GOP evoked 9/11 in Long Island political mailers; some call it a risky strategy

In the season of political mailers, Republicans have ramped up the rhetoric by releasing a series of ads painting Democrats as sympathetic to the terrorists who carried out the 9/11 attacks, a strategy that experts say stokes fear and anti-Muslim sentiment to drive voters to the polls.

As Muslim Long Islanders condemn the ads, experts say politicizing Sept. 11, 2001, is a risky strategy that targets a subset of voters and, sometimes, signals a desperate campaign.

“9/11 continues to evoke strong emotional reactions for voters,” said Costas Panagopoulos, a political science professor at Northeastern University in Boston. “It’s not surprising that campaigns are trying to leverage imagery and recollections of 9/11 for their own political purposes, especially in a place like New York.”

Jonh Geer, a political science professor at Vanderbilt University, said publishing propaganda for political gain was nothing new. “Usually you do this type of thing when you’re in trouble,” Geer told Newsday. “You’re willing to take a gamble if you’re behind.”

Two weeks after the 25th anniversary of the terror attacks, Dean Tarulli, a Democratic candidate for the state Assembly’s 15th District, covering parts of Hempstead, North Hempstead and Oyster Bay, opened his mailbox to find a campaign ad attacking him. The ad, paid for by the New York State Republican Committee, showed an image of his face next to the quote, “America deserved 9/11.”

The quote did not belong to Tarulli, nor to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a fellow Democrat, whose image also appeared on themailer. It was a quote from Los Angeles-based, far-left online streamer Hasan Piker, who has become a lightning rod for Republicans nationally to attack their political targets. Tarulli said he has never met Mamdani or Piker, and he later sent a cease-and-desist letter to Republicans asking them to retract the ads. 

State Republicans are standing by the mailer, claiming it was factual and "backed up by citations," giving them no reason to abide by the cease-and-desist demand. 

The mailer cites sources like "FOX NEWS, 6/26/26" in its footnotes, but those news outlets did not report Tarulli or Mamdani saying, "America deserved 9/11." (State Republicans have also sent a cease-and-desist to Democrats over mailers in a Nassau congressional race.)

When Isma Chaudhry, a board member for the Islamic Center of Long Island, saw the mailer attacking Tarulli, she said campaigns had hit “rock bottom.”

“It’s beyond in poor taste,” said Chaudhry, a member of Nassau’s Minority Affairs Council and the district attorney’s Faith Leaders Advisory Council. “It’s turning a national tragedy into a political weapon to win an election. Where is their integrity?”

Republicans aren't the only ones who have invoked 9/11 in campaign ads. In 2018, Dan Helmer, a Democratic House candidate in Virginia, aired a TV ad comparing President Donald Trump to Osama bin Laden. “After 9/11, the greatest threat to our democracy lived in a cave; today, he lives in the White House,” he said in the video.

‘Less American’

In the lead-up to this year's 9/11 anniversary, Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman, who is running for governor, used Mamdani as a political prop, according to experts. 

Mamdani has become the go-to bogeyman among Republicans for his democratic socialist beliefs, but experts say he faces heightened scrutiny because of his race and religion.

As conservative politicians demanded that Mamdani, New York City's first Muslim mayor, not participate in the remembrance ceremony at Ground Zero, Blakeman asked attendees to turn their backs to Mamdani at the event.

Blakeman, whose nephew was killed in the terror attacks, has called Mamdani un-American. He said Mamdani “shares the philosophy of the people that murdered my nephew and all those other people.” 

“There’s enough people who will believe those lies that it’s worth their while,” said Ibrahim Warde, a professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University who has written extensively about anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States following 9/11.

Mamdani has called such comments by Blakeman racist and bigoted.

In late August, Blakeman slammed Gov. Kathy Hochul for visiting a mosque in the lead-up to the 9/11 anniversary. He published a series of social media posts showing Hochul wearing a headscarf, calling her "Hijab Hochul" and describing the religious covering as her "latest costume.”

Hochul visited the Manhattan mosque and a synagogue on the same day, and two churches the following day, as part of a tour of houses of worship, her campaign told Newsday.

Blakeman did not respond to a request for comment this week on his rhetoric but previously told Newsday, "Nobody has worked harder to build bridges in the Muslim community than me."

Meanwhile, outrage quickly spread among Nassau’s Muslim community.

“This kind of campaigning feeds into the suspicion that Muslim Americans are somehow less American,” said Kevin Shakil, of Westbury, president of America’s Muslim Network, a national media platform. “I want my daughters to grow up knowing they belong here, without having their loyalty questioned because of their faith.”

In a North Hempstead Town Board meeting on Sep. 8, Shakil asked local officials to sign a letter asking Blakeman to apologize and take down the posts.

Republican Councilman Dennis Walsh said that he refused to sign the letter, but that he had nothing against the Muslim community and that he was “the only elected official in Nassau County that has a continental African as a [sic] executive assistant who is also Islamic.”

‘Willing to take a gamble’

The campaign strategy of linking 9/11 to Muslims and Democrats isn’t unique to Long Island.

On Sept. 10 at the Republican midterm convention in Dallas, Vice President JD Vance said Democrats were “the party that can find sympathy for the terrorists who perpetrated 9/11.”

Among the hot-button races highlighted at the convention was a tight U.S. Senate contest in Michigan, where Republican Mike Rogers falsely suggested that his opponent, Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, who is Muslim, said, "America deserved 9/11." Rogers was using the same quote from Piker, the online streamer.

In an AI-generated ad, Republicans showed a fake El-Sayed laughing at cards that read “Celebrate 9/11” and “Death to America.”

Piker has sparked a national political firestorm for his comments. Republicans displayed a seminude photo of him on the Jumbotron at the Dallas convention. Several weeks later, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu quoted his remarks about 9/11 at the United Nations General Assembly.

Piker, who later called his comments about 9/11 inappropriate, hosted Mamdani on his show last year. Mamdani has said Piker’s comments were “reprehensible.”

Party politics aside, families of 9/11 victims have been saying for years that nobody should be using the tragedy as a political football.

Two years after the attacks, Monica Gabrielle, whose husband died in the attacks, said, “For anyone to use 9/11 for political gain is despicable."