With 25th Anniversary of 9/11 Approaching, Abdul El-Sayed to Speak at Muslim Convention in Detroit

At least we can say the Democratic nominee for the Senate seat in Michigan is showing us his true colors. Chuck Ross at Free Beacon: El-Sayed is headlining the Islamic Society of North America’s annual convention in Detroit on Saturday. There, El-Sayed will speak on a panel to examine a “turmoiled America” alongside left-wing pundit Cenk Uygur and Zaid Shakir, an outspoken New Jersey-based cleric, according to a convention itinerary (Free Beacon). Detroit Free Press: The 63rd annual ISNA (Islamic Society of North America) convention is being held in downtown Detroit over Labor Day weekend. More than 20,000 are expected to attend the 3-day convention at Huntington Place in Detroit. “We are proud Americans, we are proud Muslims,” ISNA’s CEO said…. One of the panels, titled “Cultivating God Awareness in a Turmoiled America,” will include Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud and U.S. Senate Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed. They and other panelists will talk about taqwa, an Islamic term that means ‘God awareness,’ and how it relates to the challenges facing society. “ISNA meets the moment by framing taqwa (God Awareness) not only as personal piety but as a public strategy for success,” reads the panel description on ISNA’s program. “It urges the Muslim community to mobilize taqwa to uphold unity, ethical integrity, and an uncompromised commitment to justice” (Free Press).

El-Sayed Equates Lives Lost on 9/11 With Lives Lost in Wars Against Terror-Supporting Nations

The comments came on 9/11/2021—at the 20-year anniversary: “Today, I mourn the 3K lives, 6K injuries, & infrastructural devastation in NYC, perpetrated ignorantly in the name of my faith. Tomorrow, 111m mourn ~1 M lives, millions of injuries, & infrastructural devastation in 3 countries, perpetrated ignorantly in the name of my country.” El-Sayed has tried to scrub the record of thinking on 9/11. Matt Vespa at Townhall pulled together them together. Vespa: “he tried to turn the deadliest terror attack into a “both sides” argument, saying 9/11 was awful, but our justified war against terrorism, a long campaign of self-defense, was somehow equally atrocious.” Quoting El-Sayed on our response to the terror attack, from an op-ed in 2021: The cancer born of a bellicose White supremacy that has stained so much of our history metastasized still (Townhall).

Talarico Advocates for a Federal Abortion Service

Talarico has—only recently—started receiving attention for how radical he is. This is from his letter to President Biden in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision. Talarico had, just a year before, taken office as a State Representative from Austin, Texas. Talarico: On behalf of my constituents, I urge you and your administration to consider taking the following executive actions to protect the right to an abortion: • Leasing federal property t0 abortion clinics on federal lands or in federal offices. • Prohibiting states from imposing restrictions on abortion through the Food and Drug Administration Food • Hiring abortion providers as federal employees to provide immunity from state lawsuits. The General Services Administration manages more than 800 federally owned or leased building in Texas alone. Just repurposing a small fraction of those spaces for can provide critical life-saving care to people across my state (X). Byron York: advocating for what would, in effect, be a Federal Abortion Service, staffed by a Federal Abortion Corps, seems…out there (York).

Is Texas Waking Up to Talarico’s Strange Brand of Radicalism?

The latest Poll in the Texas Senate race has the candidates tied: Paxton 50, Talarico 50 (Overton). Byron York: CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski added that, “The Talarico campaign tells CNN his ‘cringey’ past comments ‘missed the mark,’ and he’s a capitalist who supports oil and gas.” Imagine that! Perhaps a more accurate description of the situation came from the X account Western Lensman, which wrote, “Talarico’s core campaign message is basically ‘don’t believe anything I’ve ever said up until about five minutes ago.’” The question is whether Talarico’s progressivism, combined with his 2026 makeover, will work in a statewide race in Texas. Well, the last time the state elected a Democrat to the U.S. Senate was Lloyd Bentsen in 1988. Many do not expect that to change; there are lots of knowledgeable Texans who will say that no matter how close the race might seem, a Democrat of Talarico’s stripe simply cannot win statewide in Texas. “If you’re running in Berkeley, California, that’s probably a good platform, but thank God Texas is not Berkeley, California,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) said on Fox News Tuesday night (Washington Examiner). Trying to look Texan, Talarico is now going to Cracker Barrel. Nick Arama: Talarico keeps trying to remake himself as more moderate, but people aren’t really buying it (RedState).

