911 Families continue opposition to having Mamdani attend memorial service

Here's another article about 911 Families opposed to having a repulsive figure like Zohran Mamdani attending the memorial service this coming month. Here's some history of a woman who lost her husband in the attack:

Monica Iken and her husband Michael Patrick Iken were set to celebrate the second anniversary of their meeting on September 9, 2001.

The newlyweds – married 11 months prior – parted on that Tuesday morning with Michael heading to his work as a bond broker in the South Tower of the World Trade Center in NYC.

“He kissed me goodbye and said, ‘I love you; I’ll see you later.’”

A few hours later, Michael called Monica from his office and told her to turn on the television. She thought this was strange, as bond traders are the busiest in the mornings and he would not normally call until the afternoon.

“I did, and I saw this gaping hole and that a plane hit the building [the North Tower],” she recalled in a conversation with The Jerusalem Post. “He told me: ‘Everything is fine, everything is okay. They said to stay where we are. Don’t worry.’”

“Then he said, ‘I’ve got to go. I’ll call you back.’ He called me back a few minutes later and said, ‘Listen, you’ve got to call the family and friends; they keep calling me here, and there’s a lot going on.’”

Monica pulled up the phone book while still watching the TV and listening to her husband, who still sounded calm.

“I have the phone book in my left hand and the phone in the right hand, and I literally see this thing come out of the corner of the screen on the right side, like a giant jumbo jet.”

“I thought: ‘There’s no way.’ Nothing was registering. When you see something like that, your brain is not computing. I literally watched [the plane] hit the [South] Tower, and I was frozen in space because he worked in tower two on the 84th floor.”

Monica said she kept thinking Michael would get out, because his best friend did. But by September 12, she said, her “nightmare had begun.”

“To this day, I have no remains,” she told the Post. “I have nothing ... not even a ring, not even an ID, nothing.”

“I had to digest that I was newly married, trying to have a baby, and he went to work but was never coming home. And even though we went down to look for him and we did all those things, the reality was – I knew he was gone.”

Monica starts NGO, September's Mission to preserve site

After Michael was killed, Monica became concerned with the idea that the city may build over the site of all the fallen. This prompted her to start her NGO, September’s Mission.

It was founded with the primary objective of working with public and private partnerships to secure the acreage of the World Trade Center site and ensure “that we do not build over dead people in America.”

Of the approximately 16-acre site of the former World Trade Center complex, Monica and her fellow advocates managed to secure half of the site for the Ground Zero memorial.

“The good news is I have a place to go to honor my husband,” she continued. “His birthday is on September 8, so I go there on September 8. He will be 62 this September. We celebrate every year.”

“As long as I’m alive, I go to the memorial, and we sit by his name, and we have merlot, his favorite thing, and we celebrate life instead of death,” Monica said.

“He took his last breath there, his last step, and for me, that is a sacred and hallowed space. I thank God every day for that place, because if I didn’t have that place to go, I would never have survived the nightmare,” she continued.

September mission's second objective is working with families of those killed and advocating for them to receive whatever they need.

“I help them with mental health and educational programming. I do a lot of things behind the scenes,” Monica remarked.

She doesn’t take a salary, and uses her own funds to keep the organization running.

Because of her work with September’s Mission, Monica is very involved emotionally and practically with the families, so when the discussion came up in recent months about New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s planned attendance at the memorial, Monica’s main concern was how the families will feel about that.

“It’s not political for me. He’s our mayor. I’m a New Yorker. It’s more about the fact that this is our time, and the people who should be there are the ones representing that time with us and were a part of that time,” she said.

“I don’t know where he stands exactly, but he doesn’t seem to be on the same page,” Monika continued, adding that she felt that Mamdani was somewhat connected to the people who “murdered our loved ones.”

“If I go to a funeral and the murderer comes, I don’t think that’s acceptable. And I’m not saying he is a murderer. I’m just saying that he wasn’t involved. I think he needs to just respect us and let us have our time, and then he can do whatever he wants.”

Mamdani should not be attending the memorial service, and he also shouldn't be working as mayor. And we must hope he won't be anywhere near the memorial site come the week of the tragedy next month.