Memo to Dems like Abdul El-Sayed and Melat Kiros: My mom did NOT deserve 9/11

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.She worked in the city morgue for weeks afterward, identifying the remains of victims.Some of those victims were her friends.

Some were her colleagues.She has carried the weight of that day for 25 years, in the form of post-traumatic stress disorder that never fully leaves.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.In the memory of friends she will never see again.She didn’t deserve any of it.No American did.That shouldn’t be a controversial sentence — but within the Democratic Party, it’s increasingly treated as one worth debating.Take Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic candidate for Michigan’s open US Senate seat.He’s campaigned alongside Hasan Piker, a media personality who says America “deserved” 9/11.When pressed on it, El-Sayed didn’t distance himself from Piker’s reprehensible comments; he merely said they needed to be viewed “in context.”Context, for the murder of nearly 3,000 people on American soil.Or take Melat Kiros, the Democratic Socialists of America member and winner of this week’s Democratic congressional primary in Colorado, who called both the 9/11 attacks and the Oct.

7 massacre in Israel “inevitable consequences” of American and Israeli foreign policy.Not tragedies, not atrocities — inevitabilities.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.Even James Carville, lifelong Democratic strategist, called Kiros a “bridge too far” for his party.He’s right.But the fact that a rising faction on Carville’s own side requires such a public correction should alarm every Democrat who still believes ...