Michigan Democratic Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed condemned America’s response to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on his now-defunct podcast shortly before the 20th anniversary of the national tragedy.
On the Sept. 7, 2021, episode of “America Dissected,” El-Sayed intoned that “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.”
El-Sayed contended that after the attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center and damaged the Pentagon, the US “wasted trillions of dollars to wage a war that we would ultimately lose” and condemned what he called an “era of death, destruction and destitution.”
“It is disqualifying for a US Senate Candidate to believe that Americans should ‘center’ their grief from 9/11,” Republican candidate Mike Rogers, who chaired the House Intelligence Committee between 2011 and 2015, told The Post.
“Abdul El-Sayed’s attitude towards the worst tragedy in American history is disgusting and makes him completely unfit to serve in public office.”
The Rogers campaign has responded to the resurfaced comments by rolling out testimonials of Michiganders who helped with cleanup and recovery operations 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.
