CBS News Spins El-Sayed’s 9/11 Tweets Into a Manufactured Anti-Muslim Scandal

CBS News Spins El-Sayed’s 9/11 Tweets Into Anti-Muslim Controversy

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CBS News Spins El-Sayed’s 9/11 Tweets Into a Manufactured Anti-Muslim Scandal

Centrist Democrats opened the door for anti-Muslim attacks on their party’s nominee in Michigan — finding common cause with right-wing bigots.

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Eoin Higgins

September 1 2026, 5:14 p.m. ET

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!US Democratic Senate candidate from Michigan Abdul El-Sayed speaks with reporters during a Student Meet and Greet at the Michigan Theatre in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on August 26, 2026. (Photo by JEFF KOWALSKY / AFP via Getty Images)

*Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed speaks with reporters at the Michigan Theatre in Ann Arbor, Mich., on Aug. 26, 2026.

Photo: Jeff Kowalsky/AFP via Getty Images*

Eoin Higgins is the author of “Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voice on the Left.”

It always felt

inevitable that Bari Weiss’s tenure at CBS News would see the network devolve into rank Islamophobia — but even for most of us, who took a dim view of her takeover of the news behemoth, tying Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed to the 9/11 attacks was an unexpected new low. To make matters worse, many centrist Democrats and their allies cleared the way for just this kind of attack.

On Monday, CBS reporter Zak Hudak published an article headlined with the critique that El-Sayed’s “deleted tweets on Sept. 11 attacks invite scrutiny of past remarks.” Weiss, whose time in charge of CBS has been rife with controversy, was reportedly deeply involved with the story’s promotion and framing, going so far as to praise it in a newsroom meeting and champion it “to the entire network,” according to media-industry newsletter Status. She “even personally directed the headline to be tweaked to specifically mention” the 9/11 angle.

The story immediately came under harsh criticism, even from people whose politics when it comes to Muslims are virtually indistinguishable from Weiss’s. Atlantic writer Jonathan Chait, for example, called the tweets a “non-story.”

CBS declined to mention that two of those three deleted posts were asking Americans to take the death toll of the Covid-19 pandemic as seriously as the attacks. It’s worth noting — CBS did not — that invoking 9/11 to put the Covid death toll in perspective wasn’t unusual at the time; then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo directly compared the pandemic, which ravaged New York City, to the attacks the same month that El-Sayed did.

Another post at issue was a rather anodyne comment about the consequences of the decadelong war on terror and a call to action: “We could save lives rather than take them.”

El-Sayed’s campaign previously told Politico that all posts older than July 2023 were deleted “to prevent any old posts from being taken out of context.”

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Weiss’s guidance led to CBS News’s racist framing that there’s just something different — even untrustworthy — about El-Sayed, and that the upcoming 25th anniversary of 9/11 is the right time to ask what that is.

In doing so, she’s embracing a long-standing bipartisan tradition of Muslim dehumanization — a playbook still being deployed on both sides of the aisle. The current anti-Muslim environment reflects the growth and regression in the country since the 9/11 moment: growth in the number of Muslims in political and public life, and the regressive backlash to multicultural liberalism that’s defined the Trump era.

This kind of bigotry was rampant during the early 2000s, particularly in 2002 and 2003, when the George W. Bush administration weaponized Americans’ anger and shock over the attacks to gin up support for its war of choice on Iraq.

> Weiss’s guidance led to CBS News’s racist framing that there’s just something different — even untrustworthy — about El-Sayed, and that the upcoming 25th anniversary of 9/11 is the right time to ask what that is.

More recently, in the wake of mass protest and opposition, mainly from the left, to Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, institutional power on both sides of the partisan divide has cracked down on dissent. In the immediate aftermath of the October 7 attacks, expressing sympathy for Palestine was enough to engender severe career consequences.

Since 2023, the landscape of public opinion has shifted significantly. A supermajority of Democratic voters are opposed to Israel’s war on Gaza and support sanctions on Israel. Increasingly, primary voters are punishing incumbents who have been diehard supporters of Israel. The callback to the anti-Muslim rhetoric of the post-9/11 era has also fallen flat with the base, who are more concerned with affordability and opposing Trump than they are with ensuring U.S. dominance over the region.

Rather than adapt to this new political reality, some of the Democratic Party’s most enthusiastic cheerleaders are fighting back by playing dirty. Neera Tanden, president of the powerful Democrat-aligned think tank Center for American Progress, has turned attacking El-Sayed and the Twitch streamer Hasan Piker — who was raised Muslim — into her main focus.

> The callback to the anti-Muslim rhetoric of the post-9/11 era has fallen flat with the base, who are more concerned with affordability and opposing Trump.

Tanden’s venomous online behavior has gained traction with anti-Muslim voices on the Democratic side, including activists Fred Guttenberg and Shannon Watts, who made their names protesting against gun violence against children — unless they live in Gaza.

But Tanden, with her reach and influence in the party, which has included stints in both the Biden and Obama administrations, is far more influential, and she wields that influence to her advantage against progressives and Muslims in her own big tent.

She’s reposted commentary from white supremacist streamer Nick Fuentes and arch-right provocateur Laura Loomer, in the latter case boosting a comment accusing Piker of using “Ninja Taqiyya,” a white nationalist meme referring to a secret Muslim plot to infiltrate Western society with their Islamic faith. Tanden later deleted it, claiming it was a “mistake,” but didn’t disavow the content.

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A number of Democratic politicians eager to revive the party’s Islamophobic war on terror days have joined these attacks. Piker, a public figure aligned with progressives but just outside the mainstream enough to threaten the establishment, is a perfect foil for centrist Democrats fighting against a lefty uprising.

Democratic senators and representatives have in turn targeted Piker as a way to swipe at the party’s ascendant left in more and more deranged and defamatory ways, and have repeatedly called on El-Sayed to disavow the streamer, who campaigned for him in the primary.

Piker’s recent comments that Israel’s actions are making Jews around the world less safe — echoing remarks previously made by Ezra Klein and others — were w