A man by the name of Giovanni Galante is currently working to put together a campaign to prevent New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani from having any part in the upcoming 25th anniversary commemoration of the horrific September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks because his wife, Grace, died in one of the towers. Mamdani is himself a practicing Muslim and has been connected to Islamic teachers who shared support for the attacks that left over 3,000 people dead.
In a piece penned for Fox News, Galante wrote, “Twenty-five years ago, on September 11, 2001, my wife Grace was at her desk on the 105th floor of the North Tower. She was 29 years old. She will always be 29 years old. Twenty-five years is long enough to learn that grief doesn’t end. It learns your calendar. Somewhere in early August it starts: the tightening, the bracing, the counting down to the morning I return to the place where Grace was taken from us.”
He then discussed how it’s around this time of year that all those who lost loved ones during the attacks begin to remember and experience the pain of their loss all over again. “It’s there that I, along with every other family at Ground Zero, remember our own Grace. We remember how she was the kind of person the rest of us build our lives around without ever realizing it,” Galante said.
“We remember how her last summer, her sister told us another baby was coming, and Grace hoped out loud for a girl. It was a girl, they named her Grace. That little girl is 24 now, and everything she knows about her aunt is a story someone told her,” he explained. Galante then turns to the memorial ceremony that happens annually, referring to it as the “one mercy in it all.”
“The ceremony itself is the one mercy in it all. The bell at 8:46. The silence. The names, all 2,983 of them, read out loud by loved ones, for hours, until every single person is remembered. No speeches, no politicians at the microphone, just the names,” he wrote. He elegantly stated that the person who designed things that way understand something important.
“Whoever built it that way understood something: for one morning a year, the most famous piece of ground in America belongs to ordinary grieving people, and to no one else,” Galante said. He then discusses how difficult it is to protect that time as more cameras and more commentary pops up each and every year, looking for a way to capitalize off the pain and harness it for their own gain.
“For weeks now, the coverage of this anniversary has been an argument about the mayor of New York City. Whether he’ll attend, what his presence means, what he said, what he meant, who’s offended, who’s defending him. Every one of those stories is a story that is not about the 2,983 people who were murdered, and every day of it, asks grieving families to spend the season we need for remembering on a political argument instead,” Galante wrote in the piece.
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“The anniversary of September 11 asks one thing of everyone who stands on that ground: an unambiguous rejection of the violence and the ideology that caused it, without hesitation and without ambiguity. The families should not have to wonder where their mayor stands,” he pointed out, going on to add, “When the cameras find him, and they will find him, the day stops belonging to the families and starts belonging to the fight.”
He then announced the creation of a Change.org petition asking that this year’s ceremony remain focused on the victims and their surviving family members. As of this writing, a total of 83,000 people have signed the petition. “Not because they hate anyone, because they want one morning free of political controversy,” Galante wrote.
Galante concluded the piece with a simple ask of Mayor Mamdani. “So this is my ask of the mayor, and it’s a simple one: on the morning of September 11, let the families have the plaza. Removing a distraction isn’t a punishment, it’s a kindness,” he said. “Grief doesn’t have a party. It doesn’t care who you voted for. Twenty-five years. One morning. Let us have it.”