Investigations

Jake Lang led anti-Islam rally at World Trade Center on 9/11

The pardoned Jan. 6 defendant organized the rally against Mayor Zohran Mamdani at the World Trade Center site.

At the World Trade Center site on the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, Jake Lang led a large anti-Islam march that drew counter-protesters and street conflicts. Channel 5 with Andrew Callaghan filmed the demonstration.

Lang organized the event and framed it as honoring the nearly 3,000 people killed in 2001 while opposing what marchers called a Muslim takeover of New York under Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani. Demonstrators chanted to deport the mayor and claimed he wanted to impose Sharia law citywide.

Lang, whose legal name is Edward Jacob Lang, grew up in New York City in a Jewish family and became a far-right street provocateur after the 2020 pandemic. He entered the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and a federal indictment charged him with assaulting officers with a bat and shield, among 11 counts. He spent nearly four years in pretrial detention until President Donald Trump pardoned him and more than 1,500 other Jan. 6 defendants on Jan. 20, 2025.

After his release, Lang held rallies against Israel and later shifted toward anti-Islam demonstrations after allies on the right objected to his Jewish background. In Dearborn, Michigan, he burned Qurans and displayed severed pig heads in public. Similar demonstrations followed in Los Angeles and Minneapolis.

Lang's first major rally after prison was outside AIPAC headquarters in Washington with neo-Nazi companions, before he pivoted almost entirely to anti-Islam events. At Ground Zero, marchers mixed calls to ban Islam with anti-Israel chants from some counter-demonstrators. One costumed counter-protester said Nazis might be the only force that could defeat Zionism, and a Lang supporter nearby called that idea brave.

Opponents surrounded Lang's group at the site. Counter-protesters labeled him a Nazi and said many in his crowd were underemployed New Yorkers steered toward ethnic hatred. Police moved the march through tight crowds as both sides traded slurs.

The same week, Mamdani's administration released more than 170,000 pages of city records on post-attack air quality and settled lawsuits that 9/11 Health Watch brought to force disclosure of documents, including the Harding memo on early public assurances that downtown air was safe.

Marchers insisted Islam was a political ideology that had taken over New York. One wore a Crusader-style helmet and told the crew it signified what Christians wore when they killed Muslims during the Crusades.

Source video: Anti-Islam 9/11 March