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Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Senate candidate in Michigan, thinks he’s another John F. Kennedy — not in terms of charm or wit, but as a fellow victim of religious bigotry.
When he ran for president in 1960, Jack Kennedy indeed encountered anti-Catholic prejudice, including the preposterous claim that he’d take orders as president from the Vatican.
This was irrational conspiracy-theorizing — whereas the questions that El-Sayed is facing about his family’s ties to extremist groups are well-founded.
It wasn’t a right-wing smear artist who first said that El-Sayed’s mother was with the Muslim Brotherhood, but his own half-sister.
She tweeted in 2012, “Had an amazing talk with my mom about her activism in the Muslim Brotherhood during the early 70s while she was in college #respect.”
She suggested that other family members in Egypt were involved in the Muslim Brotherhood.
His mom — just her luck — also worked for the Islamic American Relief Agency, which the US government designated a supporter of terrorist groups.
Now, El-Sayed could say that none of this has anything to do with him, since his biological mother didn’t raise him, and that his mother made a mistake in working for the Brotherhood.
Or, he could produce evidence of the falsity of what his half-sister said — which, if it’s wrong, shouldn’t be difficult, given that both his mother and half-sister are around (his half-sister is a radically anti-Zionist University of Chicago professor who is very excited about El-Sayed’s candidacy).
Instead, he’s argued that questions about this constitute rank Islamophobia.
He makes it sound as though the Muslim Brotherhood is a fraternal association, a Knights of Columbus for Muslims, such that any concerns about associations with it are inherently hateful.
His reaction is a little like someone being asked about his family’s alleged KKK associations and responding, “How dare you question my white Protestant heritage.”
In a viral exchange, a questioner at a town hall asked the candidate if he disavows the Muslim Brotherhood.
El-Sayed responded with a curt, “Yeah, sure,” before challenging his interlocutor about why he was asking and going on a long riff about freedom of religion in America.
Of course, no one is challenging El-Sayed’s right to worship as he pleases, or to run for public office as a faithful Muslim.
The questions have to do with his associations, and with his own views.
El-Sayed’s father-in-law, a major donor to his campaign, served on the founding committee of the Islamic Society of North America, a group designated as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 2007 Holy Land Foundation case.
He also — just his luck — served as president of the Council on American-Islamic Relations Michigan chapter, another group named as an unindicted co-conspirator in that case.
As for El-Sayed himself, The New York Times reports that when he was a student at the University of Michigan, he was president of the Muslim Students Association — an organization founded by the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1960s.
In 2012, he joined an open letter backing Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Morsi, who had just become president of Egypt: “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.”
Here one must pause to express a little sympathy for El-Sayed: Who among us hasn’t, at least once, urged an Islamist authoritarian to crack down on his political opponents?
During this Senate campaign, El-Sayed excused an Islamist attack on a Michigan synagogue (before apologizing).
He invited streamer Hasan Piker, who has repeatedly expressed sympathy with terror groups, to campaign with him.
And he has refused to say that Iran is more dangerous than Israel.
He doesn’t deserve the benefit of any doubt, and has responded to questions about all of this with evasions and high dudgeon.
No matter how often El-Sayed invokes JFK, Kennedy didn’t defend his Catholic faith as a way of distracting from his own extremism and that of people around him.
X: @RichLowry