American Muslims cheered the September 11 attacks, and Muslim American politicians have said the country deserved them

2001 and 2015: an event nobody could find

The first version is the oldest and the simplest: it describes something that happened. On 21 November 2015, at a rally in Birmingham, Alabama, Donald Trump said he had watched “in Jersey City, N.J., where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down.” Asked the next day on ABC's This Weekwhether he had misspoken, given that the police said it had not happened, he did not retreat: “It was on television. I saw it.”

PolitiFact went looking. It searched newspaper and television transcripts on LexisNexis across September to December 2001 for any mention of Muslims in New Jersey celebrating the attacks. For Jersey City it found exactly two mentions, both uncorroborated and unsourced, and neither remotely the size of the scene described. One of them was an Associated Press report of 17 September 2001 which noted “rumors of rooftop celebrations” and then said the rumors were unfounded. Paterson's police director has said his department has no record of any such celebration being reported and denies any took place. The rating was Pants on Fire.

The most likely explanation is not a lie so much as a relocation. Footage of celebrations in the Palestinian territories was genuinely broadcast, repeatedly, in the days after the attacks. Millions of Americans watched it. Over fourteen years the hardest detail to hold onto is the caption, and a real memory of real television drifts a few thousand miles west. That is a very ordinary way for a false belief to form. It is also why the belief is so hard to shift: the person holding it is not making anything up.

2019: a real sentence, minus the sentence

The second version did not need an event. It needed an edit. In March 2019, Ilhan Omar spoke for about twenty minutes at a Council on American-Islamic Relations banquet in California. The passage that became famous was about why the organisation exists:

“CAIR was founded after 9/11 because they recognized that some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties.”

Read whole, the sentence is about civil liberties, and the four words in the middle are a subordinate clause doing the work of getting from the attacks to their consequences for Muslim Americans. The paragraph before it is about being treated as a second-class citizen. The paragraph after it is about the right to ask a stranger why they are staring at you.

The video that reached more than ten million views on 12 April 2019 is 43 seconds long. It opens with the sentence cut off at “some people did something,” then goes to footage of the attacks, then repeats the phrase over the wreckage. The edit does not just remove context. It stops the sentence mid-clause, so that a passing reference to the hijackers is presented as the entirety of what she had to say about three thousand deaths. FactCheck.org printed the surrounding paragraphs within days. Omar afterwards said she had experienced an increase in direct threats on her life, many of them referencing or replying to the video.

2026: real words, wrong mouth

The third version needed neither an event nor an edit. It needed only two Muslim men on the same stage.

On 4 August 2026, Abdul El-Sayed won Michigan's Democratic Senate primary. The next day his Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, posted a statement invoking a career “hunting terrorists” and adding: “Never in a million years did I think that I would be running against someone who believes America deserved 9/11.” Senator Tom Cotton posted his own version, and later backed away from it.

The sentence is real. It belongs to Hasan Piker, a Twitch streamer, who said “America deserved 9/11, dude” on a 2019 livestream and walked it back two days later on The Young Turks, saying he abhors violence and had been trying to make a point about American foreign policy in the region. Piker campaigned with El-Sayed in April 2026, which is the entire connection. Piker is Muslim. El-Sayed is Muslim. HuffPost reported that Cotton appeared simply to have confused the two.

Snopes looked for any instance of El-Sayed saying it, reasoned that a Senate nominee saying such a thing would have been carried by the wire services, found nothing, and rated the claim False on 6 August. PolitiFact rated it false the following day. Lead Stories found no evidence for it. And El-Sayed had already answered the question on camera, in April, on the morning of the joint appearances, when a Fox and Friendshost asked him directly whether he agreed with Piker: “Of course I don't think 9/11 was justified. Because you appear with somebody doesn't mean you agree with him on everything.”

What happens when you ask for the quote

This is the part of the 2026 episode that repays attention, because it shows the accusation surviving the discovery that it is false.

PolitiFact did the obvious thing and asked the Rogers campaign for evidence that El-Sayed believes America deserved 9/11. No quotation was produced, because none exists. What came back instead were two clips: El-Sayed describing the row as cancel culture, and El-Sayed declining to say whether he would campaign with Piker again. “Abdul was asked point blank if he'd disavow Hasan Piker's comments, and he wouldn't do it,” a campaign spokesperson said. “That tells you everything you need to know.”

Notice what has happened to the claim in the space of one exchange. It began as a statement about something El-Sayed said. Under a request for the receipt, it became a statement about something he declined to say. Those are not the same accusation, and only the first one can be checked. The second is unfalsifiable by construction: an irritated answer proves it, a lawyerly answer proves it, and a flat denial can always be judged insufficiently emphatic. The Semafor journalist David Weigel caught the shift on the day, observing that the mood was not one of waiting for a fact-check but of wanting to make the target deny it.

A demand for a disavowal is not a neutral request. It presumes the thing being disavowed, and it is only ever issued to certain people. Nobody asked El-Sayed's primary opponent to disavow the 9/11 comments of anyone who had shared a stage with her.

Why a claim with no evidence keeps its footing

None of this requires anyone to be lying, and the file is better for not assuming they are. The Jersey City version almost certainly runs on a genuine memory of genuine television with the location worn off. The Omar version runs on a video that is emotionally complete in 43 seconds while the correction takes a paragraph and a request for trust. The El-Sayed version runs on the ordinary human assumption that people resemble the company they keep, which is usually a reasonable heuristic and here quietly skips a step.

Repetition by credentialed people does the rest. When a presidential candidate, a senator, and a former House Intelligence Committee chairman all say a thing, the listener is entitled to assume somebody checked, and the assumption is doing the work that evidence would otherwise have to do.

What the pattern is not is a coincidence. Twenty-five years, one accusation, four entirely different fabrication methods, and a target selected the same way every time. Claims sustained by evidence tend to hold onto their evidence. A claim that can be rebuilt out of a rumor, then out of an edit, then out of somebody else's sentence, then out of a photograph dropped under a real caption, was never resting on evidence in the first place. It is resting on the audience's prior willingness to believe it about these particular Americans.