# American Muslims cheered the September 11 attacks, and Muslim American politicians have said the country deserved them **Verdict: Contradicted.** This is a false and anti-Muslim claim, and it has been checked more thoroughly than almost any accusation in American politics. The mass celebrations on American soil were searched for and not found: PolitiFact ran an exhaustive newspaper and television archive search covering September to December 2001 and turned up two uncorroborated mentions regarding Jersey City, one of them an Associated Press report that called the rooftop-celebration rumors unfounded. The individual versions fail on their own terms too. Ilhan Omar's 'some people did something' was a clause cut out of a sentence about civil liberties. The August 2026 claim that Michigan Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed said America deserved 9/11 was rated False by Snopes and false by PolitiFact, because the words belong to a Twitch streamer who said them in 2019 and walked them back, and El-Sayed had said on camera in April that he does not think 9/11 was justified. What is real, and is not the rated claim, is that the accusation keeps being made by people with national platforms, and that the people it lands on report threats afterwards. Category: Hoaxes & Pop Culture · Era: 2000s–2020s · First circulated: September 2001, as unverified rumors of rooftop celebrations in New Jersey; revived at national scale by a presidential candidate in November 2015, again in April 2019, and again in August 2026 · Believed by: A durable minority of the American public, sustained less by any specific piece of evidence than by repetition from candidates, senators and national commentators; polling on Muslim Americans' loyalty has stayed stubbornly negative across two decades URL: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/muslims-celebrated-9-11-smear ## Summary Since the week of the attacks themselves, a claim has recurred in American politics: that Muslims in the United States celebrated September 11, and that Muslim American public figures have since said the country had it coming. It is false, and the interesting thing about it is how differently it has been manufactured each time. In 2001 and again in 2015 it was an event that investigators could not find. In 2019 it was a real sentence with most of it removed. In August 2026 it was a real quotation belonging to somebody else, moved onto a candidate who happened to share a stage and a religion with the man who said it. Keep two things apart here. On one side is the documented record: what was searched for and not found, what was actually said and by whom, and what fact-checkers established each time. On the other is the claim this file rates, that American Muslims celebrated the attacks and that their elected representatives endorse that view. That claim is debunked. ## The claim That Muslims in the United States openly celebrated the September 11 attacks as they happened, that this was witnessed and then covered up, and that Muslim American politicians have continued to say or imply that the United States deserved what happened to it. ## Origin and timeline - 2001-09-17: The Associated Press reports on rumors of rooftop celebrations of the attacks by Muslims in Jersey City, New Jersey. The same report describes those rumors as unfounded. This is the seed: a rumor, reported as a rumor, and reported alongside the finding that it did not check out. - 2001-09-18: The Washington Post publishes an article referring to law enforcement detaining and questioning people in the area. Fourteen years later this sentence will be offered as corroboration of a claim it does not make. - 2015-11-21: At a rally in Birmingham, Alabama, presidential candidate Donald Trump says: 'I watched in Jersey City, N.J., where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down.' The claim moves overnight from local rumor to a national campaign message. - 2015-11-22: Asked on ABC's This Week whether he misspoke, given that police say it did not happen, Trump says 'It was on television. I saw it.' PolitiFact publishes its check the same day and rates the claim Pants on Fire, its lowest rating, after searching newspaper and television transcripts from September through December 2001 and finding two uncorroborated mentions about Jersey City, neither approaching the scale described. - 2019-03-23: Representative Ilhan Omar speaks for about twenty minutes at a Council on American-Islamic Relations banquet in Woodland Hills, California. Describing why CAIR was founded, she says: '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.' The subject of the passage is the loss of civil liberties by Muslim Americans after the attacks. - 2019-04-12: A 43-second video circulates that opens with the clause 'some people did