The convention also displayed an image of El-Sayed fist-bumping with Hasan Piker
Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed’s speech at a controversial Islamic convention in Detroit this weekend was sandwiched between a video montage featuring a firebrand imam declaring that “America is going down” and a speech from another cleric who said members of Congress who voted for an antisemitism bill were “guilty of treason.”
The embarrassing spectacle on Saturday underscored the awkwardness of El-Sayed participating in a conference featuring a rogues’ gallery of Islamic extremists including 9/11 truthers and a Holocaust-denier.
The Islamic Society of North America kicked off day two of its annual confab on Saturday with a montage of clips from various convention speakers, including imam Siraj Wahhaj, an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
“I am ashamed of what America has become,” Wahhaj says in the undated clip. “Look at the newspaper every day, how America is going down.”
The montage also showed a clip of El-Sayed lamenting his experiences in the wake of the 9/11 attacks as a “kid with a funny name and an olive complexion.” And it ended with a graphic that included an infamous photo of El-Sayed fist-bumping Hasan Piker, the left-wing influencer who declared that “America deserved 9/11.”
El-Sayed delivered his scheduled remarks minutes later and gave a standard campaign stump speech that focused on cost-of-living issues, as well as his experiences as a Muslim in America.
“Muslim Americans, they want to tell us that we don’t belong. They want to tell us that this country’s not ours, that because of our names or how we pray that we are somehow less than,” said El-Sayed.
He was followed by Zaid Shakir, a prominent New Jersey cleric, and Cenk Uygur, the host of The Young Turks.
Shakir, who once asserted that “Zionist forces” were behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, railed against the U.S. government over its support for Jews and Israel, singling out a congressional vote to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of “anti-Semitism.”
“When the United States Congress passes laws on behalf of a genocidal, rapacious, nefarious foreign country to deny us the freedom of speech … that is a domestic enemy of the Constitution of the United States,” Shakir declared. “And as such, they are guilty of treason.”
El-Sayed appeared at the convention, held six days before the 25th anniversary of 9/11, despite calls to drop out over its links to 9/11 conspiracy theorists and Holocaust deniers.
“Abdul — stop platforming 9/11 and Holocaust deniers and withdraw from this conference immediately,” Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers said on Friday, citing Washington Free Beacon reports about the convention. Yasir Qadhi, a Texas-based imam who spoke on several panels at the convention, has called the Holocaust a “hoax.”
Both Uygur and Shakir have embraced conspiracy theories about the 9/11 attacks, in which 2,977 Americans were killed by al Qaeda operatives.
“I no longer believe [sic] official 9/11 story,” Uygur said in February. He also promoted the “dancing Israelis” myth, an antisemitic conspiracy theory that posits that five Israeli spies filmed and celebrated the terrorist attack. “I didn’t know we arrested Israeli spies who were here to ‘document the event,'” wrote Uygur.
And Shakir has called for an “examination” of what he described as “glaring weaknesses and inconsistencies” in the official 9/11 narrative. He has urged followers to read the works of David Ray Griffin, a leading 9/11 conspiracy theorist who has argued that the United States orchestrated the attacks. And Shakir asserted that the U.S. government used the attacks to “launch a war on Islam.” Shakir, who in a discussion on the 20th anniversary of 9/11 stated that he was “extremely anti-American,” has also called for Muslims to use “guerrilla warfare” to achieve their desired political outcomes.
In a 1992 treatise, Shakir asserted that “every major Muslim political gain” in modern history was brought about by “extrasystemic political action”—including guerrilla warfare. He cited the creation of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the “armed struggle” that led to Taliban control of Afghanistan.
A copy of Shakir’s pamphlet was discovered in the apartment of a suspect in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the New York Times reported in 2006.
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