground Zero.
Giovanni Galante, whose wife Grace was among the nearly 3,000 killed that day, launched the petition.
“Our objection is based on his public record — his failure to meaningfully acknowledge the horror of that day, and his employment of, support for, or association with individuals who have minimized 9/11, defended terrorists, or even suggested America ‘deserved’ the attacks,” Galante told the New York Post.
“It is not political, and it is not a platform for those connected to such views. His presence would be deeply hurtful and inappropriate — like an unwelcome guest at a deeply personal ceremony,” Galante added.
Despite the request, Mamdani — who has allied himself with the likes of streamer Hasan Piker, an anti-Israel, self-described Marxist who said America deserved the 9/11 attacks — has said publicly that he intends to go to the ceremony and pay his respects.