something' severed from the rest of Omar's sentence and then cuts to footage of the attacks, repeating the phrase over the wreckage. It passes ten million views. Omar afterwards reports an increase in direct threats against her life, many of them referencing or replying to the video. - 2026-04: Abdul El-Sayed, a former Detroit health director running for the US Senate in Michigan, campaigns alongside the Twitch streamer Hasan Piker. On the morning of those events he is asked on Fox and Friends whether he agrees with Piker's past remarks about 9/11 and answers: 'Of course I don't think 9/11 was justified. Because you appear with somebody doesn't mean you agree with him on everything.' - 2026-08-04: El-Sayed wins Michigan's Democratic Senate primary, defeating Haley Stevens. - 2026-08-05: Republican nominee Mike Rogers posts a statement invoking his career 'hunting terrorists' and saying: 'Never in a million years did I think that I would be running against someone who believes America deserved 9/11.' Senator Tom Cotton posts a version of the same claim and later backpedals, having apparently confused El-Sayed with Piker. Both men are Muslim. Within 48 hours Snopes rates the claim False, PolitiFact rates it false, and Lead Stories finds no evidence for it. - 2026-08-06: In the same week, a fabricated screenshot circulates on X purporting to show a post by the British American journalist Mehdi Hasan pairing a photograph of the second aircraft approaching the World Trade Center with the caption 'Make American Planes Crash Again.' Lead Stories establishes that the caption is real and the image is not. In February 2025 Hasan had quote-tweeted a news account's report of a fatal light-aircraft crash at a Georgia airport with that line, a sarcastic reference to the mass firing of probationary Federal Aviation Administration staff days earlier, and had deleted the post the next day with a public explanation. The 9/11 still, lifted from footage published on YouTube, was added to the screenshot afterwards by someone else. ## The evidence, claim by claim - Claim: Thousands of Muslims in New Jersey were filmed cheering as the towers came down, and the footage has been suppressed. Evidence: PolitiFact conducted an exhaustive search of newspaper and television transcripts on LexisNexis for the period September to December 2001, looking for any mention of Muslims in New Jersey celebrating the attacks. On Jersey City specifically it found two mentions, both uncorroborated and unsourced, and neither approaching the described scale. One was the Associated Press report of 17 September 2001, which characterised the rooftop-celebration rumors as unfounded. Paterson's police director has said his force holds no record of any such celebration being reported and denies that any occurred. Widely broadcast footage of celebrations in the Palestinian territories does exist and was shown at the time, which is very likely the source of the memory. The suppression premise also has a practical problem: an event on that scale in a major metropolitan area in 2001 would have produced hundreds of independent witnesses and a great deal of video, and would not depend on two unsourced newspaper lines. - Claim: Ilhan Omar dismissed the attacks as 'some people did something', which shows what Muslim American politicians really think. Evidence: The phrase is a fragment of a sentence about civil liberties. In full: '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.' The passage immediately before it is about Muslim Americans being treated as second-class citizens, and the passage after it is about the right to ask someone why they are staring at you. FactCheck.org published the surrounding text in April 2019. The viral video does not merely omit the context; it cuts the sentence mid-clause, so that a subordinate reference to the hijackers becomes, on the edit, the whole of what she had to say about the attacks. - Claim: The Democratic Senate nominee in Michigan said America deserved 9/11. Evidence: He did not. The sentence 'America deserved 9/11, dude' was said by the Twitch streamer Hasan Piker in an August 2019 livestream, and Piker walked it back two days later on The Young Turks, saying he abhors violence and had meant to point at the consequences of US foreign policy in the region. Snopes searched for any instance of El-Sayed saying it and found none, noting that a quotation like that from a Senate nominee would have been reported by the wire services, and rated the claim False on 6 August 2026. PolitiFact rated it false on 7 August. What connects the two men is that Piker campaigned with El-Sayed in April 2026. Senator Tom Cotton, who posted the claim, appears to have simply mistaken one for the other; both are Muslim. - Claim: He was asked to disavow the remark and refused, which tells you