In an incredible feat of journalism, the newly MAGA-fied CBS has unearthed several tweets from Michigan Democratic senatorial nominee Abdul El-Sayed that mention 9/11 in various capacities related to public health, heavily intimating that they are meant to be clear proof that he is a terrorist who loved 9/11, thought it was great, and believes we should have more 9/11s every day.
Let us delve in to the “controversy”! Tell us about the scary Muslim man, CBS News.
As the nation prepares to mark 25 years since Sept. 11, 2001, Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Michigan, may be facing the risk of renewed scrutiny and fresh political attack.
Don’t you love it when they do this, like this very article is not the very “renewed scrutiny and fresh political attack” of which they speak? Like they’re the ones putting out these supposedly controversial tweets, but also they’re just out here, objectively reporting the possibility that other people might scrutinize and attack them.
El-Sayed is a leader of a new crop of candidates from a wing of his party that opposed American wars and capitalized on anger over anti-Arab sentiment in a state with a robust and active Muslim community. But now he is attempting to adapt — and in some cases delete — past statements that may run afoul of a broad, general election audience.
Wow, that sounds pretty darned serious! What could these statements possibly be? Did he say that 9/11 was a a great and wonderful thing that he’d like to see happen again and again? Did he, like Trump’s good pal Laura Loomer, say it was an inside job? Did he platform 9/11 conspiracy theories and theorists, as Joe Rogan has done so frequently? Did he, like Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, state his desire to hold hearings in order to determine whether or not it was actually a controlled demolition? Did he, like Republican state Sen. Wendy Johnson of Arizona, who also claimed it was a controlled demolition, share a tweet about how jet fuel can’t melt steel when in fact we know that it was the other things in the building burning that resulted in the melted steel while also alluding to a ridiculous antisemitic conspiracy about the attack?
He did not. Rather, he compared the number of people who died in the World Trade Center to the number of people who had died from COVID by April of 2020, and suggested that we should take those deaths just as seriously.
Oh, the humanity!
Meanwhile, El-Sayed’s past references to the deadly attacks have continued to surface, including two deleted social media posts verified by CBS News that have not been previously reported. In those posts, he calls for the American public to muster the same outrage for the COVID-19 death toll that they displayed after 9/11.
In one, from April 2020, El-Sayed compared the nearly 3,000 Americans killed on Sept. 11 to the mounting COVID-19 death toll and argued for a response commensurate with the nation’s post-9/11 mobilization. In another, El-Sayed wrote that because more Americans had died from COVID than in the Sept. 11 attacks, he hoped “that means we’ll spend the next ten years fighting a war for public health & against poverty ... like we launched a global #WaronTerror after 9/11. We could save lives rather than take them.”
A public health official calling to save lives and invest in public health? Sure, he compared a tragedy to a tragedy and not, say, to raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens or whatever his favorite things are. But have you noticed that he is also a Muslim man with a Muslim name? Because he is, in fact, a Muslim man with a Muslim name.
The other tweet was possibly even worse.
In another deleted post, first reported by the Washington Free Beacon, El-Sayed wrote on Sept. 11, 2021: “Today, I mourn the 3K lives, 6K injuries, & infrastructural devastation in NYC, perpetuated ignorantly in the name of my faith. Tomorrow, I'll mourn ~1M lives, millions of injuries, & infrastructural devastation in 3 countries, perpetuated ignorantly in the name of my country.”
Clearly, when he tweeted “Today, I mourn the 3K lives, 6K injuries, & infrastructural devastation in NYC, perpetuated ignorantly in the name of my faith,” he really meant that he was celebrating “the 3K lives, 6K injuries, & infrastructural devastation” caused by assholes in the name of his faith. He was tweeting in code! A secret code that can only be understood by extremely paranoid people who think all Muslims are terrorists.
I, for one, am interested in how the “renewed scrutiny and fresh political attack” about these tweets will go. Will there be a mass outcry from the “broad general election audience” over how much they loved the #WarOnTerror and would hate a war for public health and against poverty? Because of how public health is bad, poverty is good, and the #WarOnTerror went really, really well? What will the angle be? That he was downplaying the seriousness of the attack by comparing it to a pandemic that ultimately only killed a measly 1.2 million people who were all going to die at some point anyway?
I think my favorite part of the article, however, was where they found a random “political consultant” to call El-Sayed a duck.
“El-Sayed has what I call a ‘Quacks like a duck problem,’” some guy named Adrian Hemond told the outlet. “There's enough quacking going on, sort of directionally, that it has raised questions for a lot of people, and he hasn't done a very good job addressing those questions.”
