El-Sayed's deleted 9/11 tweets resurface over deaths 'perpetuated' in his country's name

DETROIT, MICHIGAN: Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed's deleted tweets on 9/11 have resurfaced as the nation prepares to mark 25 years since the devastating t*******t attack occurred, igniting renewed scrutiny and fresh political attacks.

As El-Sayed enters the final stage of the Michigan Senate race, he has been forced to distance himself from a popular Twitch streamer, Hasan Piker, who earlier said that America deserved 9/11 and later retracted the remark.

Hasan Piker appeared at El-Sayed's campaign events.

Abdul El-Sayed draws parallel between COVID deaths and 9/11

On the other hand, El-Sayed's past references to the deadly attacks have continued to surface. In now-deleted old tweets (now X posts), he called for the American public to muster the same outrage for the COVID-19 death toll that they displayed after 9/11.

CBS News claims to have verified two such posts. In one such post, El-Sayed compared the nearly 3,000 Americans killed in the September 11 attacks with the high COVID-19 death toll and called for a response similar to the one the US launched after 9/11.

In another post, El-Sayed said that more Americans had died from COVID than in the September 11 attacks and hoped the country would spend the next 10 years fighting for public health and against poverty, similar to the global “#WaronT****r” launched after 9/11.

"Abdul has always unequivocally condemned t*******m and the September 11 attacks," a spokesperson for El-Sayed's campaign said in a statement to the outlet. "Mike Rogers' attempts to misrepresent Abdul's beliefs are bad-faith lies meant to mislead Michiganders."

Abdul El-Sayed mourns death caused by America's 'war on t****r'

In another such post about the catastrophic attack on September 11, 2001, in New York, El-Sayed said one day he would mourn the death and destruction carried out in the name of his religion; the other day he would mourn the destruction carried out in the name of his country.

"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,” Sayed wrote on September 11, 2021.

Notably, the tweet was first reported by the Washington Free Beacon.

For El-Sayed, the emergence of old social media posts could present a unique challenge, said Adrian Hemond, a bipartisan political consultant based in Lansing.

"El-Sayed has what I call a 'Quacks like a duck problem,'" Hemond said. "There's enough quacking going on, sort of directionally, that it has raised questions for a lot of people, and he hasn't done a very good job addressing those questions."