everything. Evidence: This is the part worth watching, because it is where the standard of proof changes shape. Asked by PolitiFact for evidence that El-Sayed believes America deserved 9/11, the Rogers campaign did not produce a quotation. It produced a clip of El-Sayed calling the row cancel culture and a clip of him declining to say whether he would campaign with Piker again, and a spokesperson said that this 'tells you everything you need to know.' But the accusation was that he said something. When no such statement exists, the charge quietly converts into a failure to deny with sufficient vigour, which is a test no one can pass and no one can fail. The Semafor journalist David Weigel described the mood on the day as less about fact-checking than about making the target deny it. - Claim: These are separate stories that happen to involve Muslims, not a pattern. Evidence: The charge is identical every time and the manufacturing method never is, which is the opposite of what coincidence looks like. In 2001 and 2015 the accusation rested on an event nobody could document. In 2019 it rested on real words with the sentence cut in half. In August 2026 it rested on real words belonging to a different person, transferred by proximity. Days later it rested on a real caption with a photograph of the attacks pasted underneath it. Twenty-five years, four techniques, one accusation, aimed each time at Muslim Americans in or entering public life. A claim that can lose its evidence four times over and keep going is not being sustained by evidence. - Claim: The Mehdi Hasan screenshot is different, because he really did post 'Make American Planes Crash Again.' Evidence: He did, and the sentence was about the Federal Aviation Administration. In February 2025 Hasan quote-tweeted a news account reporting a fatal light-aircraft crash at a Georgia airport with that line, days after the abrupt termination of probationary FAA employees had drawn wide criticism across the aviation industry. He deleted it the following day and posted an explanation. The fabricated version keeps the caption and swaps what sits under it, replacing the aviation story with a still of the second aircraft approaching the World Trade Center, taken from 9/11 footage on YouTube. Lead Stories documented the substitution on 7 August 2026. It is the neatest illustration in this file of how little material the accusation needs: the words were his, and reframing them as a celebration of the attacks took one image. - Claim: Even if the specific claims are wrong, no real harm is done by making them. Evidence: Omar reported an increase in direct threats on her life after the April 2019 video, many of them referencing or replying to it, and said so publicly at the time. El-Sayed characterised the 2026 attack as Islamophobia and said it was being used to divide people. Neither of those is a rating of the underlying claim, and this file does not treat them as one. They are the documented downstream of it, and they are the reason the accusation is worth answering carefully rather than ignoring. ## Why people believe it - A real memory is doing the work. Footage of celebrations in the Palestinian territories was broadcast repeatedly in September 2001, and over two decades the location detail is the easiest part to lose. People who are certain they saw it on television are often remembering something they did in fact see, and misplacing where it was. - The claim is repeated by people whose job implies they would know. A presidential candidate, a sitting senator, a former House Intelligence Committee chairman who spent his career in counterterrorism: when the accusation comes with that letterhead, most listeners reasonably assume somebody checked. - Clipped video is more persuasive than the full recording, not less. A 43-second cut with attack footage under it delivers a conclusion in the time it takes to feel something, while the correction requires reading a paragraph of context and trusting the person who supplies it. - Guilt by association feels like ordinary judgement rather than a logical error. Everyone assumes a person is somewhat like the company they keep, so 'he campaigned with the man who said it' slides into 'he thinks it' without the listener noticing that a step went missing. - The non-denial trap closes on its own. Once the demand is a disavowal rather than a fact, silence, irritation and a lawyerly answer all read as confirmation, and there is no available response that ends the accusation. ## Open questions - Where exactly the Jersey City rumor started is still not established. Two unsourced press mentions in September 2001 are the earliest trace anyone has produced, and neither identifies an originating witness. Whether it began as a misplaced memory of the Palestinian footage or as something invented locally