Abdul El-Sayed, a candidate in the Democratic primary for Michigan’s open Senate seat, repeatedly drew an equivalence between 9/11 and the ensuing war on terror in since-deleted posts on X and a 2021 op-ed, arguing that both were “perpetrated ignorantly” and driven by “tribalistic grievance.”
“Today, I mourn the 3K lives, 6K injuries, & infrastructural devastation in NYC, perpetrated ignorantly in the name of my faith,” El-Sayed wrote on the 20th anniversary of the terror attack that claimed nearly 3,000 innocent lives. “Tomorrow, I’ll mourn ~1M lives, millions of injuries, & infrastructural devastation in 3 countries, perpetrated ignorantly in the name of my country.”
The numbers El-Sayed referenced appear to come from a study published in September 2021 by Brown University, which estimated that 929,000 people had been killed overseas in the war on terror. That number includes hundreds of thousands of terrorists.
In another post, which the candidate also deleted, El-Sayed shared a quote from a 2021 op-ed he wrote for the Arab American News, a paper published in Dearborn, Mich.
El-Sayed in the op-ed likened the war on terror to slavery, further arguing that the Muslim-American community was one of the main victims of the post-9/11 era.
The war on terror, he wrote, was an “echo of the worst of our history—the decimation of Native Americans, the Transatlantic Slave Trade, Jim Crow segregation, Japanese interment [sic].”
“Few communities experienced the post-9/11 era quite like Arab and Muslim Americans (and the many other communities brown and other enough to be rendered Arab or Muslim in the eyes of ignorant people),” El-Sayed claimed. He further contended that Muslim Americans were pressured to “change our names, fix our accents and hide our heritage.”
“The patriotic duty was to assent to the implication that we were guilty until proven innocent, to take our collective punishment with a smile for the privilege of playing our part in a war on terror increasingly defined in opposition to our very identities,” he went on.
He argued that the Department of Homeland Security, established in the aftermath of 9/11, was founded solely to curtail the liberties of Muslim Americans.
“The logic of the post-9/11 era sacrificed our basic collective liberties, most of all against Muslim Americans,” El-Sayed wrote. “A whole new edifice of control, the Department of Homeland Security, was created in order to marshal the full might of a sprawling security state that confused ethnicity and faith for mal-intent.”
The supposed war on Muslims in the United States, El-Sayed argued, “deliberately left the greatest threat to our security in the shadows.” For El-Sayed, that threat was “‘homegrown’ and ‘radicalized’ White men.”
The news of El-Sayed’s claims about the United States’ response to 9/11 comes after the candidate marked the second anniversary of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack with a fundraising email that made no mention of Hamas’s atrocities and instead blamed Israel for the war in Gaza.
“Two years ago this month, [Israeli prime minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s military launched a ground invasion of Gaza,” the email began. The Democrat did not reference Hamas’s massacre of 1,200 Israelis and kidnapping of hundreds more. Instead, he condemned Israel’s response as “unconscionable” and “wrong,” accusing the United States of funding a “senseless war.”
In May, El-Sayed appeared at an Islamist convention with speakers who have called for the destruction of Israel, praised Hamas leaders, and expressed “euphoria” over the October 7 attack. In September, he spoke at another anti-Israel convention alongside Hamas sympathizers.
The news also follows revelations of other deleted X posts in which El-Sayed expressed his far-left views. Also in September 2021, El-Sayed called border agents “white supremacists” and blamed the United States for illegal immigration from Central America and the Caribbean.
CNN reported last month that El-Sayed had deleted dozens of social media posts in which he denounced law enforcement, called for police funding cuts, and described police departments as “standing armies.”
The Washington Free Beacon reported soon after that El-Sayed was on the board of an anti-police group when it organized Detroit protests that turned deadly in May 2020. The event, which drew an estimated 1,000 protesters, later devolved into a riot, with activists defacing police cars and attacking officers with bottles, rocks, and other makeshift weapons. A police captain was hospitalized, at least 60 rioters were arrested, and a man was shot and killed after a gunman fired into the crowd, according to reports.
El-Sayed also served on the board of a far-left climate group that lobbied to “defund” and “abolish the police” and described cops as “fascist pigs,” the Free Beacon reported earlier this month.
El-Sayed told the Detroit News that he never supported defunding the police, claiming what he really meant was that “we need to be making a lot more investments in things like quality education and housing.”
During his failed 2018 gubernatorial campaign, though, El-Sayed proposed commuting all sentences for juveniles given life in prison in Michigan, a policy that would grant early release for a school shooter, a child rapist and murderer, and other heinous killers, the Free Beacon reported earlier this week.
El-Sayed did not respond to a Free Beacon request for comment.
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