{"id":3565,"date":"2026-07-03T10:07:13","date_gmt":"2026-07-03T10:07:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/metrotransitreview.com\/?p=3565"},"modified":"2026-07-03T10:07:13","modified_gmt":"2026-07-03T10:07:13","slug":"memo-to-dems-like-abdul-el-sayed-and-melat-kiros-my-mom-did-not-deserve-9-11","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/metrotransitreview.com\/?p=3565","title":{"rendered":"Memo to Dems like Abdul El-Sayed and Melat Kiros: My mom did NOT deserve 9\/11"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

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.<\/p>\n

Read more Exclusive | Mamdani can\u2019t even get City Hall to stick to his 78-degree AC rule \u2014 as temps in building hit as low as 54<\/a><\/p>\n

She worked in the city morgue for weeks afterward, identifying the remains of victims.<\/p>\n

Some of those victims were her friends. Some were her colleagues.<\/p>\n

She has carried the weight of that day for 25 years, in the form of post-traumatic stress disorder that never fully leaves.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

In the memory of friends she will never see again.<\/p>\n

She didn\u2019t deserve any of it. No American did.<\/p>\n

That shouldn\u2019t be a controversial sentence \u2014 but within the Democratic Party, it\u2019s increasingly treated as one worth debating.<\/p>\n

Take Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic candidate for Michigan\u2019s open US Senate seat.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s campaigned alongside Hasan Piker, a media personality who says America \u201cdeserved\u201d\u00a09\/11.<\/p>\n

When pressed on it, El-Sayed didn\u2019t distance himself from Piker\u2019s reprehensible comments; he merely said they needed to be viewed \u201cin context.\u201d<\/p>\n

Context, for the murder of nearly 3,000 people on American soil.<\/p>\n

Or take Melat Kiros, the Democratic Socialists of America member and winner of this week\u2019s Democratic congressional primary in Colorado, who called both the\u00a09\/11 attacks and the\u00a0Oct. 7\u00a0massacre in Israel \u201cinevitable consequences\u201d of American and Israeli foreign policy.<\/p>\n

Not tragedies, not atrocities \u2014 inevitabilities.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Even James Carville, lifelong Democratic strategist, called Kiros a \u201cbridge too far\u201d for his party.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s right.<\/p>\n

But the fact that a rising faction on Carville\u2019s own side requires such a public correction should alarm every Democrat who still believes in the country their party claims to represent.<\/p>\n

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This burning hatred for America isn\u2019t a fringe internet phenomenon anymore.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

And they\u2019re getting a platform to suggest that American civilians had it coming.<\/p>\n

My mother did not have it coming.<\/p>\n

Neither did the firefighters who climbed the stairs as the towers came down.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Neither did the Israeli families and concertgoers murdered and taken hostage\u00a0on Oct. 7.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a meaningful difference between debating American foreign policy \u2014 which is fair game in this country and always has been \u2014 and excusing mass murder as a foreseeable and justified response to it.<\/p>\n

One is politics.<\/p>\n

The other is a moral collapse dressed up as nuance.<\/p>\n

The Democratic Party has a choice to make.<\/p>\n

It can continue to let candidates like El-Sayed and Kiros carry its banner while explaining away language that excuses terrorism \u2014 or it can draw a clear line and say this evil has no home in the party of Roosevelt and Kennedy.<\/p>\n

So far, the response from party leadership has been meek.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not asking Democrats to abandon their politics; I\u2019m pleading with them to remember that some things sit outside of politics entirely.<\/p>\n

The murder of nearly 3,000 Americans on a\u00a0Tuesday morning\u00a0in September is one of them.<\/p>\n

My mother\u2019s PTSD is not a talking point.<\/p>\n

\n<\/div>\n

Her dead friends are not debate props.<\/p>\n

Her scars, physical and otherwise, are not context for anyone\u2019s foreign-policy argument.<\/p>\n

If the Democratic Party cannot say, clearly and without qualification, that the United States didn\u2019t deserve\u00a09\/11, it has a much bigger problem than messaging.<\/p>\n

And Americans must ask whether today\u2019s Democrats know what it means to stand with this country at all.<\/p>\n

Harrison Fields, a senior vice president at CGCN Group, served as principal deputy press secretary in the second Trump administration.<\/em><\/p>\n

Read more Exclusive | Taylor Swift arrives at MSG for rehearsal dinner ahead of Travis Kelce wedding<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s a meaningful difference between debating American foreign policy \u2014 which is fair game in this country and always has been \u2014 and excusing mass murder as a foreseeable and justified response to it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3564,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3565","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion"],"yoast_head":"\nMemo to Dems like Abdul El-Sayed and Melat Kiros: My mom did NOT deserve 9\/11 - Metro Transit Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/metrotransitreview.com\/?p=3565\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Memo to Dems like Abdul El-Sayed and Melat Kiros: My mom did NOT deserve 9\/11 - 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