New York Governor Kathy Hochul attended Friday Jummah prayer services at the Islamic Cultural Center of New York in Queens, appearing shoeless before a congregation that was, by all visible accounts, entirely male. She wore a hijab. She thanked Kuwait's permanent representative to the United Nations, Tareq Albanai, for welcoming her "to be part of the family."
The 25th anniversary of September 11 is one week away.
Nearly 3,000 Americans were murdered that day in attacks launched from within the very city Hochul governs. The site where the towers fell is a 12-mile drive from the mosque she visited. The families who buried husbands and wives and children that year are still burying the grief a quarter-century later. And the Governor of New York chose this particular week to stage a photo op in a hijab.
Patriot News Alerts reported on September 3 that the visit drew sharp backlash, and the sharpest came from people who earned the right to speak on it. Terry Strada, wife of 9/11 victim Tom Strada, didn't mince words: "I find what he had to say completely insulting to all of the people that suffered a horrible loss that day." She added that "comparing an aunt being uncomfortable on the subway to all of these families that were murdered was just very insensitive."
Strada's anger isn't performative. It's the kind that comes from watching politicians treat your husband's death as background noise while they audition for the approval of people who couldn't care less about the anniversary.
This isn't Hochul's first hijab appearance. She wore one in 2025 at the funeral of NYPD Detective Didarul Islam, a Muslim officer killed in a mass shooting. That context was different — a specific tribute to a specific fallen officer. The Queens mosque visit carries no such justification. It was a general-purpose political pilgrimage, timed with either breathtaking obliviousness or deliberate calculation.
The mosque itself comes with history. Imam Siraj Wahhaj, who has been associated with the Islamic Cultural Center of New York, was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing — the first attempt to bring down the towers, eight years before the second one succeeded.
Hochul's visit also fits neatly into the broader political landscape of New York. Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who won election in November 2025 and took the oath of office on January 1, 2026, has shifted the city's political center of gravity in ways that make a gubernatorial hijab appearance less surprising and more strategic. Hochul isn't wandering into unfamiliar territory. She's reading a room — just not the room that includes the families who lost someone on September 11, 2001.
Brett Eagleson, another 9/11 victim family member, was among those pushing back. The families have spent 25 years watching politicians show up at Ground Zero every September, say the right words, and then spend the other 51 weeks forgetting why those words mattered.
A governor can visit any house of worship she wants. Nobody disputes that. But timing isn't an accident in politics. Every scheduling decision is a signal. And when the Governor of New York — the state that lost more people on 9/11 than any other — chooses the week before the 25th anniversary to don a hijab at a Queens mosque and tell a Kuwaiti diplomat she's grateful to "be part of the family," the signal is received.
The families heard it. They just aren't the family she was talking about.