Tucker Carlson: Abdul El-Sayed’s Past Comments About 9/11 Were ‘Obviously Right’

Conservative podcaster Tucker Carlson defended Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed’s recently resurfaced comments about the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, saying the Michigan politician was “obviously right” to point out how the U.S. response also had a devastating impact across the globe.

As Michigan’s highly contested Senate race collided with the 25th anniversary of 9/11 last week, critics of the Muslim politician painted him as a terrorist sympathizer for linking the attacks to the death and destruction caused by the Iraq war in an old podcast episode and separate social media post.

During a Sept. 7, 2021, episode of the “America Dissected” podcast that was unearthed by the New York Post on Tuesday, El-Sayed said: “9/11 scarred our country in profound ways, but what we did after 9/11 scarred millions of other people. When we talk about 9/11, we often fail to center them.”

Days later, in a since-deleted tweet marking the 20th anniversary of the attacks, El-Sayed noted: “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 added.

Carlson, the MAGA movement’s most prominent defector, vigorously backed Sayed’s comments in his Friday newsletter.

“El-Sayed did not celebrate airplane hijackings or cheerlead Al-Qaeda; he simply said that the U.S. conducting terrorism of its own in response to 9/11 was not exactly an appropriate reaction,” Carlson wrote. “He is obviously right.”

Carlson claimed history supported what El-Sayed said.

“Your typical Fox News viewer is likely oblivious to this, but America’s response to 9/11 blew the original attack out of the water,” he wrote. “George Bush’s subsequent war in Iraq, which made no sense considering Iraq did not do 9/11, got hundreds of thousands of innocents killed, had tens of thousands of American military casualties, and catalyzed the creation of ISIS. That means the US slaughtered enough civilians to account for dozens and dozens of 9/11s. And that is a conservative estimate.”

At the time, Carlson backed the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq.

Carlson then slammed El-Sayed’s Republican challenger, former Michigan Rep. Mike Rogers, for telling the Post his opponent’s “attitude towards the worst tragedy in American history is disgusting and makes him completely unfit to serve in public office.”

“Hold on a second. Disgusting?” Carlson asked. “Understanding that the Bush administration was wrong to kill hundreds of thousands of people and waste trillions of dollars in Iraq, even though, again, Iraq did not do 9/11, is disgusting?”

“We are really not sure who Mike Rogers is, but if anyone in Michigan’s Senate race is ‘unfit to serve in public office,’ it is him,” Carlson added.

Carlson also outraged conservatives earlier this month when, during an episode of “The Tucker Carlson Show,” he praised El-Sayed’s “almost Trumpian” levels of patriotism and said he “wouldn’t vote for Mike Rogers at gunpoint.”