El-Sayed’s viral video was a diversionary tactic, not his JFK moment

(Oct. 22, 2026 / JNS)

Michigan Democrat Dr. Abdul El-Sayed is being questioned about his links to extremists. In response, he’s running for the Senate as if he is the Muslim version of John F. Kennedy, the first Catholic president of the United States. The question facing Michigan voters, as well as other Americans, is not just whether they are willing to accept his claim that such questions are a form of religious prejudice. It’s whether they understand the long-term implications of normalizing his extremist views about America and its role in the world, as well as the demonization of Jewish influence in the public square that he represents.

These are questions to be answered because El-Sayed’s cheerleaders in the liberal media are treating a confrontation with someone who questioned him at a campaign event as a viral moment that will seal the election for him. Whether or not that turns out to be true remains to be seen. But to accept the idea that the mere act of asking him about his connections to the Muslim Brotherhood or to denounce it is wrong is to buy into his campaign talking points, not an expression of principle.

A diversionary tactic

Far from standing up for freedom of religion and against prejudice, those running interference for him on this point or denouncing anyone asking questions are part of a diversionary tactic.

Their claim that people have been expressing concern about his candidacy are only doing so because Republicans are weaponizing Islamophobia plays into Americans’ sense of fair play and their desire to uphold the First Amendment to the Constitution’s free exercise clause. Nobody wants to set up an unconstitutional religious test to qualify for high office.

Even as that is acknowledged, it’s crucial not to be diverted from the main issue here. The problem with El-Sayed is not faith, per se. It’s the fact that his personal connection to those associated with the Brotherhood is consistent with the troubling positions he takes on major issues, coupled with his own efforts to weaponize traditional tropes of antisemitism.

Just as important, it is an effort to distract us from something else—that is to say, drawing some obvious conclusions about the consequences of normalizing the toxic influence of the red-green alliance of leftists and Islamists that El-Sayed exemplifies in American politics now on display in Western Europe.

Protests in France started by students but more recently joined by mobs of violent leftists and unassimilated Muslims unreconciled to the norms of democracy or the rule of law show what happens when a society is on the brink of being overwhelmed by those who don’t share its basic values. The same is true about the way similar red-green alliances have, to one extent or another, normalized antisemitic hate in Britain and other E.U. nations.

What is happening in each of those countries is distinct from the others. The same is true for the way the alliance of so-called Democratic Socialists and Islamist sympathizers like El-Sayed are in the process of hijacking the Democratic Party. The tragedies unfolding in France and elsewhere are a warning to Americans of what they can expect if the Michigan Democrat and other progressives gain power.

But before they can do that, they need to intimidate or silence those calling attention to what he represents. And that is what the blowback from El-Sayed’s viral moment is all about.

An antisemitic campaign

El-Sayed spent most of the year prior to winning the Michigan primary for an open Senate seat on offense. He is a virulent opponent of Israel. And like those who demonstrated against the Jewish state’s efforts to defend itself against the Palestinian-Arab terror attacks on Israeli communities on Oct. 7, 2023, he’s a tacit supporter of the genocidal war launched by Hamas and supported by other Iranian terror proxies.

Rather than defend that point of view, he campaigned by demonizing Israel’s American supporters and their efforts to use the tools of democracy to elect those who agree with them. By treating the pro-Israel AIPAC lobby as part of a grand conspiracy to buy Congress and manipulate American foreign policy to the country’s detriment, he employed classic antisemitic tropes straight out of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Sadly, these ideas are not only embraced by the political left but also by their counterparts on the far right, like former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

El-Sayed smeared his moderate opponent, Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.), as a puppet of Jewish money. The purpose of this was not only to hurt his opponent but to drive Jews—or at least those who refused to disavow their own people and their security—out of the American public square.

