New York marks the 25th anniversary of the devastating September 11, 2001 attacks on Friday, with a ceremony marked by US President Donald Trump’s absence and right-wing outrage at the attendance of the city’s first Muslim mayor.
Trump will pay his respects at the Pentagon, not New York, where hijacked planes destroyed the World Trade Center and killed most of the 2,977 total victims on that world-altering day.
Vice President JD Vance and Trump’s four living predecessors — Republican George W. Bush, who was in office during the attacks, and Democrats Joe Biden, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton — are all expected at the “Ground Zero” site in lower Manhattan.
No one will give speeches at the ceremony, while bereaved family members will read out the names of all of those killed and a bell will be rung to mark major moments during the attack.
“Memorials like this and discussions about those events are an important part of keeping it alive and understanding how we prevent tragedies like this from ever happening again,” said Robert Kafka, a Chicagoan in his 60s visiting the 9/11 Memorial.
Alongside the former presidents will be Democratic Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the Big Apple’s first Muslim mayor, despite a campaign urging him to stay away, spearheaded by the right-wing New York Post and former mayor Rudy Giuliani.
A petition, which has gathered more than 100,000 signatures, accuses Mamdani of associating with unspecified individuals who are “dismissive of American institutions or insufficiently critical of extremist ideologies”.
“It’s concerning to me that the mayor is being treated differently simply because he is Muslim,” city council member Shahana Hanif told CNN.
Mamdani won plaudits, however, for recently revealing thousands of documents showing what city officials knew about toxicity levels of the air in Lower Manhattan following the attacks.
After the initial dust cloud that followed the collapse of the World Trade Center, months of pollution and lingering dust ensued, causing cancers from which thousands of New Yorkers still suffer today.
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