Mamdani’s Terror Lawyer Ramzi Kassem Lies About His 9/11 Response

“9/11 ought to be recounted primarily through the stories of Muslims”

Zohran Mamdani’s decision to pass the pen used to sign a 9/11 commemorative order to Ramzi Kassem, the lawyer for the 20th 9/11 hijacker, whom he had appointed as the city’s chief counsel blew up, outraging 9/11 families and members of the NYPD.

This was not an accident as demonstrated by the decision to feature Kassem in a Gothamist puff piece about how Muslims were the real victims of 9/11 and Americans should feel guilty for resisting Islamic colonial terrorism.

And Ramzi Kassem, who volunteered as a legal translator at a nearby prison, remembers being briefly detained by a guard who suspected he might be a terrorism suspect.

Kassem, 48, spent years fighting civil rights abuses during the federal government’s war on terror and the NYPD’s extensive surveillance of Muslim communities. He now serves as Mamdani’s chief counsel.

“I could not have known then that much of my legal career would be spent standing with clients and communities who bore the brunt of government actions in the days and years that followed: immigrant New Yorkers and Muslims here and abroad subjected to registration, detention, incarceration, surveillance, torture, war or worse,” Kassem, whom City Hall declined to make available for an interview, said in a statement. “Many people who saw 9/11 for what it was — a horrific act of mass murder — were nonetheless treated as enemies.”

Here’s how Kassem actually saw it.

“This is not a battle of good versus evil,” Ramzi Kassem wrote in an op-ed that appeared on September 17, 2001. “The perpetrators were probably not driven to their actions by some intrinsic evil or inherent hatred of the good United States.”

He went on to argue that the Al Qaeda attack a week earlier was the result of the “resentment these terrorists felt towards the United States” as a result of “our country’s policies.”

Two decades later, Kassem, a prominent terror lawyer, claimed in a Washington Post op-ed that, “since 9/11, the government has consistently used the law to enable, operationalize and justify the violence it has deployed against Muslims.”

And that, “the legacy of 9/11 ought to be recounted primarily through the stories of Muslims the world over who have largely paid the price of American power and prosperity.”

Ramzi Kassem had boasted of having “held the record for the longest delayed security clearance in the Guantánamo setting”, but even that does not seem to have dissuaded the Biden administration from bringing him on board.

While some leave behind the extremist views of their college years, Ramzi Kassem instead built a career around them, becoming a noted terrorist lawyer whose Gitmo inmate clients included Ahmed al-Darbi, an Al Qaeda terrorist and the brother-in-law of one of the hijackers who flew a plane into the Pentagon, and who was himself a key figure in the bombing of an oil tanker.

In his columns, as in his activism, Ramzi Kassem repeatedly justified terrorism as a reaction to its victims. “Terrorism is but one of many reactions to oppression and dispossession and not their cause.”

While at Columbia University, Kassem co-founded Turath, an association of Muslim students, and then Qanun at Columbia Law. A fellow student described these hateful groups as having brought “under the guidance of Mr. Kassem… speakers to this campus that support violence against American and Israeli civilians… defended the genocidal program of Hamas.”

Does this sound like a man who “saw 9/11 for what it was — a horrific act of mass murder ” But rather than treating his as an enemy, we put him in power over us.