"It's disrespectful, it's offensive." Mayor Zohran Mamdani attended the 9/11 remembrance at Ground Zero despite a petition signed by more than 110,000 people urging him to stay away. "He showed up anyway. It does bother us," one mourner said as families gathered to remember the nearly 3,000 lives lost 25 years ago. Another mourner was even more blunt: "He's a snake and he's also a communist. We don't like communists here in the United States." The backlash centers in part on Mamdani's appointment of Ramzi Kassem as his chief counsel. Kassem previously represented a Guantánamo detainee linked to an al Qaeda terrorist plot. ▻