Victimhood is a potent political tool. And earlier this month, Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan’s Democratic U.S. Senate candidate, gave a master class on how to use it.
At a town hall in Caro, Michigan, a young man in the audience asked El-Sayed if he disavowed the Muslim Brotherhood, which he called a terrorist group. “Sure, yeah, absolutely,” the candidate responded. Then he flipped it: “Why are you asking the question?” The man said he asked because he had not yet heard El-Sayed disavow the group.
That flat-footed justification gave El-Sayed an opening: “You assume,” he said, “that because I am Muslim, that somehow I would have some allegiance to something that is not our Constitution.” In other words, the only voters who would ask about his allegiance are bigots. El-Sayed employed the same dodge against his Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, after their last debate: “He just pointed at me and said, ‘He’s Muslim.’”
There are certainly some Americans who will decline to vote for El-Sayed simply because of the way he prays. Alleging Islamophobia when questioned might be a useful tactic for avoiding scrutiny. But exploring El-Sayed’s political affinities is a legitimate exercise, invited by the candidate’s past statements.
The GOP’s frenzied attempt to find an El-Sayed Muslim Brotherhood membership card makes it easy for him to conflate questions about his past policy positions with anti-Muslim animus. Republicans have been obnoxiously muddying the waters — President Donald Trump repeatedly used El-Sayed’s middle name, “Mohammed,” and called him a “jihadist.” At a rally on Sunday, Trump said the American-born El-Sayed would be the only senator who would “have to go through a metal detector before he’s allowed to go into the Senate.”
The fixation on the Muslim Brotherhood isn’t just prejudice. It also stems in part from El-Sayed’s own obfuscations. Though he has denied personal and familial ties to the organization, his half sister wrote on social media in 2012 that their “family has long been MB.” El-Sayed has said that he wasn’t raised by his birth mother.
In 2012, he also signed onto an open letter, according to the Washington Free Beacon, from Egyptian Americans supporting the presidency of senior Muslim Brotherhood member Mohamed Morsi after President Hosni Mubarak was toppled in the Arab Spring revolution. With Morsi’s hard-line religious regime taking hold, the letter said: “We, leaders of the Egyptian community, support the revolutionary decisions taken by the president, and we call on him to purge the media and the police as quickly as possible.”
But the more Republicans fixate on uncovering every last contour of El-Sayed’s possible affiliation with the Muslim Brotherhood, the more they feed his victim narrative. Besides, El-Sayed already has served up plenty of other fodder that merits scrutiny.
It’s perfectly justifiable to interrogate the unsavory associations and radical positions of someone who could influence U.S. foreign policy as a senator. It was El-Sayed’s decision, for example, to share the stump with extreme leftist commentator Hasan Piker during the primaries.
That relationship drew scrutiny over the summer when Piker suggested that American Jews were inviting violence against themselves. El-Sayed distanced himself from Piker without condemning him: “While politicians and pundits try to make this race about a Twitch streamer,” he said, “we’re going to be talking about gas, groceries, good schools, and health care.”
El-Sayed’s distancing doesn’t change the fact that Piker was already known for anti-American vitriol when he became associated with El-Sayed’s campaign. The streamer has voiced support for terrorist groups such as the Houthis and Hezbollah, rationalized Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre in Israel and even argued that America deserved the 9/11 terrorist attacks (he later apologized). That El-Sayed wanted to reach Piker’s audience at all is an insight into the candidate’s worldview.
El-Sayed has already spouted many of his own radical takes. He has declined to support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, and has called it an “illegal apartheid regime.” He has drawn equivalences between Israel and the Islamic Republic of Iran, which has repeatedly called for the destruction of America.
According to the Free Beacon, which has been tirelessly reporting on El-Sayed in recent months, when Iran’s despotic leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed in the joint U.S. and Israel bombing campaign in February, El-Sayed warned his staff not to make public statements because “there are a lot of people in Dearborn who are sad today.”
In March, a terrorist attempted to attack Temple Israel near Detroit to avenge family members killed by an Israeli strike in Lebanon. El-Sayed condemned the attack, but he also tried to rationalize it, saying, “Hurt people hurt people.”
El-Sayed later apologized for the comment, saying he was trying to lend “context” to the matter. But is there ever a need for “context” to explain an attempt to massacre Americans?
That’s a fair question for any prospective U.S. senator — and religion doesn’t enter into it.
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