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Left-wing Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed is being slammed over a resurfaced Columbia University research paper he authored with a “racist and eugenics outcome” that concluded Arab women should only breed with their own kind for optimal health outcomes.
El-Sayed — who has repeatedly called himself a physician though he never completed his medical school residency — warned in the 2011 paper published in the “Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health” of the hazards of “interethnic mating” — which he insisted increased the risk of children being born premature.
“Our findings suggest that interethnic mating may be associated with increased risk for adverse birth
outcomes among Arab ethnicity mothers,” he stated, back then going by Abdulrahman M. El-Sayed.
El-Sayed began the paper, titled “Interethnic mating and risk for preterm birth among Arab
American mothers,” with the bold claim that Arab mothers, “a growing ethnic group,” have “systematically better birth outcomes” than white mothers.
He said American Arab women were 16% less likely than white women to give birth prematurely, citing his own research from 2008, while omitting to mention that same study found the gap disappeared after adjusting for maternal and socioeconomic factors.
The research, funded in part by NIH grants, concluded that Arab women having children with white men was linked to 18% higher odds of preterm birth — below 37 weeks — and 24% higher odds of late preterm birth — between 34 and 36 weeks — compared to having a child with an Arab father.
The study found no statistically significant difference in very preterm birth, before 32 weeks, based on whether the father was Arab or white, but didn’t spend much ink dwelling on that finding.
Critics savaged the paper as pseudoscience.
“This is ‘science’ with “a pre-ordained racist & eugenics outcome,” wrote Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tx.) on X. “Scary stuff.”
Others wondered what the radical Democrat’s real motivation was to even research the topic.
“Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed’s scientific research is…odd. Arab mothers who engage in ‘interethnic mating’ have worse birth outcomes than those who mate with Arab men?” ripped John David Haltigan, an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Buckingham. “Why research this?”
Under Sharia law, Muslim men can marry “chaste” Christian or Jewish women, but Muslim women can only marry Muslim men.
“The father’s ethnicity did not appear to affect pregnancy outcomes when the mother was a non-Arab white woman,” he noted in the paper.
The paper also shamed interethnic marriages, saying the researchers found “Arab ethnic mothers engaged in interethnic mating were less likely to be married, had higher maternal ages….were more likely to smoke than their counterparts who mated with Arab fathers.”
He also claimed, “it has been shown that individuals in interracial/interethnic relationships have
increased stress….in turn increase risk for adverse birth outcomes.”
For the paper, he looked at data for 617,451 women in Michigan, “the state with the largest concentration of Arab Americans in the US,” he noted.
He compiled data from the birth records of the State of Michigan’s Department of Community Health, looking at 21,621 Arab women and 594,431 white women who gave birth between 2000 and 2005, using self-reported ancestry to determine ethnicity.
El-Sayed, 41, who argued throughout the paper against “racial heterogeneity,” is the product of Egyptian parents.
But he married a non-Arab woman. His wife, Sarah Jukaku, is Indian. They tied the knot in 2006 and had their first child in 2018. They have two daughters.
“So he, an Arab man, can mate interracially, no problem, but Arab women, in his scientific opinion, it seems, are better off staying within their own tribes,” slammed writer Katya Sedgwick on X.
“El Sayed exhibits great many third world attitudes that are repressive, violent, and incompatible with our way of life.”
At the time of his marriage, El-Sayed boasted that the couple was required under Islamic law to live separately for a year without consummating their union.
“The interesting thing about the Muslim perspective is that it’s a lot more serious,” he told The Michigan Daily in 2006.
El-Sayed, who is campaigning to become the first Muslim senator in US history, suggested at the end of the paper future researchers may want to “consider the effects of interethnic mating on risk for
other adverse birth outcomes,” including neonatal mortality and birth defects.
Other research he conducted at Columbia followed the same theme, including one where he looked at “ethnic inequalities in mortality.”
He withdrew his medical school residency application before he would’ve started it, to pursue public health instead.