By Noah Rothman
Friday, August 14, 2026
The thrill America’s Muslims supposedly experienced when
Abdul El-Sayed won the Michigan Democratic Senate primary was short-lived,
according to the Associated Press. Their “elation” was soon “tempered by
awareness of persisting and widespread anti-Muslim sentiment across much of the
nation.”
The evidence the AP marshals for this assertion of bias
ranges from the plausible to the absurd. Outgoing Congresswoman Nancy Mace’s
allegation that “every single Muslim holding public office in America is a
Trojan horse” is certainly ugly. But using the candidate’s full name, as Donald
Trump did, is not.
El-Sayed himself is hardly shy
about accusing his critics of harboring anti-Muslim
animus in their hearts. But both the candidate and his defenders seem to
imply that El-Sayed’s views and statements are uncontroversial among his fellow
Muslims. That assumption deserves to be challenged.
For example, most Muslim Americans, like most Americans
generally, do not express any sympathy for the terrorist group Hamas.
Even though Israel’s favorability among all American adults has declined, the
public’s contempt for Hamas has remained static. Yet, while a
majority of Americans, including the minorities for whom El-Sayed presumes to
speak, can distinguish between Israel and its terrorist enemies, the candidate
cannot.
“Yes. Killing tens of thousands of people makes you
pretty damn evil,” El-Sayed said on the debate stage in April when asked if Israel is “as evil” as
Hamas. “It’s not how evil is this one versus that one: Hamas, evil. Israeli
government, evil. You can say both.”
El-Sayed wasn’t just staking out a rhetorical position.
In a candidate questionnaire, the Senate nominee outlined the steps he wants
the American government to take to isolate Israel on the world stage, including
withdrawing aid. “That’s why I support immediate re-investment in foreign aid,
including to UNRWA,” he wrote.
At least twelve employees of that U.N. agency in Gaza
took part in the October 7 massacre. Indeed, according to the U.N.’s
own audit, which “horrified” its leaders in 2024, the agency employed
thousands of Gazans who were tied to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad —
findings that compelled the U.S. State Department to withdraw America’s
financial support for UNRWA. None of this seems to bother El-Sayed.
Similarly, when El-Sayed refused to say that the
neutralization of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was a good
thing, he attributed his reticence to his deep well of compassion for his
fellow Muslims. “There are a lot of people in Dearborn who are sad,” he said of the death of a brutal dictator with American blood on his hands.
It’s improbable that the majority of American Muslims —
even those who observe Sharia-compliant practices, as El-Sayed sometimes does — feel the same. Only 12 percent
of American Muslims are Arab, the demographic that dominates Dearborn. The
Iranian diaspora, which makes up a healthy portion of the American Muslim
population, was hardly given to lamenting the death of the Persian people’s
erstwhile tormentor. And that is to say nothing of the majority of American Muslims who were born in the United
States and have deep roots in a nation that has been at war with the Islamic
Republic for nearly a half century.
It’s unsurprising, therefore, that most American Muslims
are as fearful of radical Islamist terrorism as anyone else. Indeed, they feared it long before Israel bought up all the real estate
in activist progressive heads. So, when El-Sayed refused to unequivocally condemn a terrorist attack on a
synagogue with 140 preschool children under its roof without condemning Israel
in the same breath — reasoning that “hurt people do hurt people” — he wasn’t
deferring to the consensus among American Muslims. He was speaking for himself.
Nor is it so much that El-Sayed lacks discretion when
associating with unsavory elements in the American political landscape. He’s
extremely discerning, in fact, because he seems to select for those unsavory
elements.
El-Sayed is a longtime associate of the activist Linda Sarsour — a figure who called for a “jihad” against
Donald Trump, and who contributed to the dissolution of the Women’s March amid
a series of investigations into the activist network’s antisemitism. He
surrounded himself with Nation of Islam leaders, including “two lieutenants of
the group’s leader, Louis Farrakhan, who themselves have railed against ‘the
Jews,’” the Washington Free Beacon reported. Then there is Hasan
Piker, the Maoist streamer who became a fixture
at El-Sayed campaign events and who has said that America
deserved 9/11, described Hamas as morally superior to Israel, and called for the outright murder of Republican elected officials.
“Of course I don’t think 9/11 was justified,” El-Sayed said of that particularly “dumb statement” from
his unofficial campaign surrogate. At the same time, El-Sayed steadfastly refused to criticize his associate, calling it
a “gotcha game” and contending that ostracizing figures like Piker is “exactly
why Democrats too often fail to get our message out to everybody.”
Michigan’s voters will have to draw their own conclusions
about where El-Sayed’s reticence comes from, just as they will have to consider
the candidate’s support for the sequence of events that briefly brought the
Muslim Brotherhood, subsequently a
U.S.-designated terrorist group, to power in Egypt. They’ll have to parse
El-Sayed’s apparent comfort with the $115,000 his campaign raised from individuals
associated with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), an
organization named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism-financing scandal.
To the extent that Democrat-friendly media outlets have
confronted any of this, it is only to allege that the public’s possible
discomfort is due entirely to America’s latent “Islamophobia.” And some Republicans have made the press’s
job easier by playing to the cheap seats. But even journalists’ defenses of
El-Sayed contribute to the indictment of his judgment.
“Today, there are more than 230 elected Muslim
officials,” the New York Times reported, “including four Muslim
Americans in Congress, the highest number ever.” If this candidate stands out
among them, it is no mystery as to why.
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