It's Always 9/11 Somewhere

Edited by Sam Thielman

HELLO FROM MICHIGAN, where the Democratic nominee for Senate, Abdul El-Sayed, is under sustained Islamophobic attack. The attempts to scandalize El-Sayed's antipathy for Israel, to make him appear antisemitic—he's simply not; neither is Hasan Piker; I'm not going to waste time detailing the ways antizionism is not antisemitism; and I say this with the full authority vested in me by the identity-politics game Zionists play—are in overdrive. El-Sayed's Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, sees 9/11 politics as the likeliest path to victory, which the broader Democratic Party evidently wouldn't mind, whatever the wishes of its voters, whom the party considers less important than its donors.

El-Sayed isn't a socialist, but is instead a progressive. (Hey, nobody's perfect.) To the elite consensus described above, it's a distinction without a difference. El-Sayed is for socialized medicine via Medicare For All, he's against U.S. aid to the apartheid state of Israel, he seeks to abolish ICE, and he's proposing a wealth tax. The oligarchic Ellison family purchased CBS and installed the right-wing Zionist functionary Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief for moments like this. 

Yesterday CBS published a piece designed to make you associate El-Sayed with 9/11. The piece purportedly reveals two deleted tweets from El-Sayed, suggesting the candidate is concealing his sympathy with the attacks. But when it came time to detail these tweets, they said nothing of the sort. "In those posts," writes reporter Zak Hudak, "he calls for the American public to muster the same outrage for the COVID-19 death toll that they displayed after 9/11." 

If you don't understand why that's scandalous, it's because you're thinking rationally. CBS wants you instead to react with outrage, and particularly, identity-based outrage. You are supposed to be scandalized by a Muslim of Egyptian origin, who seeks political power, comparing a mass-casualty event with a larger, even more mass-casualty event. CBS cannot actually find an example of El-Sayed diminishing 9/11—he explicitly says the attacks were "perpetuated ignorantly in the name of my faith," something the Do You Denounce crowd typically claims it wants to hear Muslims say—so the network has no choice but to rely on innuendo. Here's is Hudak's what-it-all-means quote, harvested from some Michigan consultant:

"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." 

That, you will notice, is just euphemism and gobbledygook, afraid to say what it actually means, because doing so would expose its incoherence, and its incoherence would expose the racism at its core. You are supposed to understand El-Sayed as less American than you are because he's a Muslim of Egyptian origin—and, accordingly, to consider his pursuit of high office a threat to you. Even, perhaps, a violent threat.

This is 9/11 politics. It's supposed to be a four-move checkmate, to shut down any consideration of El-Sayed on the merits, by making you fear someone different from you. It sits at the intersection of racism and class war, since the purpose of demonizing El-Sayed is to keep him from a position where he might tax wealth and redistribute it to fund access to health care for the working class. We saw this—and continue to see this—deployed against Zohran Mamdani. It failed. I will not lie to you and act like my two weeks in Michigan give me any insight into the senate race. But these will be the stakes of the race, whether El-Sayed wins or loses. 

I've seen some reaction implying that this is a "return" to 9/11 politics. All I would say is that over the past 25 years, these politics have never disappeared—they’ve only gone into occasional abeyance. The reason for that is two-fold. First, because of the persistent utility that 9/11 politics have for maintaining the status quo; and second, because decent people don't fight back against them with the ferocity required. The imminent 25th anniversary of 9/11 is a depressingly obvious hook for their rejuvenation. But with 25 years of disastrous consequences on display, they're the feeblest they've ever been, and it's long past time to shatter Islamophobia's glass jaw. 

THE CONSEQUENCES OF a purged military: Excellent reporting from the Washington Post has revealed that the four-star commanders of European Command, Pacific Command, Southern Command, as well as the Chief of Naval Operations, have delivered an internal vote of no confidence in the failed Iran War to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. The "leadership" of the Army and the Air Force—though it's unclear from the piece whether that means the service secretaries, the chiefs of staff or both—reportedly continue to back the war "but each emphasized that doing so would come with significant risk." 

Shortly after that story broke, the U.S. returned to bombing Iran. That did little but drive the price of oil back above $90 a barrel. Then, last night, Hegseth finally fired Army secretary and J.D. Vance ally Dan Driscoll. The best story about that comes from my old friend and Pentagon press corps doyenne Nancy Youssef. Nancy and her team report that Driscoll went to the White House with his lack of confidence in Hegseth. That's a last stand.

But these are not profiles in courage from the uniformed leadership. They're profiles in exactly the cowardice you'd expect from a military whose top ranks have already been purged to yield loyalty to the president. These generals and admirals let the war get to this point. They didn't speak out against an Iran War that was an obvious disaster and an unjustifiable aggression from the start, let alone resign over it, which would have been an intervention in the decision-making process that, whatever its outcome, displayed integrity. Now they're covering their asses. It's reminiscent of the 2006 "revolt of the generals" against Donald Rumsfeld over an Iraq war that none of those generals opposed when it mattered. Whatever they teach in the service academies, it's not moral courage.

OH LOOK, GEN. Dagvin Anderson of U.S. Africa Command is feeding the Wall Street Journal a story about a Houthi/al-Shabaab alliance, much as I highlighted in my last Zeteo column.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN you're an Afghan who served the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan and you need asylum? You get rendered to the Central African Republic. Thank you for your service. 

RELATED TO THE top item, I'm proud to have signed this letter in defense of Mark Ruffalo from frivolous accusations of antisemitism from Paramount/Oracle/the Ellisons.