News/Commentary

Bari Weiss personally ordered the 9/11 angle in explosive El-Sayed headline: report

September 1, 2026 | | Print Article

Corporate media cover for Abdul El-Sayed spun a report on controversial September 11 posts into allegations of “overt racism” and an attack on CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss.

As Americans prepare to mark 25 years since the September 11 terrorist attack, the political rise of Islamists across the country has demonstrated that some disgracefully opted to trample on vows to “Never Forget.”

Now, instead of covering the Democratic Senate nominee from Michigan’s concerning ties to designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations, Weiss was made the focus for insisting a report about El-Sayed’s deleted September 11 posts actually mentioned September 11 in the headline.

According to reporting by Oliver Darcy in his Status newsletter, the CBS News head “personally directed” the mention in the article titled, “Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed’s deleted tweets on Sept. 11 attacks invite scrutiny of past remarks.”

Within the report, Zak Hudak covered how an April 2020 post compared the death toll attributed to COVID-19 to the murder of 2,977 people on September 11, 2001, as El-Sayed sought similar levels of outrage for the virus.

Another post noted that, as COVID-19 surpassed those of September 11, the politician 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.”

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Responding to the coverage, a CBS News campaign spokesperson defended, “Abdul has always unequivocally condemned terrorism and the September 11 attacks. Mike Rogers attempts to misrepresent Abdul’s beliefs are bad-faith lies meant to mislead Michiganders,” came an added dig at El-Sayed’s Republican opponent.

Darcy reported that Hudak was “praised” by Weiss for his work on the article, “signaling her support for the piece to the entire network.”

At the same time, anonymous sources were cited as viewing the report as “yet another blemish calling into question the organization’s objectivity under new ownership,” including a former staffer who argued, “The racism is overt.”

Similarly, former MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan, who infamously posted “Make American Planes Crash Again” in what he described as a “poorly worded” response to a number of fatal plane crashes, described El-Sayed’s posts as “perfectly banal and uncontroversial” as he accused Weiss of “Islamophobia.”

“It should be a scandal that a major American news network is now led by an overt, hands-on, undisguised Islamophobe but… it isn’t. Islamophobia has been normalized in our media, and in our country. Shamefully,” he argued.

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Offering his own response to the resurfaced posts, El-Sayed — who has endeavored to distance himself from streamer Hasan “America deserved 9/11” Piker heading into the general election, further remarked, “There is not a day that goes by that I don’t think about the destruction that 9/11 wrought,” prompting nationally syndicated radio host Dana Loesch to share another past comment from the politician marking the 20th anniversary of the attack.

“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,” he wrote with Loesch captioning, “Oh stop with this ‘out of context’ slop bailout. There is no other context.”

Kevin Haggerty
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