New York City Mayor Mamdani Releases 400-Page Racial Equity Plan

The initial framework for the plan was released in April. This week: Mayor Mamdani’s office released the full 400-page plan. The plan is the product of the city’s radical Chief Equity Officer Afua Atta-Mensah, who said: “ The release of the final plan is the beginning of implementation, not the end of planning,” said Atta-Mensah, who is commissioner of the Mayor’s Office of Equity and Racial Justice. “Agencies now have to take these commitments and put them into practice” (Gothamist). From the city: this is what it looks like to govern with equity in mind (NYC). Harmeet Dhillon with the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division has not been bashful to take action on legislation and policy unequally applied based on race. She spoke up when the initial framework was released. New York Post: The Trump administration is reviewing a “racial equity” plan released by Mayor Zohran Mamdani – with a top Department of Justice official calling the city’s proposal “fishy.” The assistant attorney general for the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, in a statement to The Post, threatened to “bring enforcement actions if necessary” over the long-delayed report unveiled by Mamdani on Monday. The “preliminary citywide racial equity plan”  aims to get dozens of local agencies involved to “solve decades of neglect and discrimination” against black and Hispanic and Latino New Yorkers — including through mandated “anti-racism” training and pay equity for city workers (New York Post).

Two Democrats Voted With Republicans Enabling Resolution on Socialism; Their Leaders Want Payback

This would have never taken place under Emperor Pelosi. Washington Times: House Democratic leaders want to punish two party members who crossed party lines to advance the Republican agenda on Tuesday. Reps. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington and Jared Golden of Maine cast the deciding votes to advance a Republican rule resolution allowing for consideration of a host of conservative bills. Defections to vote for the opposite party’s rule are extremely rare. With their defections, the two Democrats bailed out Republican leadership, which did not have enough votes to overcome a GOP revolt against the rule. “The decision by two of our colleagues to blindside the entire House Democratic Caucus and join with the Republican majority to pass a procedural rule on the brink of failing represents a significant breach of trust,” House Democratic leaders wrote in a Tuesday statement. “It is an action that necessitates a serious response, and we have asked the Committee on Caucus Rules to take this up in short order.” The statement comes from the caucus’s leading figures: House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York, Whip Katherine Clark of Massachusetts and Caucus Chairman Pete Aguilar of California (Washington Times).

American Muslims Focus on City-by-City Approach to Assert Influence; ‘Welcome to Little Palestine’

Many of you are acquainted with what’s happened to Dearborn, Michigan. Paul Sperry with Real Clear looks at the trend. Take, for example, Paterson, New Jersey: In June 2023, Paterson Mayor Andre Sayegh signed a sister city agreement with the mayor of Ramallah, a city in the West Bank and the seat of power of the Palestinian Authority, which officially celebrates the killing of Israelis. And last year during a ceremony kicking off Ramadan, he declared his city the “capital of Palestine in the United States of America” and the “fourth-holiest city” in Islam. “We are 100% halal!” Sayegh gushed, meaning pure and lawful under Islam. The mayor even agreed to hang a sign at the city entrance that reads: “Welcome to Little Palestine.” … elected American officials annually raise the Palestinian flag. Several years ago, Paterson’s Muslim-majority city council voted to change existing noise regulations to allow the city’s dozen mosques to blast out the Islamic call to prayer five times a day – from before dawn to after dusk. The move has incensed some non-Muslim neighbors, including one who recently entered a nearby mosque to complain about the noise. “Everybody’s not Muslim here,” the man yelled. “I don’t want to hear that s— every day.” Paterson’s largest mosque – the Islamic Center of Passaic County – is run by a radical cleric whose brother-in-law was a senior Hamas commander in the West Bank, where he orchestrated a number of suicide bombings against Israelis. Before immigrating to the U.S. from Jordan, this leading Paterson imam, Mohammad Qatanani, served time in an Israeli prison for his own confessed ties to Hamas. Yet he was presented the keys to the city by Paterson’s mayor in 2024 (RCP).

