The September 11 Whataboutism of El-Sayed and Mamdani

By Dan McLaughlin

Tuesday, September 01, 2026

 

A resurfaced, since-deleted September 11, 2021, tweet from Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed is making the rounds. On that 20th anniversary of the worst terrorist attack in American history, El-Sayed tweeted:

 

Today, I mourn the 3K lives, 6K injuries, & infrastructural devastation in NYC, perpetrated ignorantly in the name of my faith.

 

Tomorrow, I’ll mourn ~1M lives, millions of injuries, & infrastructural devastation in 3 countries, perpetrated ignorantly in the name of my country.

 

That same day, Zohran Mamdani tweeted a strikingly similar message:

 

Nearly 3,000 New Yorkers died on 9/11; 20 years later, the death hasn’t stopped. We mourn our neighbors who died that day. The hundreds of thousands who died in the wars that followed. The unknown millions injured & displaced. In their memory, we work toward a better world.

 

Mamdani tweeted virtually verbatim 9/11 anniversary messages in 2022, 2023, and 2024 before shifting his tune during the fall of his mayoral campaign.

 

The wording may be different in some ways — at least El-Sayed acknowledged that the deaths on September 11 were “perpetrated,” while Mamdani annually framed them in the passive voice as something that just happened — the common thread is the framing. Both men insisted on drawing a parallel, which El-Sayed underlined by using identical language in both sentences. To these men, the American wars against the Taliban and Saddam Hussein (like Israel’s response to the October 7 terrorist atrocities) were morally equivalent with terrorists attacking purely civilian targets in peacetime. That’s the whole point of pairing them in this way: to suggest that these are two sides of the same coin. (We’ll leave aside El-Sayed’s bogus math.)

 

While we have imported the term into our domestic politics, “whataboutism” is a rhetorical tactic that was introduced, or at least perfected, as a tool of Soviet propaganda: Whenever any of the many crimes of the Soviet regime and the communist bloc were pointed out, defenders would try to compare them to what America and the West were doing — e.g., “Gulags? What about Jim Crow?” The goal was always to erase our moral faculties by suggesting false equivalences between tyranny and liberal democracy, and between aggressive wars of conquest and responses to aggressive wars of conquest. But, as William F. Buckley Jr. once quipped, “That is like saying that the man who pushes a little old lady into the path of a bus is morally equivalent to the man who pushes her out of its path, because they both push little old ladies around.”

 

This is precisely what El-Sayed and Mamdani have been doing. To them, the September 11 attacks — like the October 7 attacks, or like the Holocaust — is an embarrassing fact that needs to be whatabouted away in order to prosecute their argument against America, the West, and “Zionists.” The fact that both men have done so in such strikingly similar turns of phrase illustrates that. When people tell you who they are, believe them.