Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed criticized the United States’ response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks during an episode of his now-defunct podcast released shortly before the tragedy’s 20th anniversary.
Speaking on the Sept. 7, 2021, edition of “America Dissected,” El-Sayed said, “9/11 scarred our country in profound ways, but what we did after 9/11 scarred millions of other people.”
“When we talk about 9/11, we often fail to center them,” he added.
El-Sayed argued that, following the attacks that brought down the World Trade Center and struck the Pentagon, the US “wasted trillions of dollars to wage a war that we would ultimately lose,” while denouncing what he described as an “era of death, destruction and destitution.”
Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers, who led the House Intelligence Committee from 2011 to 2015, sharply criticized the remarks in a statement to The Post, saying, “It is disqualifying for a US Senate Candidate to believe that Americans should ‘center’ their grief from 9/11.”
“Abdul El-Sayed’s attitude towards the worst tragedy in American history is disgusting and makes him completely unfit to serve in public office,” Rogers said.
In response to the resurfaced podcast comments, the Rogers campaign has released testimonials from Michigan residents who took part in cleanup and recovery efforts at Ground Zero.
Four days after the podcast dropped, El-Sayed posted a since-deleted tweet that was similarly tone-deaf.
“Today, I mourn the 3K lives, 6K injuries, & infrastructural devastation in NYC, perpetrated ignorantly in the name of my faith,” El-Sayed wrote on Sept. 11, 2021.
“Tomorrow, I’ll mourn ~1M lives, millions of injuries, & infrastructural devastation in 3 countries, perpetrated ignorantly in the name of my country.”
During the Michigan primary, El-Sayed stumped with far-left, Mao-loving Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, who once said that America “deserved” 9/11, before attempting to walk back the shocking remark.
Piker has since given a framed copy of the New York Times front page of Sept. 12, 2001, pride of place in his podcast studio.
“Abdul has always unequivocally condemned terrorism and the September 11 attacks,” El-Sayed campaign spokesperson Cole Wozniak told The Post Tuesday. “Mike Rogers’ attempts to misrepresent Abdul’s beliefs are bad-faith lies meant to mislead Michiganders.”
El-Sayed, who would become the first Muslim elected to the Senate if he wins, explained on the podcast that he turned down his mother’s offer to pick him up from school the day of the attacks because he decided to stay “in solidarity.”
“I didn’t know it at the time, but I was watching men driven by hate attack my country in the name of my faith, claiming an act of violence in the name of a faith they didn’t understand, and by many accounts, didn’t even practice,” he added.
However, El-Sayed also insisted that in the “post 9/11 era, the conversation in the United States tends to be centered in the United States.”
“I think the more appropriate way to center this conversation is in telling the broader global story about the conduct of the United States and what followed.”
Michigan’s Senate race is one of the most competitive in the country, with El-Sayed holding a 2.3 percentage point edge over Rogers in the latest RealClearPolitics polling aggregate.
