A conservative group is marking the 25th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks with a blistering new television ad pointing out the ties between Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed and Hasan Piker, who has said America “deserved” the deadliest terrorist attack in U.S. history.
The one-minute spot from Great Lakes Conservative Fund opens with harrowing scenes of ground zero and is airing in the Detroit market on the 25th anniversary of 9/11.
“Twenty-five years ago, America was attacked — not for something we did, but for who we are. The attackers tried to divide us with hatred. It had the opposite effect. We united with courage and with resolve,” the ad’s narrator states.
“But the hatred behind 9/11 did not disappear,” the ad continues, featuring clips from leftist streamer Hasan Piker before turning its focus to El-Sayed.
“Abdul El-Sayed gives comfort to that hatred. He campaigns with it. He accepts money from it, and he justifies it. Twenty-five years later, we are being tested once again. This election, remember what is at stake,” the narrator says.
The Bernie Sanders-backed leftist running against Republican Mike Rogers has faced scrutiny over deleted social media posts and unearthed audio raising eyebrows over his outlook on the deadliest terrorist attack in the nation’s history.
“9/11 scarred our country in profound ways, but what we did after 9/11 scarred millions of other people,” El-Sayed said in a September 2021 podcast. “When we talk about 9/11, we often fail to center them.”
El-Sayed’s campaign told Politico earlier this summer that he deleted all posts published before July 2023 to “prevent any old posts from being taken out of context.” But several of those deleted posts have since resurfaced, raising fresh questions about his past rhetoric, The Daily Wire previously reported.
Two of the posts, originally published in 2020 and first reported by CBS News, compared the American lives lost in the September 11 terrorist attacks with the growing COVID-19 death toll.
In one post, El-Sayed called for a national mobilization against COVID-19 modeled on the response to 9/11. In another, as the pandemic death toll surpassed the number of Americans killed on 9/11, he wrote that he hoped it would lead to “the next ten years” of fighting a “war for public health & against poverty” similar to the “global #WaronTerror” launched after the attacks.
“We could save lives rather than take them,” he added.
A third post from 2021 — shared on the 20th anniversary of the attacks — was first reported by The Washington Free Beacon and drew a comparison between the victims of 9/11 and those killed in the wars that followed.
“Today, I mourn the 3K lives, 6K injuries, & infrastructural devastation in NYC, perpetrated ignorantly in the name of my faith. Tomorrow, I’ll mourn ~1M lives, millions of injuries, & infrastructural devastation in 3 countries, perpetrated ignorantly in the name of my country,” El-Sayed wrote.
Beyond his old tweets, El-Sayed was in lockstep with Hasan Piker on the campaign trail leading up to the bitter primary fight between the party’s establishment guard and its insurgent socialist wing. Now, as he pivots to the general election, El-Sayed is attempting to thread the needle — keeping Piker off the campaign trail while stopping short of disavowing his views or their close association.
In August, NBC’s Kristen Welker pressed El-Sayed to disavow Piker’s 9/11 comments. He shrugged them off.
“Of course it was a dumb statement, and of course, I think Hasan himself would say that was a dumb statement. He disavowed it. So yes, America didn’t deserve 9/11,” El-Sayed said, but then immediately pivoted to qualify his remarks, suggesting that continued focus on Piker’s remarks amounted to “cancel culture.”
If elected, El-Sayed would become America’s first Muslim senator. His parents are both Egyptian immigrants, and his father was a part-time imam, The Daily Wire previously reported. His father-in-law is a founding committee member of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), which has close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, according to the federal government.
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