El-Sayed’s Troubling Ties

National Review Online

Thursday, October 15, 2026

 

‘We all have fathers, don’t we?” John F. Kennedy once quipped after being told disparaging information about Martin Luther King Jr.’s father.

 

True enough, but not all of us have family members connected to the Muslim Brotherhood.

 

Mike Rogers hammered Abdul El-Sayed in last week’s Michigan Senate debate over the Democratic candidate’s family ties to the terror group, and Meet the Press host Kristen Welker followed up in a subsequent interview with the Democratic candidate, asking if it was true.

 

“No,” El-Sayed twice insisted. As the Washington Free Beacon reports, that is not accurate. At least, not according to El-Sayed’s half sister, who proudly noted their mother’s radicalism.

 

“My family has long been MB,” Eman Abdelhadi, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago who would go on to celebrate the October 7 massacre, wrote of the Muslim Brotherhood in the summer of 2012. “I have had family jailed for being a part of it,” she added a year later. “Praying for all my family that supports the #MB in Egypt. Lie low, stay safe.”

 

(Abdelhadi’s 2012 post coincided with the accession of Mohamed Morsi, a Muslim Brotherhood ally, to Egypt’s presidency after the 2011 Arab Spring ousted Hosni Mubarak. That November, El-Sayed himself signed an open letter affirming his support for Morsi and calling on the new regime to “purge the media and police.”)

 

Their mother, Fatten Elkomy, also worked for the Islamic American Relief Agency — an organization the U.S. Treasury accused of supporting outfits like Hamas and al-Qaeda in 2004. “An exhibit list filed in court referenced Elkomy more than a dozen times,” CBS News reported of the Justice Department’s 2007 indictment of the organization, “documenting participation in wire transfers and recorded phone calls between 1999 and 2002, as well as an IARA-USA transfer request form for over $24,000 to its Iraq office.”

 

This isn’t the only family connection to an extremist group. The candidate’s father-in-law, Tayeb Jukaku, a prolific contributor to a pro-El-Sayed super PAC, has similar ties. The Beacon revealed in July that Jukaku has served on the Islamic Society of North America’s founding committee for nearly 20 years. ISNA was cited by federal prosecutors as an unindicted co-conspirator in the famous 2007 prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, in which its founders were convicted of funneling $12 million to Hamas. Jukaku also served as president of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) Michigan chapter in the second half of the aughts, when the group, too, was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land case.

 

In the last decade, CAIR sued the federal government twice in its effort to get El-Sayed’s sister-in-law, Mariam Jukaku, removed from the Department of Homeland Security’s terrorism watchlist. Neither suit succeeded, and the federal government will not explain why she was on that list or even whether she remains on it today.

 

Even if we discount all of this as simply unfortunate family relations, El-Sayed has similar political associations. From the radical activist Linda Sarsour to the noxious streamer Hasan Piker to allies of the antisemitic Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, El-Sayed has cultivated relationships with agitators whose hatred of Israel and its allies is matched only by their affinity for Islamist street action.

 

Those who notice the many disquieting relationships in El-Sayed’s background are often accused of racism, bigotry, and general anti-Muslim bias. Indeed, that is how the candidate himself deflects when he is charged, as he frequently and understandably is, with displaying a suspect level of sympathy for terrorists and their causes.

 

Among other things, he pointedly declined to celebrate the death of the blood-soaked Iranian despot Ayatollah Ali Khamenei because there were “a lot of people in Dearborn who are sad,” and says he wants to zero out all U.S. support for Israel and redirect those funds to UNRWA, a U.N. agency that admits a number of its employees participated in the October 7 slaughter.

 

This demonstrates, by the way, that his policy preferences have really nothing to do with keeping “our money here.”

 

Voters can perhaps forgive a few embarrassing family ties. They should not, however, extend any charity to a candidate who lies on their behalf and who apparently does so only to obscure his own similarly suspect sympathies.

 

As senator, El-Sayed could serve on committees that would give him access to sensitive national security information. Given his litany of troubling associations, his family ties to radical Islamist organizations, and his own statements, he should not be put in a position that requires such trust.