Memo to Dems like Abdul El-Sayed and Melat Kiros: My mom did NOT deserve 9/11
My mother Audrey Valentine, who spent her career as a detective with the NYPD, was one of the first responders who ran toward the towers on Sept. 11, 2001, while everyone else was running away.
She worked in the city morgue for weeks afterward, identifying the remains of victims.
Some of those victims were her friends. Some were her colleagues.
She has carried the weight of that day for 25 years, in the form of post-traumatic stress disorder that never fully leaves.
In prurigo nodularis, a chronic skin condition is tied to her exposure at Ground Zero, a permanent bodily reminder of where she stood that morning.
In the memory of friends she will never see again.
She didn’t deserve any of it. No American did.
That shouldn’t be a controversial sentence — but within the Democratic Party, it’s increasingly treated as one worth debating.
Take Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic candidate for Michigan’s open US Senate seat.
He’s campaigned alongside Hasan Piker, a media personality who says America “deserved” 9/11.
When pressed on it, El-Sayed didn’t distance himself from Piker’s reprehensible comments; he merely said they needed to be viewed “in context.”
Context, for the murder of nearly 3,000 people on American soil.
Or take Melat Kiros, the Democratic Socialists of America member and winner of this week’s Democratic congressional primary in Colorado, who called both the 9/11 attacks and the Oct. 7 massacre in Israel “inevitable consequences” of American and Israeli foreign policy.
Not tragedies, not atrocities — inevitabilities.
As if the men who flew planes into buildings full of office workers, and the terrorists who slaughtered families in their homes, were simply following a script written by us.
Even James Carville, lifelong Democratic strategist, called Kiros a “bridge too far” for his party.
He’s right.
But the fact that a rising faction on Carville’s own side requires such a public correction should alarm every Democrat who still believes in the country their party claims to represent.
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This burning hatred for America isn’t a fringe internet phenomenon anymore.
These are candidates for federal office, people who could soon hold a Senate or House seat, who are being defended and praised and funded by sitting officials.
And they’re getting a platform to suggest that American civilians had it coming.
My mother did not have it coming.
Neither did the firefighters who climbed the stairs as the towers came down.
Neither did the office workers, the janitors, the Cantor Fitzgerald traders, the Windows on the World waitstaff or the passengers on four hijacked planes who tried to fight back.
Neither did the Israeli families and concertgoers murdered and taken hostage on Oct. 7.
There’s a meaningful difference between debating American foreign policy — which is fair game in this country and always has been — and excusing mass murder as a foreseeable and justified response to it.
One is politics.
The other is a moral collapse dressed up as nuance.
The Democratic Party has a choice to make.
It can continue to let candidates like El-Sayed and Kiros carry its banner while explaining away language that excuses terrorism — or it can draw a clear line and say this evil has no home in the party of Roosevelt and Kennedy.
So far, the response from party leadership has been meek.
I’m not asking Democrats to abandon their politics; I’m pleading with them to remember that some things sit outside of politics entirely.
The murder of nearly 3,000 Americans on a Tuesday morning in September is one of them.
My mother’s PTSD is not a talking point.
Her dead friends are not debate props.
Her scars, physical and otherwise, are not context for anyone’s foreign-policy argument.
If the Democratic Party cannot say, clearly and without qualification, that the United States didn’t deserve 9/11, it has a much bigger problem than messaging.
And Americans must ask whether today’s Democrats know what it means to stand with this country at all.
Harrison Fields, a senior vice president at CGCN Group, served as principal deputy press secretary in the second Trump administration.
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