The Pattern
On the 25th anniversary of the attacks, The Babylon Bee published a piece called “Nation Forgot.” The byline is “BabylonBee.com.” No writer is named, so there is nobody to ask about any sentence in it.
The illustration above the headline is a two-panel split. On the left, a photograph of the North Tower already burning, its antenna mast against the sky, with the fireball of the second impact erupting behind it. On the right, a smiling portrait of Zohran Mamdani in an office chair. A thin orange rule divides them. The credit reads “Robert on Flickr / Wikimedia Commons.”
Most of the text is a familiar complaint played as a bit. In the Bee’s telling, New Yorkers have forgotten the attacks: they cannot recall what happened, something about airplanes, tall buildings, and they would rather talk about free bus fare. Agree with it or not, none of that needs a source.
Then the piece introduces the mayor of New York as “the city’s Muslim, socialist, terror-justifying mayor,” and gives him dialogue:
“Isn’t it great?” Mamdani said. “Twenty-five years ago, nobody could have imagined that I’d be elected mayor of this city. Now, I can declare my auntie the real victim of that day. She’s what everyone should remember.”
And then, in the publication’s own narrative voice rather than a character’s:
At publishing time, Mamdani had promised to bring charges against any New Yorker who shed any tears on 9/11.
Mamdani is a living man with a desk and a phone. He was sworn in on January 1 as the city’s first Muslim mayor, and he was in office when that piece went up. He did not say those words, and he has made no such promise.
On September 11, 2001, he was nine years old and in elementary school in Manhattan. His family had moved to New York when he was seven.
Where the line came from
His auntie as “the real victim” is not the Bee’s invention. It is Vice President JD Vance’s line, posted on X on October 25, 2025, the day after a speech Mamdani gave in the Bronx:
According to Zohran the real victim of 9/11 was his auntie who got some (allegedly) bad looks.
Last October that sentence was an accusation. Vance made it under his own name, about a man who could answer, and Mamdani did, in an MSNBC interview that same weekend. What he said about the post was this:
Cheap jokes about Islamophobia, so as to not have to recognize what people are living through.
On the anniversary the Bee hands the accusation back to him, in quotation marks, as a boast. An accusation has to be argued. A confession only has to be printed.
The route that was already open
The speech behind the joke had a real accuracy problem. It was reported, and it was corrected.
On October 24, 2025, speaking outside the Islamic Cultural Center in the Bronx and wiping away a tear, Mamdani said: “I want to speak to the memory of my aunt, who stopped taking the subway after Sept. 11 because she did not feel safe in her hijab.”
The story did not hold up. His father’s sister does not wear hijab, and she was living in Tanzania at the time. Three days later Mamdani told reporters he had meant “Zehra fuhi, my father’s cousin, who sadly passed away a few years ago.” Fuhi is a word for a paternal aunt in Urdu and Hindi.
Some relatives of the dead objected to the comparison itself. Terry Strada, whose husband Tom died in the North Tower, told the Daily Mail, in remarks quoted by the Washington Examiner, that Mamdani was “equating a Muslim woman wearing her hijab on the subway to nearly 3,000 people being murdered,” and that “there is no comparison.”
So the route was open. People walked it in public, and Mamdani had to answer. Some of that criticism was fair and some was not, and all of it could be weighed, because it was on the record.
Neither Bee piece mentions the correction or Terry Strada.
What the label is actually for
The Bee has heard the misinformation charge before. Its chief executive, Seth Dillon, answered it in a talk at Hillsdale College in September 2024, as the Hillsdale Collegian reported:
“The New York Times said we were ‘trafficking misinformation under the guise of satire,’” Dillon said. “But they are trafficking misinformation under the guise of journalism.”
The first clause goes unanswered. The reply is that someone else does the same thing, which is whataboutism.
If you check the quote, you have failed to get the joke. If you do not check it, the quote stands. No result counts against the piece, which is the definition of an unfalsifiable claim.
The law is not the interesting part. This is protected expression, and Hustler v. Falwell settled that in 1988. The Times has already printed a correction for calling the Bee misinformation. There is no verdict to issue here.
What the label carries
The criticism that holds up is narrower, and we made most of it in August, in The Mamdani smear machine runs on association: “Muslim,” “socialist,” and “terrorist” keep being set side by side until they look interchangeable. The Bee does it in one string of adjectives, “the city’s Muslim, socialist, terror-justifying mayor.” Two of those words are facts. The third comes with nothing to support it. The same piece also states, in its own voice and outside any character’s mouth, that Americans “elected leaders who champion the spread of Islam in the U.S.”
There is no joke in either line. Both ride inside a piece that has jokes in it, and the label covers all of it.
The day before “Nation Forgot,” the Bee ran “Mamdani: Women Attending 9/11 Memorial Will Be Required To Wear Hijab,” under a licensed press photograph of his face. That piece has him saying this:
“This should be a time of healing and unity. That is why all females in attendance, including family members of 9/11 victims, must wear a hijab,” said Mamdani. “No Muslim man, on this day, should be forced to attack an American woman because she wore normal clothing. As we mark this grave moment, let us come together under the Sharia Law of Islamist dictatorships. Then, at last, we will have learned the true lessons of 9/11.”
A real, named, living Muslim man is made to say that Muslim men are forced to attack women over clothing, that the families of the murdered should dress for their killers’ religion, and that the true lesson of 9/11 is Sharia law. None of it resembles anything he has said. It rests on a premise about Muslim men in general, and it is printed under his photograph.
Mohammad Salman Hamdani was 23, an NYPD cadet, a trained paramedic, and a Muslim. When he heard about the attacks that morning, he went to the towers to help, and he died there. His mother has said that he was afterward treated as a potential attacker, his picture circulated with instructions to detain him for questioning. On the memorial, according to The World, his name is not with the first responders but on a list off to the side, among “individuals with a loose connection to the attacks.”
Six weeks after the attacks, while he was still missing, Congress wrote his name into the USA PATRIOT Act. It is there among the Arab and Muslim Americans who “acted heroically during the attacks on the United States.”
The Babylon Bee was not contacted for comment. Its chief executive’s public answer to the misinformation charge is quoted above, and both Bee articles are linked below as archived copies, so they can be read in full rather than through our excerpts. Zohran Mamdani’s office was not contacted either. Everything he actually said is quoted here from published reporting, and nothing in this piece depends on his version of events.
