As the Michigan Senate race enters the home stretch and Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed’s radical views and associations are garnering more attention, he and his allies are using familiar cries of bigotry to stifle a closer examination of his record.
Christyna Thompson, a spokeswoman for the Democratic-led Senate Majority PAC, accused Republicans of waging a campaign of “casual Islamophobia.” Bill Clinton said, “I’m tired of people denigrating Muslims because they’re Muslim.” El-Sayed compared himself to JFK, noting the first Catholic president had to overcome charges he would be more loyal to the Vatican than the U.S. Constitution.
As an infant at the time of JFK’s assassination, former Representative Mike Rogers, El-Sayed’s Republican opponent, was not old enough to have known Jack Kennedy, but we feel confident in saying that El-Sayed is no Jack Kennedy.
JFK served his nation honorably in World War II and performed heroically in saving his crew when the boat he commanded, the PT-109, was sunk by a Japanese destroyer. Those questioning his loyalty to America were doing so purely on the basis of his faith.
El-Sayed, on the other hand, has built up a record of extreme views and associations, and has lied about them. The attacks on him on these grounds are fair game.
As we detailed in a previous editorial, despite his claims of having no ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, there is ample evidence that his mother and other family relations did.
While a defender might argue that he can’t be held accountable for his family members, the associations are consistent with his own record. In 2012, he signed an open letter to Mohamed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood leader and president of Egypt at the time, which 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.”
El-Sayed decided to hold multiple rallies with Hasan Piker, one of the leading antisemitic podcasters in America. Piker has claimed that “America deserved 9/11” and regularly defends terrorist groups. He said Hamas is “a thousand times better” than Israel, that he did not have “a single issue with Hezbollah,” and that what the Houthis were doing was “not only moral, but it’s just.” The events with Piker didn’t happen long ago, but in this very Senate race.
El-Sayed, too, has equated Israel to Hamas and refused to say that Iran, the leading sponsor of global terrorism, is a greater threat to the U.S. than Israel.
According to the New York Times, by the way, while at the University of Michigan, he was president of the Muslim Students Association, an organization founded by the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1960s.
His campaign waves off questions about his letter to Morsi, and in a viral clip, he answered a question at a town hall about whether he disavows the Muslim Brotherhood with a quick, rote disavowal followed by a long defense of the free exercise of religion.
In fending off questions about his family’s associations and his own views, he often portrays himself as a committed defender of the Constitution, which is rich coming from him. El-Sayed has called for packing the Court and, in an unearthed YouTube video, called for scrapping the Second Amendment.
The question about his campaign isn’t whether someone can be a faithful Muslim and hold public office, but whether El-Sayed deserves to serve in the United States Senate, and given his views and rank dishonesty, the answer should be a resounding “no.”