I remember exactly where I was when I learned the first plane hit the Twin Towers.

I was riding in a Durango headed south on Broad Street toward my office in Philadelphia. My mind envisioned a horrible, tragic accident.

I remember exactly where I was when I learned the second plane hit the Twin Towers. I had reached my office and was sitting at my keyboard, the same one I am using to type this column.

That was when I realized it wasn’t an accident at all. The few moments between those events represent the last, bittersweet stretch of time in my life when I believed that we are victims of random cruelty.

Learning of the second crash, and what precipitated it, forced me to confront the fact that there is something even worse than randomness.

Sept. 11, 2001 at exactly 9:03 a.m. and 1 second, I realized there was evil in the world.

It’s not that I wasn’t aware of the vicious nature of Islamic fundamentalism. I handled asylum cases where the Taliban made life hell for my clients.

I knew what it was like to escape the Iranian mullahs because you were considered a religious apostate. It wasn’t news to me that women who didn’t wear veils to erase their identities were slated for death. But the full measure of Islamic terror was on display on 9/11, in the form of Saudis, people with whom our own government had allied in some diabolical alliance.

It was the story of the scorpion and the frog, and we were the frogs.

Some of the people reading this column weren’t born when 9/11 happened. Some were so young they have the same vague memories I have of the assassination of JFK.

I was sitting on my mother’s lap as she sobbed uncontrollably, but I only know that because my mother told me in later years she held on to her baby girl so tightly that I squirmed and cried in discomfort.

That’s the way many in Gen Z and the millennials view the terror attacks. And even they have the decency to mourn people they never met, who were murdered on a bright and sunny September Tuesday simply because they had the misfortune of being in the city that symbolized America for those who hated us.

They were normal people — men and women; boys, girls and babies; elderly folk; and mostly young adults — with their lives stretching before them in shining promise.

All of them, gone. And the generations that weren’t here have the decency to grieve.

But not all of them. Some in my own generation hate this country and its people, its traditions, its status in the world and its significance across the arc of history, to such an extent that they are capable of saying “America deserved 9/11.”

Anyone who is capable of saying those words, like Hasan Piker, and anyone who is capable of embracing his support, like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Philadelphia’s Chris Rabb, disgraced Senate candidate Graham Platner and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani really don’t understand what happened to us that day.

And they don’t deserve to be anywhere near the 25th anniversary memorial service.

Mamdani is of particular interest, since he is the mayor of the city that bled that sparkling late summer day in 2001. He has already displayed his hostility to Jewish New Yorkers with his words of condemnation for Israel.

But the fact he has never distanced himself from Hasan Piker, and the fact his wife’s social media feed was filled with anti-American rhetoric before she scrubbed it clean is a clear sign that he has no place at that service.

There is a petition being circulated by the widower of a woman who was murdered on 9/11, and it has gotten a great deal of traction among the 9/11 families.

Not everyone believes the mayor should stay away.

There are those who lost relatives who are willing to forgive Mamdani for what I can only call in an excess of generosity “tone deafness.”

But if there is even one person whose heart was shattered by the cruelty of the 9/11 monsters, it would be a blessing and an act of respect for the mayor to stay away and not make this about himself and his desire to be at the center of everything.

This is not about him. This is about them.

Of course, saying this will get me targeted as an Islamophobe simply because Mamdani is Muslim. If I criticize Israel, am I an antisemite?

If I criticize the failure of my own Catholic church in protecting her children, am I anti-Catholic?

If I read books about Hitler, am I anti-German? If I condemn the mafia, am I anti-Italian?

No. Zohran Mamdani does not have a conception of what 9/11 means for us. He has shown that he does not understand the depth of anger, loss, shock, regret and resolve it created in us.

And if he truly loves the city he leads, he will step back, and let it mourn without him.

Copyright 2026 Christine Flowers