Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed again denied accusations that he has personal or family ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, dismissing past social media posts from his half sister as “hearsay.”
In an interview that aired Thursday, NBC’s Tom Llamas asked El-Sayed about past tweets from his half sister, including one in which she mentions their biological mother’s “activism in the Muslim Brotherhood during the early 70s while she was in college.”
El-Sayed’s Egyptian immigrant parents divorced when he was 3 years old, and his biological mother, Fatten Elkomy, moved out of Michigan. El-Sayed was raised by his father, Mohamed, and stepmother, Jacqueline Johnson, in a Detroit suburb.
“I was born in 1984, down the street in Rochester Hills. I was raised here in Michigan, went to the University of Michigan, rebuilt the health department in this city, led the health department in this county, and you want to ask me about what was happening in Egypt in 1970? Are you serious?” El-Sayed told Llamas in the interview.
After Llamas pressed him, El-Sayed insisted that he has no connection to the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist movement that was founded in Egypt in 1928 that has produced several offshoots: Some are legitimate political parties and others are extremist groups, such as Hamas and al-Qaeda. Last November, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to designate certain chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood as foreign terrorist organizations.
“I have no ties. We have no ties,” El-Sayed told Llamas. “I have never had these conversations with my mother. I wasn’t raised by my mother … You’re using hearsay evidence from a tweet. It’s just not serious.”
During the interview, NBC also included screenshots of a half-dozen other tweets from 2012 and 2013 in which El-Sayed’s half sister appeared to reference the Muslim Brotherhood as “MB.”
“My family has long been MB, but I’ve always felt that it has navigated the political sphere poorly/destructively,” she wrote in one.
Throughout the campaign, Republicans have tried to paint El-Sayed — an epidemiologist who would be the first Muslim senator if he wins his election — as a “radical Islamist.” El-Sayed’s primary win triggered a wave of anti-Muslim rhetoric online, according to an analysis by The Washington Post.
El-Sayed has called attempts to tie him to the Muslim Brotherhood Islamophobic and said he does not want to dignify responding to such claims, including those in campaign ads by his Republican opponent, former congressman Mike Rogers.
In an interview that aired Sunday with NBC’s Kristen Welker, however, El-Sayed flatly denied having any personal or family ties to the Muslim Brotherhood after Welker asked if he could “set the record straight.”
“Let me ask you, though, why this is even a subject of debate?” El-Sayed added. “Because [Rogers’s] only strategy is to point to me and my name and my faith and to say that we’re different and that you should suspect people simply because they are different than you in how they pray.”
The Washington Free Beacon resurfaced the old social media posts from El-Sayed’s half sister after his interview with Welker.
The post El-Sayed again denies ties to Muslim Brotherhood appeared first on Washington Post.
