CBS Headline on Abdul El-Sayed’s Deleted 9/11 Posts Sparks Left-Wing Backlash

Adriana Stone 0 2 min read

CBS Headline on Abdul El-Sayed’s Deleted 9/11 Posts Sparks Left-Wing Backlash

CBS News set off a major online fight after highlighting deleted 9/11 posts from Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Michigan.

The controversy began Monday, when CBS posted a warning that quickly went viral. The post reportedly drew more than 12 million views.

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.

Here is the CBS News post:

The accompanying article examined posts El-Sayed later deleted from his account. One of them compared the COVID-19 death toll with the nearly 3,000 Americans killed on Sept. 11. CBS reported that El-Sayed argued the country should respond to the pandemic with a mobilization similar to its response after the terror attacks.

Another deleted post connected the COVID-19 death toll to the wars and public-health efforts that followed 9/11. El-Sayed wrote that 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 separate post, dated Sept. 11, 2021, drew renewed attention after being reported by the Washington Free Beacon. El-Sayed wrote:

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.

CBS’s framing triggered an immediate backlash from El-Sayed’s supporters and other prominent voices on the left. Rather than focus on the deleted posts themselves, critics accused CBS of promoting “racism” and “Islamophobia.”

David Sirota claimed the wording suggested CBS was trying to imply that El-Sayed had some connection to 9/11. Hasan Piker called the headline “insane.” Mehdi Hasan asked CBS and Bari Weiss whether referencing 9/11 while discussing a potential Muslim senator was offensive and Islamophobic.

Other critics used even harsher language. Tim Miller called the post “anti-muslim woke right garbage,” while Rep. Yassamin Ansari labeled the headline “blatantly racist.”

Those reactions largely skipped the central issue: CBS was reporting on public posts that El-Sayed himself had written and later removed. The article did not claim he participated in the 9/11 attacks. It raised the obvious political question of whether those old statements could return as he campaigns for the Senate.

The online criticism continued across X:

El-Sayed’s defenders argued the posts showed concern about public health, poverty, and the consequences of war. But voters are also free to judge whether comparing 9/11 with other national tragedies was appropriate—and whether deleting those posts makes the scrutiny more or less significant.

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