Charles Jacobs is president of the International Freedom Coalition.
(Oct. 23, 2026 / JNS)
Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic candidate for a Michigan Senate seat, has spent weeks fending off questions about his family’s ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.
There are good reasons for this: His half-sister posted that their mother was active in the Brotherhood in Egypt in the 1970s. El-Sayed himself wrote a 2011 op-ed that urged Washington to back Brotherhood-aligned protesters in Cairo as revolutionary “counterparts” worth supporting.
On Meet the Press, El-Sayed issued a flat denial: “I have no ties; we have no ties.” When a Michigan voter asked him if he’d disavow the Muslim Brotherhood, he answered, “Sure. Yeah, absolutely.” That’s the verbal equivalent of a shrug.
Relitigating what his mother did in Cairo 50 years ago lets El-Sayed frame himself as the victim of guilt by association. There is a better approach to evaluating his sympathies; one that actually matters to those whom the Muslim Brotherhood’s allies are killing and enslaving right now.
If El-Sayed has no sympathy for the Brotherhood or the jihadist movements it has fostered across the Middle East and Africa, then he should make a full, detailed condemnation of what jihadist and Islamist groups are doing to innocent people of all colors and cultures in those regions.
Name them. Describe what they’ve done.
We at the International Coalition for Freedom have gathered victims of jihad across the Middle East and Africa. We asked our representatives about El-Sayed. Here is how they responded:
Daowd Salih, our partner from Darfur, said, “Jihadist militias armed by Khartoum enslaved and massacred my people in Sudan and Darfur for decades. Mr. El-Sayed, you ask Michigan to send you to the Senate—will you speak about our reality, or wave it off the way you’ve waved off everything else?”
Stephen Enada, who represents Nigeria’s persecuted Christian communities in our coalition, stated, “Boko Haram jihadists have murdered thousands of Nigerian Christians and abducted our daughters, and the international left has never once marched for us. Will you condemn the jihadists who do this, Mr. El-Sayed?”
John Hajjar, an American of Lebanese Christian descent, said, “Hezbollah, a Khomeinist-backed jihadist militia, has held the country of my ancestors hostage and silenced its Christian and Druze communities for 40 years. Jihadism from the Ottoman Turks starved to death over 200,000 Christian Lebanese in the Kafno. My grandparents were lucky to survive with nothing more than the clothes on their backs. Mr. El-Sayed, will the next senator from Michigan ever name that militia as the terrorists they are?”
Ayellet Aviv, our Israeli-Jewish member, noted, “On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas raped, tortured and murdered my people simply for being Jewish, in their own homes. Americans were also among the victims. A one-sentence denial didn’t satisfy anyone when it was about your family’s history, Mr. El-Sayed. Why would it satisfy us now?”
Our vice president, the Middle East scholar Dr. Walid Phares, said, “A Senate candidate who answers both Oct. 7 and the Muslim Brotherhood question with a shrug has already told us what we need to know. The way out isn’t a denial. It’s a denunciation—long, specific and unflinching.”
El-Sayed has a microphone. He does not have to keep talking about his mother’s past. He just needs to tell Michigan, in detail, what he thinks of the jihadists who are murdering and enslaving so many innocents across the Middle East and Africa. He needs to end his silence on the global jihad.