How October 7 Inherited the Guilt of September 11

In some of his past reflections on the attacks of September 11, Michigan’s Democratic nominee for Senate, Abdul El-Sayed, suggested that our commemorations should attend more to “the war against brown Muslim folks over there” that America subsequently waged. “When we talk about 9/11,” El-Sayed added, “we often fail to center them.” This apparent demand for greater sympathy for the suffering of others contains a not-so-subtle judgment about the proper object of remembrance. Accordingly, the “brown Muslim” supposed victims of the U.S. acquire an interpretive precedence through which the murder of 3,000 innocent Americans becomes the occasion for examining the country’s guilt. For El-Sayed, guilt, not mourning, is the main note that should be sounded on the anniversary. That the United States declared war on jihadists and on brutal governments and not on “brown folks” or Muslims, who are by no means the same, is, of course, irrelevant.

Likewise, the online agitator Hasan Piker, whom El-Sayed kept by his side during the primary campaign, went one step further by declaring that, in fact, America deserved the 9/11 attacks, a statement that follows inevitably from El-Sayed’s own twisted logic: American culpability furnishes the attacks with retrospective moral warrant.

From the other side of the aisle, we find a right increasingly obsessed with accusing American institutions of treachery and backstabbing. Last year Tucker Carlson produced a five-part series, the 9/11 Files, inviting the viewer to entertain all manner of conspiracy theories about the CIA, dancing Israelis, and an inside job.