Wayback Wednesday: America Took Out Al-Qaeda's #2, and El-Sayed Had the Sadz

Geez, man. Wait until Abdul El-Sayed finds out what his weekend rally mate did to Anwar al-Awlaki!

Four years ago, El-Sayed wrote an essay for The New Republic objecting to the U.S. strike that took out Ayman al-Zawahiri. He accused Joe Biden, or whoever had the hand-puppet duty that week, of using al-Qaeda's chief architect of 9/11 as a "fig leaf" to cover up the disastrous rout from Kabul a year earlier. Jon Levine dug this up for the Free Beacon, along with a few more nuggets from El-Sayed's public commentary on rabid Islamists:

In the piece, "Projecting Strength Abroad Isn't Simply About Killing Terrorists. It's About Standing Up to Despots, Too," which was published in the New Republic on Aug. 5, 2022, El-Sayed spoke out against the CIA drone strike that successfully took out al-Zawahiri, a fellow Egyptian who'd joined the Muslim Brotherhood as a teenager and ultimately rose to lead al Qaeda.

"President Biden is using the strike to bolster his approval here at home. It is troubling to watch yet another American president flog 'War on Terror' themes to resurrect a laggard term," El-Sayed sniffed in the article.

El-Sayed went on to accuse Biden of launching the attack on al-Zawahiri—who'd been on the FBI's 10 most wanted terrorist list for almost 21 years—as a way to arrest sliding approval numbers stemming from the disastrous United States withdrawal from Afghanistan.

"This strike," he went on, "offers the Biden administration a fig leaf, demonstrating that even in Taliban hands, Afghanistan is not off-limits for direct action against terrorist targets," El-Sayed wrote, adding that Biden did it in order to "project strength" for Democrats heading into the midterm elections that year.

Ahem. We are second to none in distrusting the Biden Regency and its machinations to cover up Joe's cognitive and performative incompetencies. However, this is just nuts. The U.S. had been hunting for al-Zawahiri since before we pushed the Taliban out of Kabul, having identified him immediately as Osama bin Laden's chief lieutenant and the chief director of the 9/11 attacks. In fact, US intelligence had sought both al-Zawahiri and bin Laden for years before 9/11, when it became clear that the two had plotted a series of attacks on American interests, including two of our embassies in Africa in 1998 and the USS Cole in 2000. 

The scandal wasn't that Biden took out al-Zawahiri almost a full year after the fall of Kabul, which wasn't much of a distraction from that humiliating debacle anyway. It's that it came two decades later than it should have. 

It seems odd that El-Sayed would criticize justice coming to someone responsible for the massacre of nearly 3,000 fellow Americans, no? Actually ... no. Levine notes a pattern of defending Islamists in El-Sayed's public commentary, including al-Awlaki, natch:

• On Trump's strike on Qassem Soleimani, responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American soldiers in Iraq: "one shouldn't kick a rabid dog."
• El-Sayed blasted Obama's strike on al-Awlaki, an AQ leader who conducted attacks on Americans from Yemen, as an "extrajudicial assassination." 
• His well-reported lament on the death of Iran's ayatollah Ali Khameini in the first moments of the war against Iran this year: "there are a lot of people in Dearborn who are sad today."

Levine also notes that the same 2022 essay accusing Biden of wagging the dog with the strike on al-Zawahiri had El-Sayed pushing Biden to pressure the UAE into releasing Asim Ghafoor. El-Sayed claimed that Ghafoor had been imprisoned on "trumped-up charges" relating to money laundering and tax evasion, but failed to identify the purpose of those machinations. Ghafoor represented the Global Relief Foundation, a front for al-Qaeda and bin Laden. Ghafoor was affiliated with Care International, another suspected front for Islamist terrorism. He served as an attorney for bin Laden's brother-in-law Mohammed Jamal Khalifah, another Islamist terrorist who eventually got killed in a Madagascar shootout. 

This looks like a pattern, and it's not a pattern that suggests El-Sayed has American interests foremost in mind. El-Sayed has spent the last week or so pushing back on Mike Rogers, Bret Baier, and other reporters, claiming that they are accusing him of having dual loyalties. No one needs to make that accusation, however, since El-Sayed's public statements make his sympathies pretty clear already, including his signature on a letter defending the Muslim Brotherhood that he refuses to discuss at all. 

Michigan voters have plenty of evidence showing where El-Sayed's sympathies lie. Time to choose wisely. 

Editor’s Note: The 2026 Midterms will determine the fate of President Trump’s America First agenda. Republicans must maintain control of both chambers of Congress.

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