Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani shook hands with Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D-NY) at the Ground Zero ceremony, five days after he told the mayor not to attend because his presence offended him.
Video from ABC7NY, posted on X on Friday morning, showed Mamdani approaching Giuliani before the two men shook hands in a crowd of guests at the commemoration.
The ceremony marked 25 years since the Sept. 11 attacks, which killed 2,977 people. Giuliani was the city's mayor on the day the World Trade Center fell.
Giuliani had called on Mamdani to skip the event during an interview on Newsmax's "Sunday Agenda" on Sept. 6, comparing New York City's elected mayor to Sept. 11 hijackers and making baseless claims that he is a supporter of a Muslim anti-American plot, the New York Times reported.
Two days later, at a City Hall news conference on Sept. 8, Mamdani accused former city leaders of lying to New Yorkers about the air quality around Ground Zero after the attacks, The New York Times reported.
"People got sick because the leaders they trusted lied and told them they were safe to breathe in toxic air," Mamdani said.
Mamdani declined to say who he believed had lied, according to the Times.
Giuliani and Christine Todd Whitman, then the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, were among the officials who told New Yorkers in the weeks after the attacks that the air was safe to breathe, the newspaper reported.
Mamdani also released more than 170,000 pages of city records on the toxic air, the Times reported, and a spokesman for Giuliani did not respond to the newspaper's request for comment.
The video of the handshake had drawn more than 2.5 million views by Friday afternoon, according to the public counter on the X post.
"Kind of shocked @RudyGiuliani shook Mamdani the Jihadi's hand this morning at the 9/11 memorial service," far-right activist Laura Loomer wrote on X.
"Zohran Mamdani shaking hands with Rudy Giuliani is such a class move. He honestly never ceases to impress me," Joe Gallina, the attorney who founded the advocacy group Call to Activism, wrote on X.
"This shows in a video that Mamdani is a real one and Giuliani is a posturing POS," wrote author Matthew Rettenmund, who shared the clip.
