Abdul El-Sayed wrote it himself.
Nobody hacked him. Nobody misquoted him. Nobody caught him on a hot mic.
He wrote it.
And now apparently the offensive part is that CBS reported it.
El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Michigan, has some old social media posts he’d probably prefer people didn’t spend much time reading as we approach the 25th anniversary of September 11.
So naturally, people started reading them.
One from 2020 compared the death toll from 9/11 to the death toll from COVID.
But the one that stopped me was written on September 11, 2021.
El-Sayed wrote that he mourned the roughly 3,000 Americans murdered that day — lives taken, as he put it, “in the name of my faith.”
Then he kept going.
He said he’d spend the following day mourning roughly a million lives lost across three countries “in the name of my country.”
There it is.
Three thousand Americans murdered by terrorists.
Then America’s wars abroad.
One mourning followed by another.
I’m sorry, but those things don’t belong on the same scale.
You can oppose the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Plenty of Americans do. You can believe Washington made catastrophic decisions after September 11. You can argue that innocent people died unnecessarily because of them.
Make that argument.
But that’s not what happened on September 11, 2001.
Nineteen terrorists boarded four commercial airplanes with the specific intention of murdering innocent people. They flew two into the World Trade Center. They flew another into the Pentagon. Passengers fought back on Flight 93 before it crashed in Pennsylvania.
Nearly 3,000 people went to work, boarded airplanes, sat at desks, answered phones, served breakfast, responded to emergencies — and never went home.
That wasn’t war.
That was mass murder.
El-Sayed put the two in the same rhetorical breath.
CBS noticed.
And that’s when everybody suddenly became very interested in talking about CBS.
Hasan Piker called the headline insane and blamed the new editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss.
Mehdi Hasan wondered whether it was “Islamophobic” to reference September 11 in a story about a Muslim candidate for the United States Senate.
Tim Miller called it “anti-Muslim woke right garbage.”
A sitting member of Congress called the headline racist.
Quite a reaction.
Except there’s something missing.
Not one of them — not one — explained why El-Sayed’s actual words were okay.
That’s the part I keep coming back to.
Forget Bari Weiss.
Forget CBS.
Forget whether somebody liked the headline.
What did El-Sayed mean?
That’s the question.
And it’s apparently the one nobody wants to answer.
When El-Sayed was confronted about the post, he called September 11 “a disaster” and “a terrible attack.”
Well, yes.
Then he moved immediately to talking about not sending American servicemen and women to fight wars we have no business fighting.
Again, that’s an argument he’s perfectly entitled to make.
It just isn’t an answer.
Does Abdul El-Sayed still believe the murder of nearly 3,000 Americans on September 11 belongs in the same moral comparison with casualties from America’s subsequent wars?
Yes or no?
He didn’t say.
Instead, he changed the subject.
His defenders did too.
And we’ve seen this trick before.
Somebody says something indefensible. Somebody else finds it. And suddenly we’re told the scandal isn’t what was said.
The scandal is that somebody found it.
The reporter becomes the problem.
The headline becomes the problem.
The network becomes the problem.
The person who actually wrote the words somehow wanders out the back door while everybody is screaming at each other in the front yard.
No.
El-Sayed is running for the United States Senate.
Michigan voters have every right to know how he thinks about September 11. They have every right to read what he wrote about it. And they have every right to decide for themselves whether his comparison says something important about the judgment of the man asking for their vote.
That’s not Islamophobia.
It’s an election.
And being Muslim doesn’t make El-Sayed’s old statements off-limits any more than being Christian would make mine off-limits.
If I wrote something stupid five years ago, quote me.
If I wrote something offensive, ask me about it.
If I still believe it, I’ll defend it.
And if I don’t, I should have the guts to say I was wrong.
What I shouldn’t get to do is accuse the person who found it of bigotry and pretend the original words somehow disappeared.
El-Sayed didn’t retract his.
He changed the subject.
His defenders didn’t explain them.
They changed the subject too.
Which is apparently where we’re all supposed to go now.
Look at Bari Weiss.
Look at CBS.
Look at the headline.
Look at the people complaining about the tweet.
Look anywhere except at the words sitting right there on the screen.
Sorry.
He wrote them.
That’s the story.