Some politicians dodge difficult questions. Then there is Abdul El-Sayed, the newly elected Democratic Senator in Michigan, who has built a political strategy around avoiding the obvious answer.
He has no trouble finding the words when accusing Israel of “genocide” and “apartheid.” He loses them only when the conversation turns to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, or Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.
In September, an Iranian American told him that a relative had been chased through the streets by the Revolutionary Guards and asked whether he stood against the mullahs. El-Sayed responded by talking about American imperialism and corporate interests.
“We are dying. Are you with us?” the man pressed. To no avail. It is the familiar routine of the average “progressive”: seize on anything marketed as “Palestine” to parade your “compassion” and enlightened credentials, then see nothing and hear nothing when actual genocides unfold—in Ukraine, for instance—or mass atrocities are committed in Iran and elsewhere.
Another sip of wine, another conversation with like-minded souls about things only they can “get.”
And perhaps only they can. That, being hardly a compliment.
In a recorded private conference call, he also reportedly explained that he did not want to comment on Ali Khamenei’s death because “a lot of people in Dearborn are sad.”
He did not explicitly deny saying it.
Israel presents him with no such difficulties. Asked whether it had a right to exist, he replied that it “exists” and dismissed the question as a “gotcha” exercise.
As for Iron Dome—without which Israel would have been reduced to rubble in the course of a century-long, openly declared campaign of genocide—he said he saw no meaningful distinction between offensive and defensive weapons.
So, a system that intercepts missiles fired by the terrorist organisations Hamas and Hezbollah is treated, more or less, as an instrument of aggression.
He also claims to have condemned Hamas on 7/10 “from day one.” The earliest public condemnation the Investigative Project on Terrorism could find came almost four months after the massacre. On its second anniversary, his campaign sent out a fundraising appeal that mentioned neither Hamas, nor the 1,200 people murdered, nor the hostages.
“A mistake,” he said. A remarkably convenient one.
Some 140 people, many of them children, were inside Temple Israel when the synagogue was attacked. El-Sayed condemned the attack, but added that “hurt people hurt people,” linking the attacker’s actions to the deaths of relatives in Lebanon.
It took him months to acknowledge that he should have stopped at condemnation.
Meanwhile, the extremist Turkish streamer Hasan Piker, with whom he made campaign appearances, likened courting Jewish voters in West Bloomfield to campaigning for a black candidate in a “Ku Klux Klan neighborhood.”
El-Sayed condemned the comparison. Yet he had chosen Piker as a high-profile ally despite his already well-known record. He has since put some distance between them, but Piker remains one of his closest friends and advisers. Even now.
The most damning material concerns his links to the Muslim Brotherhood. No evidence shows that El-Sayed was a member or that he “pledged allegiance” to it.
He was, however, responsible for recruiting members for the University of Michigan chapter of the Muslim Students Association, and later served as its vice president. An internal Brotherhood memorandum described the national MSA as one of “our organizations,” while a 2007 FBI assessment published by the IPT called it “the first official Muslim Brotherhood organization in the United States.”
MSA meeting minutes record plans for a fundraiser for KindHearts, which later became the subject of an investigation into Hamas financing.
El-Sayed attended meetings at which those plans were discussed.
Nor was this merely a matter of his student days. Between 2017 and 2020, he appeared repeatedly at ISNA, CAIR and ICNA–MAS events and personally appealed for financial support for CAIR. Brotherhood documents, statements to the FBI and statements by federal prosecutors have placed these organizations within the Brotherhood’s American network.
At a 2019 convention, he told Ilhan Omar that she was “absolutely right” to push back against repeated demands that she condemns Hamas.
In 2011, he had dismissed as “foolish” the comparison between a possible Brotherhood government in Egypt and Hamas’s rule in Gaza. In 2012, his name appeared in a letter supporting Mohamed Morsi’s decisions and calling for a “purge” of the media and the police.
El-Sayed has become the new darling of America’s “progressive” camp. “Progress,” that is, as embodied by the late Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood, Erdoğan, Hamas, Qatar’s rulers and everyone else who dreams of freeing the West from the “corruption” of its democracy and freedoms—whether they are saying so openly yet or not.
We live in an age that lurches between the darkness of communism, back from the dead and making common cause with its Islamist counterpart, and a far right already having its suits tailored in anticipation of power.
Two or three decades of dumbing down, disinformation, ignorance and corruption—and of mistaking democracy for a license to flatten every distinction and abolish every boundary—have, sadly, been enough to bring a new darkness to our doorstep.