Hasan Piker and the Question: ‘What is November about?’

Leading Democrats don’t want to talk about “some streamer in California.” But the public is waking up and don’t seem to be too quick to ignore him. The Wall Street Journal’s Damian Paletta gets to the heart of the matter: What is November about? There’s a new, energetic, extremely progressive crop of Democratic candidates on ballots across the country. While this has excited a number of Democratic primary voters, it has unnerved many others (Wall Street Journal). Ed Morrissey: That actually is the problem. Midterm elections give the party out of power – or at least out of the White House, and this cycle Dems qualify as both – the opportunity to frame the cycle as a check on the president. Donald Trump should be particularly vulnerable on this point…. Instead, Democrats made themselves, socialism, and Hamas the issues of the midterms. Hasan Piker helped drive that shift to the Left, but Piker was hardly alone in it either. The Squad in Congress had pushed for a radical response to October 7 in support of its terrorist perpetrators for nearly three years. Academia has indoctrinated multiple generations into socialist activism as well as anti-Western positioning. The mainstream media has pushed in this direction for years, normalizing radical rhetoric while characterizing dissent from it as Republican “pouncing” (Hot Air).

US Ambassador Mike Waltz Presses for Accountability at UN

Special Rapporteurs with the U.N. have peddled lies for years. Many observers have tracked with the particularly dark work of Francesca Albanese. She denied many of the atrocities of October 7—including the well-documented weaponization of sex crimes by Hamas. She waged accusations of deliberately imposed starvation of Gaza. A number of things have changed. Most immediately notable: U.N. Secretary General António Guterres has admitted as much. Perhaps it’s because his term expires at the end of the year. It is notable, nonetheless. Guterres, from a recent interview: We have independent reporters and we have many that are totally out of control from the point of view of the Secretariat (UN Watch, full interview: Financial Times). Our Ambassador to the U.N., Mike Waltz: The reality is many Secretariat leaders privately admit the Special Rapporteurs, like Albanese, are out of control and a discredit to the UN, but have failed to hold them accountable even when they violate their code of conduct or abuse their posts to wage lawfare. This is a broken system that must be fixed (Waltz). U.N. Watch, quoting the organization’s Executive Director Hillel Neuer: “Albanese has functioned as Hamas’s de facto spokesperson at the UN. Many leading democracies have condemned her for Holocaust inversion and other ethical violations, making her the first UN human rights official in history to be so denounced. The United States sanctioned her. Guterres called her a horrible person in private. Now Ambassador Waltz confirms what senior UN officials have been saying all along,” said Neuer (UN Watch).

Trump to Attend Pentagon Ceremony on 9/11

He would have been prevented from speaking at the ceremony in Manhattan. New York Times: President Trump is not planning to attend a ceremony in Manhattan for the 25th anniversary of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, in part because he wanted to deliver a speech and the annual event has long barred remarks, according to four people with knowledge of the events. Mr. Trump’s team had conducted advance visits at the site and had initially signaled to officials in New York and in Washington that the president intended to visit the memorial space known as ground zero, two of the people with knowledge of the events said. The president’s interest in speaking on Sept. 11 was conveyed to memorial planners in recent weeks, three of the people with knowledge of the events said. But since 2012, politicians have been barred from speaking at the site (New York Times). On Vance, CNN adds: Vice President JD Vance will attend the ceremony at the World Trade Center, the sources said (CNN).