Disgusting Deleted 9/11 Posts Haunt Abdul El-Sayed

Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed deleted old social media posts that compared 9/11 deaths to COVID-19 deaths and America’s post-attack wars, and CBS News found them anyway.

Quick Take

CBS News says it verified two deleted posts from Abdul El-Sayed comparing 9/11 outrage to the COVID-19 death toll.
A Sept. 11, 2021 post mourned 3,000 American 9/11 deaths alongside roughly 1 million deaths in three countries tied to U.S. wars.
El-Sayed’s campaign says all posts older than July 2023 were wiped to stop them from being “taken out of context.”
El-Sayed defends the posts, calling 9/11 “a disaster” and “a terrible attack on our country.”
The story has split media coverage, with some calling it fair scrutiny and others calling it an Islamophobic hit piece.

What CBS News Actually Found

CBS News reported it verified two deleted social media posts from El-Sayed that had never been reported before. In them, he called on Americans to feel the same outrage over COVID-19 deaths that they felt after 9/11. That claim didn’t come from an anonymous tip. CBS says its own team confirmed the posts existed before they vanished from his account, giving the story a documented paper trail rather than a rumor.

One post, dated Sept. 11, 2021, went further. 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”. That post was first surfaced by the Washington Free Beacon, giving critics a clear origin point for the material rather than a secondhand screenshot.

The Campaign’s Explanation For The Deletions

El-Sayed’s campaign told Politico that every post older than July 2023 was removed “to prevent any old posts from being taken out of context”. CBS says it was never told the exact dates of deletion, which leaves a gap. Nobody disputes the posts existed. What’s unclear is whether they came down before this controversy started or only after reporters began asking questions.

A campaign spokesperson added that El-Sayed “has always unequivocally condemned terrorism and the September 11 attacks”. El-Sayed personally defended his intent in an interview, saying, “My point is just to say that what happened on 9/11 is a disaster.” He called it “a terrible attack on our country,” and said his broader goal was protecting American troops from wars “we have no business fighting in”.

Why The Media Reaction Split So Sharply

Fox News, the New York Post, and Townhall all read the posts as comparisons that risk minimizing 9/11 by weighing it against war casualties and pandemic deaths. Townhall went further, claiming El-Sayed deleted eleven separate posts from 2020 through 2022 that downplayed the attacks, though the full text of all eleven isn’t laid out with dates and screenshots. That’s an important distinction. A documented pair of posts is different from an unverified claim of eleven.

The Intercept pushed back hard, describing one of the disputed posts as “a rather anodyne comment” about the war on terror that simply argued, “We could save lives rather than take them.” Progressive lawmakers and commentators went even further. Mehdi Hasan called the CBS framing “super offensive and disgusting and Islamophobic,” while Rep. Rashida Tlaib said the coverage felt “intentional and coordinated”. Those are strong words, but they respond to how the story was framed, not to whether the quoted text is accurate. The posts themselves aren’t in dispute. Their meaning is.

Abdul El-Sayed deleted 11 tweets from 2020-2022 that downplayed 9/11 and equated America’s response with terror attacks.

— Brad Berkowitz (@BradBerkowitz) September 3, 2026

What This Says About Politicians And Old Posts

This isn’t a new playbook. Old tweets resurfacing during a campaign has become almost routine, and the response pattern rarely changes: posts surface, backlash builds, and the candidate insists their views were always more nuanced than a screenshot suggests. Social platforms reward outrage, which means the sharpest, most provocative line in any old post is the one that gets amplified, stripped of whatever context surrounded it originally.

Voters don’t need a media referee to judge this one. El-Sayed wrote what he wrote, on the record, on the actual anniversary of an attack that killed nearly 3,000 Americans. Comparing that day to war casualties or a pandemic death toll is a political argument he’s entitled to make. But scrubbing it from public view years later, then calling the scrutiny unfair, asks voters to trust an explanation instead of the receipts. Michigan voters can read the quoted words for themselves and decide what they mean.