That despicable effort succeeded when he won his party’s nomination. Since then, he has shifted to defense as scrutiny of his record and dubious associations has cast an unflattering light on his candidacy. Indeed, it was only after winning the primary that he issued a belated apology for rationalizing the motives and seeming to sympathize with the domestic Muslim terrorist who attempted to drive a pickup truck filled with explosives into a synagogue and Jewish school in West Bloomfield, Mich., back in March.

His response to questions about his remarks or character, echoed by other Democrats and liberal media that view his victory in November as essential to winning control of the Senate, is to essentially label anyone asking questions about him as an Islamophobic hate-monger.

That was the prelude to the viral moment at a campaign town hall in Caro, Mich., in the state’s “thumb” region, when a Republican activist monitoring the event named Thomas Teepell asked him about his association with the Muslim Brotherhood and whether he would condemn the international Islamist terror group. He began his answer by saying, “Sure, absolutely.” But then, his voice dripping with condescension, he tried to turn the tables on the questioner, claiming that the question was illegitimate and prejudicial.

Good reasons to ask the question

There are good reasons to ask El-Sayed about the Brotherhood.

His sister has written about how their mother was a Brotherhood activist in her youth. More importantly, the candidate’s father-in-law is a leader in the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), a Brotherhood front group that was part of the conspiracy to help raise funds for Hamas in the United States that resulted in the prosecution and conviction of several of its members in the Holy Land Foundation case. The leadership of ISNA and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which masquerade as a civil-rights group but are similarly connected to the Brotherhood and Hamas, along with 41 persons connected to Hamas fundraising in the United States, happen to be donors to El-Sayed’s campaign.

It’s equally true that in 2012, long before he decided it was prudent to put some distance between the Brotherhood and his political ambitions, El-Sayed signed a letter urging Mohamed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood operative who was then-president of Egypt, to use authoritarian powers to fend off popular efforts to end his despotic rule.

More to the point, whatever he claims to stand for now that he’s running for a Senate seat, El-Sayed’s political positions mirror those of CAIR and other Brotherhood fronts. He not only incessantly floats blood libels about Israel but deems any effort to support it by Americans as a foreign conspiracy. He also treats any attention paid to Muslim antisemitism and support and/or rationalizations of Islamist terrorists such as the regime in Tehran as Islamophobia.

El-Sayed’s campaign thought his exchange with the GOP activist who asked him about the Brotherhood was so good that they turned it into a video clip that has, as of this moment, gotten nearly 15 million views.

More than that, liberal media has picked it up with stories in outlets like CNN, The New York Times and The New Republic speaking of it as a brilliant act of political jujitsu in which he had turned the tables on his “bigoted” opponents.

Silencing questioners

Worse than that, they began to form an online mob that attempted to bully any journalists who wrote about the issue or asked similar questions. Indeed, one CBS journalist who praised Tommy’s question without even expressing an opinion about the exchange was forced to apologize. More ominously, the same press outlets began pushing a narrative in which CBS News head Bari Weiss, whose efforts to transform a news operation that had become notorious for its liberal bias into one that is more balanced, was denounced for encouraging journalists to dig into the story. As one headline read, “Bari Weiss Exposed for Pushing CBS to Smear Democratic Candidates.”

The object is to portray El-Sayed as a brave man standing up to prejudice in much the same way Kennedy faced down those in 1960 who said a Catholic ought not to be elected president of the United States. In his speech to a group of Protestant pastors in Houston, JFK famously said, “I am not the Catholic candidate for president. I am the Democratic Party’s candidate for president who happens also to be a Catholic.”

That’s the same point El-Sayed is trying to make in an ad that the Times singled out in an article as a model of liberal tolerance.

The difference is that Kennedy was swatting down a prejudice rooted in the myths of a bygone era. There was no Catholic conspiracy to rule America. By the 1960s, the differences between Christian denominations no longer mattered as they once did. JFK’s platform had nothing to do with the Vatican or any sect’s agenda.

