Abdul El-Sayed Has A Deleted 9/11 Tweets Problem

With less than two weeks to go before the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed is raising eyebrows with deleted social media posts that reference 9/11.

El-Sayed’s campaign told Politico earlier in the campaign that he’d deleted all tweets posted prior to July 2023 in an effort “to prevent any old posts from being taken out of context” — but the posts that have resurfaced in the time since then have only sparked more questions.

Two of the deleted posts — originally shared in 2020 — were evaluated in a report published Monday by CBS News and showed El-Sayed comparing the American lives lost in the terrorist attacks to those lost during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In one 2020 post, CBS reported that El-Sayed argued for a national mobilization to combat COVID that mirrored the response to the 9/11 attacks — while in another from that same timeframe he argued as the COVID death toll eclipsed the number killed on 9/11, 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 third post from 2021 — shared on the 20th anniversary of the attacks — was first reported by The Washington Free Beacon, and appeared to suggest that America’s actions against terrorist organizations were just as bad as the terrorist attacks that had prompted them.

“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,” he said.

Matt Grossmann, a political scientist at Michigan State University, told CBS News that he didn’t believe a deleted tweet or two would necessarily herald the end of El-Sayed’s campaign — but the threat they posed was in the likelihood that they’d bolster the overall perception that the candidate’s views were too extreme.

“Is any specific tweet going to matter for the general election? It seems unlikely,” Grossmann explained. “But does the general impression that he might be too extreme […] will that make a difference? That has a bigger chance of doing so.”

Toward that end, El-Sayed’s continued association with socialist Twitch streamer and Mao Zedong superfan Hasan Piker — who cheerleads for terror groups like Hezbollah and claimed that “America deserved 911” — might ultimately prove to be the political baggage he’s unable to shed.