Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani shook hands with Mayor Zohran Mamdani at the 25th anniversary 9/11 ceremony at Ground Zero on Friday morning, days after publicly calling on Mamdani to skip the memorial entirely.

The cordial greeting came less than a week after Giuliani, 82, went on Newsmax and urged Mamdani not to attend, claiming the mayor "doesn't agree that September 11 was an Islamic terrorist attack on the United States of America." Giuliani said the notion of Mamdani attending the ceremony "offends me." Whatever vehemence drove those remarks appeared to dissolve when the two men met in person at the site where nearly 3,000 Americans were murdered a quarter-century ago.

The handshake capped a week of political friction over who belongs at Ground Zero, and who gets to define the meaning of September 11 for New York City going forward.

Giuliani's Newsmax broadside set the stage

On Sunday, Giuliani appeared on Newsmax and delivered a pointed challenge to the sitting mayor. He framed the memorial as something that belongs to the families of the dead and to the nation's collective memory, not to a politician he views as hostile to the basic facts of the attack.

"The reality is this ceremony is for the families and for America to remember historically."

Giuliani, who led New York City on the day of the attacks and earned the informal title "America's Mayor," went further. He said Mamdani's attendance offended him and flatly asserted, "No question", that Mamdani does not accept the attacks as an act of Islamic terrorism. The former mayor did not cite specific Mamdani statements to support that claim.

Mamdani has drawn sustained criticism from Jewish leaders and law enforcement supporters throughout his time in office. AP News reported that over 1,000 Jewish clergy members nationwide signed a statement denouncing Mamdani's candidacy during his mayoral run, driven by his description of Israel's military campaign in Gaza as "genocide" and his pledge to direct the NYPD to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu if he visited New York. Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove said publicly, "I believe Zohran Mamdani poses a danger to the security of the New York Jewish community."

That backdrop gave Giuliani's demand real weight. This is not a mayor whose relationship with the city's traditional institutions is on solid footing. Mamdani has been booed off stage at an NYPD event on Staten Island and has faced repeated questions about whether his political worldview is compatible with the obligations of his office.

Mamdani deflected, and shifted focus to air quality failures

When reporters asked Mamdani on Tuesday about Giuliani's demand that he stay home, the mayor sidestepped.

"I think that the focus of memorial services should be on the New Yorkers who were killed that day, their families, the survivors, the first responders, I don't think it should be on politicians."

It was a polished non-answer. Mamdani did not address Giuliani's specific accusation, that he rejects the characterization of September 11 as an Islamic terrorist attack. He simply redirected.

Earlier in the week, Mamdani used the anniversary to take aim at government failures in the aftermath of the attacks, specifically the air quality crisis that sickened thousands of first responders and downtown residents.

"People got sick because the leaders they trusted lied and told them they were safe to breathe in toxic air."

He continued: "And then, when they began to contend with the symptoms of the illnesses that followed, the government that had not hesitated to send them into harm's way was nowhere to be found." Mamdani made those remarks without naming any of his predecessors directly, a careful omission, given that Giuliani himself ran the city during the period in question and has faced criticism over the post-attack air quality response.

The implicit target was hard to miss. Mamdani's administration also released 170,000 previously withheld city documents related to air quality risks following the attacks, a move his office framed as part of the week's 9/11 tributes. The document release, the New York Post reported, drew attention to long-standing questions about what city officials knew and when they knew it about the toxic dust that blanketed Lower Manhattan.

170,000 documents add a political edge to the anniversary

The scale of the document release, 170,000 pages on post-9/11 air quality, is significant on its own terms. For years, families and first responders have pressed for transparency about what government agencies knew about the health risks at Ground Zero. Mamdani positioned himself as the mayor who finally opened the files.

But the timing raises fair questions. Releasing those documents in the same week that Giuliani publicly challenged Mamdani's fitness to attend the memorial turned a transparency measure into a political counterpunch. Mamdani's air quality remarks, accusing unnamed "leaders" of lying to New Yorkers about safety, landed squarely on the man who ran the city on September 11, 2001, even if Mamdani never said his name.

Mamdani's administration has faced its own transparency problems. A City Council hearing was set to examine a secret influencer operation run out of the mayor's office, raising questions about whether this administration practices the openness it preaches.

At Ground Zero, the tension gave way to a handshake

For all the buildup, Friday morning at Ground Zero was anticlimactic. Giuliani arrived. Mamdani arrived. They shook hands. The greeting was described as genial.

No words from the exchange were reported. No visible confrontation. Whatever Giuliani felt about Mamdani's presence, and he had been emphatic about it days earlier, he chose civility at the site where he once stood in the ash and led a wounded city.

Former Mayor Bill de Blasio was also present and spoke with Mamdani at length, doing "most of the talking," according to observers at the ceremony. The substance of that conversation was not reported.

Mamdani has faced mounting questions about his rhetoric on Israel and its consequences for the city's Jewish residents. His record on law enforcement has drawn sharp criticism. And his willingness to use the 9/11 anniversary to score points against predecessors, however carefully worded, suggests a mayor more interested in political positioning than in the solemn duty the day demands.

Giuliani's reversal from fiery Newsmax denunciation to a cordial handshake may strike some as inconsistent. But it also reflected something simple: at Ground Zero, on the 25th anniversary of the worst attack on American soil, even deep disagreements can yield to the gravity of the moment. The ceremony is bigger than any politician, a point Mamdani himself made, even if his week of political maneuvering suggested otherwise.

Mamdani has also found himself in awkward positions on the world stage, and his handling of the 9/11 anniversary fits a pattern: say the right words about unity while using the occasion to advance a political agenda. The question for New Yorkers is whether a mayor who won't plainly affirm the nature of the September 11 attacks, and who uses the anniversary to relitigate air quality disputes, is honoring the dead or leveraging their memory.

Ground Zero deserves a mayor who shows up to mourn, not to maneuver. The families reading those 2,977 names deserve at least that much.