No Daylight Between Abdul El-Sayed and Hasan Piker

National Review Online

Wednesday, August 26, 2026

 

Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed spent this week trying to create the appearance of daylight between himself and poisonous internet personality Hasan Piker. There is no reason for Michigan voters to take his statements, which don’t even directly criticize Piker, as anything more than a desperate general election gambit.

 

Piker garnered attention for a livestream this week in which he claimed that “if Jews in America keep putting this idea out there that they are singularly invested in Israel, eventually someone’s going to come around and take action. Not against the state of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews.” He made the statement while the screen showed a photo of Jeremy Moss, a Jewish Democrat who is running for a U.S. House seat in Michigan.

 

There is a long history of blaming Jews for bringing antisemitism on themselves, including in Nazi propaganda. The idea that a particular religious group cannot hold a given set of views without inviting violence is deeply un-American. While Piker’s comments could be charitably interpreted as his sympathetically noting the way things are, rather than arguing that this is how they ought to be, there is very little reason to give him the benefit of the doubt.

 

Piker has claimed that “America deserved 9/11” and regularly defended terrorist groups. He said Hamas is “a thousand times better” than Israel, that he did not have “a single issue with Hezbollah,” and that what the Houthis were doing was “not only moral, but it’s just.”

 

Headlines that El-Sayed has “distanced” himself from Piker are overstated. In response to Piker’s latest comments about American Jews inviting violence on themselves, the candidate released a statement that could have been generated by AI, declaring generically, “Americans deserve the right to advocate what they believe without fear of violence.” Notably, he avoided directly criticizing Piker, merely claiming that “while politicians and pundits try to make this race about a Twitch streamer,” he wanted to focus on affordability.

 

But the politician most responsible for making Piker an issue has been El-Sayed himself, by happily campaigning with the streamer — and not just once. He embraced Piker at an April campaign rally at which he mocked the idea that it was deemed controversial even as President Trump was trying to commit “genocide in Iran.” Just a few weeks ago, Piker appeared at El-Sayed’s final rally before the Democratic primary. Piker’s views were no secret.

 

That Piker would again say something controversial about Jews during the campaign was not an unforeseeable event, considering that El-Sayed consciously used Piker to energize the youth vote that helped deliver him the nomination. And there’s plenty of evidence that El-Sayed, who has made rabid anti-Zionism a cornerstone of his campaign, shares a lot of Piker’s sentiments. El-Sayed himself said that Israel was just as “evil” as Hamas.

 

What’s happened, of course, is that Piker was seen as an asset during the Democratic primary and now is viewed as a liability. Given the strong environment for Democrats in a state where Republicans have not won a Senate race in over 30 years, a generic Democrat would be expected to be coasting to victory. But El-Sayed, who dramatically underperformed polling in the primary, finds himself in a dead heat with former Representative Mike Rogers, the Republican nominee.

 

El-Sayed is eager to convince reluctant voters that they can vote for him in good conscience. But there is no reason to believe that daylight exists between him and the terrorist-sympathizing hater Hasan Piker.