Is it Islamophobic to connect the El-Sayed dots?
According to his supporters, it’s worse than guilt by association — it’s Islamophobic. That’s what those who are backing Michigan Democratic US Senate nominee Dr. Abdul El-Sayed are saying about claims that he is connected to the Muslim Brotherhood, the international Islamist group that spawned the Hamas terrorist organization.
The fact that President Donald Trump termed El-Sayed “100 percent” affiliated with the Brotherhood, as well as a “Muslim radical” and a “con man” who “hates our country,” will likely only reinforce the belief of most Democrats that he is innocent of the charge.
Is it a smear or a credible accusation?
Since no smoking-gun Brotherhood membership card has been produced, that’s likely to be the way Democrats treat this issue. Indeed, most of their liberal media cheering section is simply ignoring the issue altogether as beneath their dignity to fact-check something that they regard as a slur, rather than a credible reason to doubt El-Sayed’s fitness for high office that ought to be reported.
And given a contemporary culture in which the worst thing you can call someone is racist, El-Sayed’s effort not merely to refute the allegation but to shut it down will likely succeed with most mainstream outlets.
But there is a problem with this attempt to dismiss this discussion. Far from this being a smear, there are good reasons to think long and hard about the implications of electing someone to the Senate who is not merely closely associated with persons who are Brotherhood supporters in one form or another, but who is also largely championing their political platform.
Simply put, El-Sayed isn’t being accused of being connected to the Brotherhood because he is a Muslim. The charge sticks because, regardless of whether he has ever personally belonged to the Brotherhood or one of its many affiliated groups, given his positions, he might as well be.
It could be a waste of time to play a political version of “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” with El-Sayed and the Brotherhood. But what those covering this race should be talking about is something different. A question needs answering: How is it possible for someone who traffics in the sort of antisemitic invective and advocacy that represent the hallmark of the Brotherhood and its advocates to rally mainstream Democrats and liberal media behind him, and be on the brink of winning a seat in the US Senate?
Equally important, the row about El-Sayed and the Muslim Brotherhood illustrates the meaning of Islamophobia in 21st-century American politics. What we learn from this episode is that someone has noticed antisemitism coming from an American Muslim — and is being denounced for having the nerve to say it.
Lying on NBC
The question of El-Sayed’s radicalism has been rattling around the internet since the soon-to-be 42-year-old won his party’s primary in August. But it became a national topic of conversation after he was asked about possible ties between himself or his family and the Brotherhood during the course of a generally fawning Oct. 11 interview on NBC’s Meet the Press.
The candidate’s answer was a flat “no.” He argued that it was not a legitimate question. And he went on to say it was evidence that his Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, and others opposing him are both “shameful” and “Islamophobic.”
It might have ended there. Yet within a day, evidence surfaced that contradicted El-Sayed’s denial.
His half-sister, Eman Abdelhadi, a supporter of her brother’s political career and a radical professor at the University of Chicago, arrested for assaulting a police officer at an anti-ICE rally, posted on social media about their mother’s record as a Muslim Brotherhood activist in the 1970s.
El-Sayed and his supporters attempted to swat that down by pointing out that he was born a decade later. More to the point, he wasn’t raised by his mother, as was the case with his sister, but instead grew up with his father and stepmother in a separate state.
Connected to terror
Yet even more damning was evidence uncovered by the Washington Free Beacon that El-Sayed’s father-in-law, Dr. Tayeb Jukaku, a Michigan neurologist, is a leader of and donor to the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), an American front group for the Brotherhood. ISNA was one of the unindicted co-conspirators in the notorious case in which leaders of the Holy Land Foundation were tried and convicted for using the charity to raise more than $12 million to funnel to Hamas terrorists.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), like the older ISNA, was created in 1994 to act as a cover group for those organizing on behalf of the Brotherhood and Hamas. Since then, these groups have attempted to position themselves as civil-rights groups representing the interests of a supposedly persecuted Muslim minority in the United States.