By contrast, concerns about the Brotherhood are not a witch-hunt aimed at American Muslims. If El-Sayed were simply a garden-variety liberal Democrat, his religion and/or ethnic background would be no more of an issue than Kennedy’s Catholicism or that of former President Joe Biden. After El-Sayed conducted an openly antisemitic primary campaign with endless repetition of blood libels against Jews and the Jewish state, it would be irresponsible for both his opponents and the media not to bring that up.

The fact that he does have personal connections to a radical Islamist group and that he also supports efforts to delegitimize the Jewish presence in the public square and seeks to demonize Israel are not a coincidence. They also make close scrutiny of his beliefs all the more important.

Kennedy’s affirmation that he was not “the Catholic candidate” rang true because his political beliefs were not a function of his religion. With El-Sayed, it’s the opposite. The main thrust of his campaign against Israel and demonizing Jews emanates directly from the Islamist beliefs of the Brotherhood and is pursued by its American frontmen at ISNA and CAIR.

Rather than defending his Muslim faith, what his apologists are doing is normalizing antisemitism and hatred for Israel. And paying attention to that is not an act of prejudice.

It also matters because of what we’ve already seen happening in Europe. It should be understood that events in France are the result of a complicated mix of factors.

The riots may have their origins in protests about underfunded schools. However, legitimate complaints about it were, as has been done innumerable times in French political history, exploited by radicals with agendas that were insurrectionary rather than reformist. The violence was fomented by the French-equivalent of America’s Antifa thugs, whether anarchists or Marxists.

A substantial number of those who took over the streets and participated in mass violence and looting were immigrants from Muslim countries in North Africa and other former French colonial possessions, or their children or grandchildren who have not assimilated into the country’s economy. The fault for that may partly lie with the French government, though it is far from clear that most of this population is ready to be absorbed into French culture or society.

This has produced a significant Muslim minority—estimated at 10% of the total—at war with French and Western civilization. As in the rest of Europe, it is now former colonial peoples who are colonizing the native land of others and insisting that it should change to accommodate their concerns and religious sensibilities.

The same is happening in Britain, where a similar red-green alliance is influencing the Labour Party government to tilt even farther to the left and against Israel. Jews in both countries no longer feel safe. But at this rate, what is happening to Jews now will, sooner or later, happen to other groups, including the once-dominant indigenous majority that is slated for minority status at some point.

A warning to America

This is a warning to Americans about the dangers of unfettered immigration from countries where migrants bring a set of beliefs and culture antithetical to the rights of non-Muslims. And very often, they are also blatantly antisemitic.

The situation in the United States is nowhere near the inflection point of the crisis reached in Europe, where in some countries, their ability to defend their national identities—not to mention basic safety on the streets—is now in question. But should a future administration reverse President Donald Trump’s shutdown of the illegal immigration that brought in several million such migrants during the administration of his predecessor, the potential for catastrophe will be there. And as seen in the “mostly peaceful” riots during the Black Lives Matter summer of 2020, those who say it can’t happen in America have already been proven wrong.

Along with opposition to Israel, the organizing principle of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party is opposition to enforcement of immigration laws. El-Sayed and other Democrats want to abolish ICE and essentially return to Biden’s open-borders policies. That raises the possibility that more hordes of migrants intimidating Jews and waving Palestinian flags as a symbol of their cause may also be seen on the streets of American cities just as they have been in France.

Just as El-Sayed and his allies seek to force Jews to keep quiet and keep the peace about the potential election of an open antisemite, they also want to intimidate journalists not to ask him tough questions or dig into his background. That’s because when they do, his unfitness for high office and ties to extremists are on display for all to see.

If they succeed, it’s obvious where this will eventually lead. All that’s needed is to look across the Atlantic at the awful videos from Paris to see where America is headed if Islamism becomes normalized. The alternative is to pretend, as many on the left are now doing, that a supporter of Islamist hate that is adjacent to that of the Muslim Brotherhood is the second coming of John F. Kennedy.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS. Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.