What kind of questions? What kind of duck? A communist duck? A terrorism-loving duck? A Muslim duck? What sort of quacking and in what direction? This seems like a very weird thing to say if you have a concrete criticism of someone that isn’t “Well, I don’t like his religion.”
Naturally, the article also brought up El-Sayed’s association with Hasan Piker, who said, in 2019, that America “deserved” 9/11, when he meant that the US did a lot of things in the Middle East over the years that made people’s lives horrible and therefore made them a lot more susceptible to radicalization, a factually true thing that we have decided to ignore in favor of believing that they simply hated us for our freedoms. Piker has repeatedly apologized for having said that over the last seven years, but as he is also a Muslim man with a Muslim name, no apology will ever be sufficient.
It’s also just very, very important that we believe, as a nation, that the radicalization that occurs in areas that have been war torn or brutally oppressed and the violence that occurs more frequently in severely impoverished areas are either pure coincidence or instead caused by the religion or ethnic makeup or “culture” or biological, intrinsic evil of the people involved. Or else, you know, we’d have to start doing things like taking care of people and not invading other countries or assisting military coups, and that would be communism.
There has been a concerted effort to frame El-Sayed as being mysteriously and ambiguously “scary” for months now, largely because specific attacks against him tend to sound patently ridiculous, particularly when taken in context. They’ve tried the “he’s a socialist!” nonsense, but he just says he’s a capitalist and moves on (to be clear, I would personally prefer it if he were a socialist, but he’s not). JD Vance, in a recent speech, claimed that “There’s something about Abdul El-Sayed that is very, very evil.”
And still, rather than playing defense, El-Sayed got specific and pointed out some of the actual evil things Vance has done.
“Evil is ripping healthcare away from working people in exchange for tax breaks for billionaires. Evil is making people pay more for groceries and gas while pushing for trade wars and actual war. Evil is dividing people for your own gain. Evil is selling out your morals for a little bit of power,” he said in a statement.
All correct, although I think he’s being a little too generous by suggesting that Vance ever had any “morals” that could be sold out in this way.
Curiously, CBS does not have any post-MAGA-takeover articles about JD Vance’s association with Peter Thiel, a creepy billionaire who has claimed that environmental activists and critics of AI are in league with the Antichrist, or with noted crank and actual monarchist Curtis Yarvin. They also do not even have one article about Laura Loomer’s recent racist attacks on Angie Nixon and other Black Democratic women.
As an aside, as far as I can tell, no Republicans are scrambling to distance themselves from Loomer or denounce her over this (other than Marjorie Taylor Greene, though that is likely only because she and Loomer have ongoing beef to begin with), even though Loomer claims to be so influential in the Trump administration that she can get her personal enemies deported.
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Of course, it’s pretty obvious why CBS is going after El-Sayed like this. It’s not just that he’s “from a wing of his party that opposed American wars and capitalized on anger over anti-Arab sentiment in a state with a robust and active Muslim community.” He, like 80 percent of Democrats and 60 percent of US adults writ large, has been critical of Israel’s actions in Gaza, which CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, noted free speech warrior, does not think should be allowed.
In fact, it has now been reported by Oliver Darcy at Status that Weiss was heavily involved in this article, and even demanded that the headline be adjusted to include the fact that the tweets were deleted. Except El-Sayed deleted all of his pre-2023 tweets, not just the very innocuous ones referencing 9/11.
Unsurprisingly, this was leaked because more than a few CBS staffers weren’t too happy about it.
Via Common Dreams:
Weiss’ endorsement of the El-Sayed story came despite the fact that senior staffers at CBS raised concerns about it with the network’s standards department, Status added.
“They took a small nugget of news, forced it into something much larger, and messed up,” one staffer said.
Another staffer told Status that the story is “shameful” due to its “overt” racism.
One anonymous CBS News staffer similarly told Zeteo media columnist Justin Baragona on Monday that the Weiss-endorsed story was “trash” and “horribly Islamophobic.”
It was, indeed.
It’s clear that El-Sayed scares the shit out of some people, and not because he’s “scary” or because they actually think he’s a secret terrorist lover. He scares them because he is incredibly attractive, well-spoken, charming, and unapologetic about believing what he believes. He scares them because they know that right now, whether they like it or not, people want single payer Medicare for All, they want the government to spend more money on things that actually help them lead nice, pleasant lives and less on invading Iran and supplying Israel with bombs.
But, on the bright side, it seems like there are fewer and fewer of those people these days — and the intensely negative reaction to CBS’s nonsense article seems to be proof of that.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
Evil is saying you think Trump is America's Hitler.
Then going to work for him anyway.
I mean didn’t El-Sayed sort of gloat that now his building was the tallest in downtown Manhattan literally as the ruins were still smoldering? Oh wait.