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Of course el Sayed is on the side of the terrorists

By David Harsanyi

Published Nov. 2, 2026

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President Donald Trump recently accused Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul el Sayed of being "on the side of the terrorists." The accusation triggers fits of indignation from the Left. The Washington Post and other major outlets assured voters "there is no evidence" to claim that el Sayed supports groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood.

Need it be said, the president is prone to lots of hyperbole. But Trump didn't accuse el Sayed of being a terrorist. He accused el Sayed of siding with terrorists. I'm not sure how anyone can argue otherwise.

For one thing, we're in possession of a long list of pro-Hamas groups and individuals whose support el Sayed openly welcomes, among them notorious anti-Americans imams, jihadists, and 9/11 truthers.

There's a reason el Sayed wouldn't condemn the terrorist Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps when asked by a college student during a Michigan town hall not long ago. It is the same reason el Sayed wouldn't speak out when we helped eliminate the nefarious Islamist dictator and American enemy Ali Khamenei.

It's not the candidate's fault that his father reportedly attended a "remembrance ceremony" for the ayatollah or that his mother-in-law and father-in-law reportedly raised money for "global terrorist" groups or that his Hamas-loving Marxist sister maintains his family has historical ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. But it is curious that he feels the need to lie about it.

At another town hall, a man named Tommy asked el Sayed if he would "disavow" the Muslim Brotherhood. "Sure. Yeah, absolutely," the candidate answered dismissively before retorting, "Why are you asking the question?" and launching a prefabricated tirade about "Islamophobia."

Well, maybe Tommy was asking because el Sayed signed an Arabic-language open letter published on an Egyptian site supporting "revolutionary decisions" of Muslim Brotherhood's Mohamed Morsi, imploring him to "purge the media and the police as quickly as possible," none of which sounds very progressive.

Maybe Tommy finds it odd that El Sayed sends out social media posts commemorating the 9/11 terrorist attack, in which at least three of the hijackers were once affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, that are largely aimed at the alleged sins of the United States rather than Islamic murderers.

Today, el Sayed's moderate act is undercut by his unrehearsed moments and associations, which include the Islamic Society of North America, a group with opaque funding sources that grew out of the Muslim Brotherhood โ€” his father-in-law served on the founding committee โ€” and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, whose president was "happy" to see Hamas, also an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, deliberately and joyously murder over 1,000 civilians in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

El Sayed allied with these groups long after they were named unindicted co-conspirators in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism-financing case.

Understandably, affordability issues are almost surely at the top of mind for most Michigan voters โ€” not that el Sayed's hackneyed socialism will do anything to help them on that front. But do they really want to elect a senator who couldn't obtain a security clearance to work with classified documents?

El Sayed has also declined to answer whether the Islamic mullahs of Iran who chant "Death to America" or Israel, a longtime ally whose population feels a kinship with our nation, are a greater threat to the U.S. Considering his past actions and comments, it's clear el Sayed prefers the Islamic terrorist state over the liberal democracy.

Hatred of Jews is one of the defining characteristics of the Islamo-Marxist. We don't need to look further than el Sayed's "hurt people hurt people" rationalization for a Hezbollah-inspired Islamist attempting to massacre a school filled with 140 American Jewish children in West Bloomfield, Michigan, to understand where his loyalty lies: the West Bank. El Sayed's initial, unprocessed reaction, the truthful one, is so vile and un-American it would have been a career-ending event for any normal politician in any normal era.

Alas, we are not in that era. If we were, el Sayed's candidacy would have ended when he invited doltish terrorism cheerleader and Maoist cosplayer Hasan Piker to campaign with him on numerous occasions. Last week, Piker's uncle, the unhinged, Jew-baiting Cenk Uygur, a man who named his online network after the Turkish movement responsible for a genocide of Christians in the 20th century, ran a ham-fisted antisemitic ad featuring a couple at a grocery store unable to buy eggs and bananas because their money had been set aside "for killing Palestinians" and to "drop bombs on Gaza."

After his campaign promoted the spot, it was widely claimed by media that el Sayed had "distanced" himself from the ad. The fact was he never dissociated himself from the message. Why? The candidate has literally made the identical claims. "Israel is an affordability issue," he once said. "Every time you want to put glasses on kids' faces or give people healthcare or fix a school, somebody pops up and is like, โ€˜Well, how are you going to pay for that?' I don't know. Maybe we should keep our money here instead of sending it there to drop bombs on people's schools or their hospitals."

Why isn't Ukraine an affordability issue for the Israel-obsessed el Sayed? Jordan? Egypt? The Palestinian Authority? El Sayed, Piker, and Uygur want Americans to blame Jews for their problems. And by rebooting a string of ugly tropes, they convince voters that pro-Israel Americans, many of them Jews, aren't just sitting on the wrong side of long-standing foreign policy debate but stealing constituents' healthcare and food.

This is an ugly emotional appeal. The reality is that the U.S. is committed to about $86 billion in overall foreign assistance every fiscal year โ€” roughly 1.3% of total federal spending. Israel accounts for around 5% of that foreign aid in an average year. Or, in other words, if we're being generous, Israel's aid constitutes somewhere in the vicinity of 0.1% of the federal budget, 98% of which is spent in the U.S. on weaponry from American manufacturers.

But let's talk about affordability issues. Americans have largely been kept safe from jihadists, so we tend to forget that we spend hundreds of times more stopping the Islamic terrorist groups that el Sayed struggles to denounce each year than we do on Israel, or all foreign aid, for that matter. We have spent trillions thwarting Islamist attacks since 9/11.

Then again, one can oppose foreign aid and the Iran war and even Israel and also unequivocally condemn 40 years of Islamic belligerence toward the U.S., including the murder of hundreds of service members in both Lebanon and Iran and scores of Americans kidnapped over the decades. One can unequivocally condemn a regime that murders thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of Iranian protesters or tortures women for religious and political crimes.

One can. El Sayed can't. It's worth asking why.

"If you have folks who refuse to vote for somebody because of the direction in which they pray, it most certainly has an impact," Dearborn, Michigan, Mayor Abdullah Hammoud recently said regarding el Sayed. Voting against any candidate solely based on the direction they pray is irrational, of course.

Ignoring a candidate's ideological and theological predisposition toward illiberalism and extremism and his long history of associating with those who detest this country simply because he is Muslim is also irrational.

(COMMENT, BELOW)

Previously:
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• 08/31/26 El-Sayed's Insane Circumcision Analogy
• 08/24/26 Second Amendment backward; NYT attempts to horrify on supposed 'Right to Kill'
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