What they really do is put forward a sanitized version of the Brotherhood’s political agenda of an Islamist war on the West. That has fooled much of the media and many in the Democratic Party, including the Biden administration, which consulted CAIR not only in designing its anti-Islamophobia strategy paper but also in its effort to combat antisemitism. This was outrageous as well as ironic because CAIR itself is a major source of anti-Jewish, anti-Israel invective and advocacy.
What’s more, the leadership of ISNA and CAIR, along with 41 persons connected to Hamas fundraising in the United States, are reported to be among the donors to El-Sayed’s campaign.
Even setting aside his mother’s involvement, his father-in-law’s role in ISNA and his welcoming of funds from those who are linked to the Holy Land case and Hamas should be enough to make questions about El-Sayed’s ties to the Brotherhood legitimate.
Yet more troubling than any of these ties is El-Sayed’s open antisemitism — and opposition to Israel’s existence and right to defend itself. The same is true for his efforts to mainstream blood libels about Israel committing “genocide.”
Open antisemitism
El-Sayed defeated Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.) in the Michigan Democratic primary by smearing her as a puppet of Jews who were trying to buy American elections for Israel. What was truly “shameful” was his invocation of traditional tropes about Jews and money that came straight out of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” that the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups still promote.
This is also the candidate whose initial reaction to an attempt to plow a vehicle filled with explosives into a synagogue and Jewish school was to sympathize with the terrorist, rather than the intended victims. It took him several months to walk that back. But like most gaffes, it said more about him than he would like to admit.
El-Sayed may claim that he dislikes Israel, but not Jews. It’s an oft-used dodge that demands Jews drop an essential element of Jewish peoplehood to get the approval of the red-green alliance of leftists and Islamists that he embodies.
Some prominent Democratic activists, including Jews, are stating that the reluctance of Jews to vote for El-Sayed shows they care more about Israel than their own country and will suffer for doing so. But what it actually illustrates is that even most liberal Jews understand that his anti-Zionism and spreading of blood libels are indistinguishable from those of antisemites. In fact, his views pose a clear and present danger to Jews’ safety and that of their children.
In their frenzy to win a majority in the US Senate, what Democrats are doing is trying to legitimize a Muslim Brotherhood-adjacent candidate. That they are doing so amid an unprecedented surge of hatred and violence since the Hamas-led Palestinian Arab terror attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, is particularly shocking and especially irresponsible.
If they are successful, the consequences in terms of shifting the Overton window of acceptable discourse even further to make Jew-hatred acceptable will be obvious.
Role of hate groups
Just as obvious are the implications of the media’s labeling any criticism — or even reporting about El-Sayed’s antisemitism and his links to an international terror group — as Islamophobia and thus reprehensible.
Denial of the Brotherhood’s role in promoting Jew-hatred around the globe is nothing less than the moral equivalent of flat-earth advocacy. The same is true for efforts to make Americans look away from how Hamas supporters continue to evade accountability, even after the atrocities of Oct. 7. Like their friends operating within the terrorist organization based in Gaza, groups like CAIR and ISNA seek Israel’s destruction and Jewish genocide. They are hate groups, not advocates for civil rights.
It’s bad enough that public figures like El-Sayed won’t distance themselves from the effort to destroy Israel by condemning these groups. More than that, the dishonest campaign to claim that those who notice this hateful activity are just prejudiced against Muslims is doing real damage to Muslims in the United States. What’s more, by allowing these groups to get a foothold in the American public square, let alone put one of their friends in the Senate, El-Sayed’s apologists are undermining the security of all Americans and not just Jews.
Far from a campaign smear that will fade with time, the Brotherhood’s effort to gain a beachhead in the United States threatens democracy, and the safety of Jews and Americans at large. In the long run, that some on the left think that’s a small price to pay to get another Democrat elected to the Senate is a scandal that only further inflames a crisis of antisemitism for which El-Sayed’s supporters bear responsibility.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS.