is unresolved. - Why the correction never sticks is a genuine puzzle. PolitiFact rated the New Jersey claim Pants on Fire in 2015 and the record has not changed since, yet the same claim was in national circulation again in 2026 without anyone needing to rebut the 2015 finding. - Whether the disavowal demand can be answered at all is untested. No Muslim American politician has yet found a form of words that ends this line of attack, and it is not clear that one exists. - How much of the belief is about 9/11 at this point is unclear. The accusation now attaches to candidates who were schoolchildren in 2001, which suggests the attacks have become the vehicle rather than the subject. ## Latest developments - 2026-08-10T21:20Z: The 2026 strand has taken a third step, and it is worth recording because it follows the logic this file already describes. First the charge was that El-Sayed said America deserved 9/11, which was traced to a Twitch streamer and rated false by Snopes on 6 August and by PolitiFact on 7 August. Then, asked for evidence, the challenge became a failure to disavow with sufficient conviction. Now it has moved off the accusation entirely and onto his account of himself. On 9 August the actor Dean Cain posted on X asking whether anyone had ever seen a photograph of El-Sayed playing high school football, noting that he says he was captain of the team, and inviting the internet to do its thing. Lead Stories answered it on 10 August with documents. A Detroit Free Press report of the Bloomfield Hills Andover game against Royal Oak Dondero in September 2002 lists him at nose tackle with three sacks. Bloomfield Hills Schools sent the outlet two pages from the 2002-03 Andover yearbook, one showing him in the team photo at number 61 and one captioned 'Senior captain Abdul El-Sayed jumps and reaches to touch the banner while he leads the team onto the field'. He had also posted photographs of himself in his football gear to his own Instagram account in March. The pattern is the point rather than the football. When a specific accusation is disproved, the demand does not stop; it relocates to the next thing about the person that can be doubted, and each relocation resets the burden of proof onto them. (source: https://leadstories.com/hoax-alert/2026/08/fact-check-photos-show-abdul-el-sayed-played-high-school-football.html) ## Sources - Fact-checking Trump's claim that thousands in New Jersey cheered when World Trade Center tumbled, PolitiFact (2015): https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2015/nov/22/donald-trump/fact-checking-trumps-claim-thousands-new-jersey-ch/ - Rep. Ilhan Omar's 9/11 Comments in Context, FactCheck.org (2019): https://www.factcheck.org/2019/04/rep-ilhan-omars-9-11-comments-in-context/ - 'Some people did something': Rep. Omar's remarks in context, The Washington Post (2019): https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/04/11/some-people-did-something-rep-omars-remarks-context/ - Did Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed say he believes America deserved 9/11? There's no proof, Snopes (2026): https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/el-sayed-america-deserved-911/ - In Michigan Senate race, Mike Rogers falsely ties Abdul El-Sayed to Twitch streamer's 9/11 comments, PolitiFact (2026): https://politifact.com/factchecks/2026/aug/07/mike-rogers/abdul-el-sayed-9-11-hasan-piker-michigan/ - Fact Check: NO Evidence Abdul El-Sayed 'Celebrated 9/11', He Said 'I Don't Think 9/11 Was Justified', Lead Stories (2026): https://leadstories.com/hoax-alert/2026/08/fact-check-abdul-el-sayed-did-not-say-he-celebrated-9-11-he-said-i-dont-think-9-11-was-justified.html - GOP Senator Claims Abdul El-Sayed Said America 'Deserved 9/11', Then Corrects Himself, HuffPost (2026): https://www.huffpost.com/entry/tom-cotton-abdul-el-sayed-september-11-tweet_n_6a74f6cfe4b0a79b03a797cd - Republicans putting controversial figure's 9/11 comment in Abdul El-Sayed's mouth, Straight Arrow News (2026): https://san.com/cc/republicans-putting-controversial-figures-9-11-comment-in-abdul-el-sayeds-mouth/ - Fact Check: Mehdi Hasan Social Media Post Did NOT Have A 9/11 Image Under The Caption 'Make American Planes Crash Again', Lead Stories (2026): https://leadstories.com/hoax-alert/2026/08/fact-check-mehdi-hasan-social-media-post-did-not-have-a-911-image-under-the-caption-make-american-planes-crash-again.html - Fact Check: Photos Show Abdul El-Sayed Played High School Football, Actor Dean Cain Had Doubted That, Lead Stories (2026): https://leadstories.com/hoax-alert/2026/08/fact-check-photos-show-abdul-el-sayed-played-high-school-football.html Rated by The Conspiratory, a neutral, sourced encyclopedia of conspiracy theories. Full page: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/muslims-celebrated-9-11-smear