El-Sayed’s Muslim Motherhood

Ah, the terrorist ties that bind.

Poor Abdul El-Sayed, whose grip on becoming a U.S. senator from Michigan is slipping away. Despite all those massive headwinds of electoral goodwill he at first generated, it looks like he might lose after all. There were cautionary signs all along, but his candidacy seemed impervious to politically bad optics.

From the outset, his outlier views on Israel deviated from any serious contender for higher office in the United States. He inflexibly stated that the Jewish state had no right to exist. And Israel most certainly should not be allowed to defend itself against Islamic terrorists with American weaponry. Nothing he said appeared to have any effect in derailing his campaign.

Nor were the campaign pit-stops he received from Hasan Piker problematic. For any other candidate, Piker’s presence would have been a death knell. He, too, was consumed with antisemitic, anti-Israel priorities. And he infamously entertained the unconscionable charge that the United States “deserved 9/11.”

The endorsement of a malcontented piker like Piker should have been a toxic liability. Apparently, for El-Sayed, he was an asset.

But a new damning disclosure may finally be too much for even diehard Democrats to overlook.

It appears that the candidate’s mother was a campus “student leader” in the 1970s for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. That’s right: the terrorist organization that still supplies the ideology and bloodlust that fuels Hamas. It is precisely the link between Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood that accounts for why Egypt has refused to take in any Palestinians during this Gazan war.

That’s who El-Sayed’s mom palled around with in college?

The Muslim Brotherhood has long been known as a cesspool of trouble, a brotherhood of Islamic hoodlums. And now we see yet another candidate for public office in the West presenting himself as the embodiment of mutual tolerance, when, in actuality, El-Sayed is a rotten apple falling not far from the tree of terrorism.

Now we see yet another candidate for public office in the West presenting himself as the embodiment of mutual tolerance, when, in actuality, El-Sayed is a rotten apple falling not far from the tree of terrorism.

We know this because El-Sayed’s half-sister, a University of Chicago professor, posted over a decade ago that, “My family has long been MB [Muslim Brotherhood] … [and] had been jailed for Brotherhood involvement.”

Even when she lived in the United States, El-Sayed’s mother worked for five years for the Islamic American Relief Agency, a designated global terrorist group accused of financing al-Qaeda and Hamas.

El-Sayed says that he had no personal knowledge of his mother’s association with these entities. Somehow the life lessons about the glories of terrorism were learned but forgotten at his mother’s knee.

She must have really hated Jews to have chosen such an unappealing band of brothers. The Muslim Brotherhood is no feminist organization. They demand adherence to strict Sharia rules about the role of women under Islam. And we know where that can often lead: lashings, stonings and dismemberments for listening to music in a car with a man or revealing strands of hair in public.

In 2013, the Muslim Brotherhood formally opposed a U.N. declaration condemning violence against women. They feared that such a statement might end up being enforceable, if not influential in liberating women from violent men. Such a disastrous outcome would undermine Islamic values and undercut family structures.

Let’s remember that the Muslim Brotherhood wholly endorsed the barbarism of October 7, 2023. Its publications are replete with antisemitic rhetoric. When one of their own was elected president of Egypt, he immediately allowed thugs to violate and nearly storm the Israel Embassy in Cairo. He didn’t last long—he was deemed too extreme even by antisemitic Egyptians.

There are other anti-democratic, illiberal, antisemitic highlights from the El-Sayed clan. His father-in-law was affiliated with the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). It has its own longstanding ties with the Muslim Brotherhood, labeled a partner in the “grand jihad.” ISNA had a joint bank account that funded Hamas. Before becoming a candidate for public office, El-Sayed often spoke at ISNA conventions.

There are more truths that specifically tie El-Sayed to terrorism. On Substack, in 2021, he praised Mohamed Soltan, who was imprisoned in Egypt for Muslim Brotherhood-related activities, as “my friend.” When an Islamist attacked Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan in what the FBI characterized as “a Hezbollah-inspired act of terrorism,” El-Sayed explained it all away by saying, “hurt people hurt people.” The assailant’s brothers, Hezbollah terrorists, were killed in an Israeli airstrike.

Because he knows that Dearborn, Michigan is comprised of a Muslim majority governed by a Muslim mayor and the entirety of its city council, he lamented that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would be sorely missed. During a recent debate with his Republican opponent, he declined to categorically state that Iran posed a greater threat to the United States than Israel.

His yen for jihad even overrides his progressive politics. Years earlier he criticized President Obama for killing al-Qaeda cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who radicalized terrorists on YouTube from Yemen, until a drone strike finally silenced him.

In Minnesota, a sitting congresswoman and fellow antisemite, Ilhan Omar, is facing her own problems attributed to a parent. She might find herself denaturalized and deported on account of it. Her father apparently lied to immigration officials when he sought asylum in the United States from Somalia. He neglected to disclose that he was a senior military officer during Somalia’s civil war—in fact, shilling and shelling for the more ruthless side.

He also lied about his daughter’s age, a lie that she perpetuated. A federal judge believed that there was enough credible evidence of immigration fraud to authorize search warrants for Omar’s home. In the unlikely event that she finds herself facing deportation, it might not be such a hardship, after all. She has publicly stated that she misses Somalia and wishes that she might someday raise her children in her true homeland.

Omar, like El-Sayed, doesn’t shy away from Israel-bashing or terrorist-sympathizing. She once trivialized 9/11 by referring to the al-Qaeda terrorists of that dark day as merely, “some people did something.”

And then, of course, there are the Islamist loyalties of New York’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, inculcated from his own Islamically radicalized parents. His father, a professor at Columbia and a BDS proponent, falsely imparts on his students Israel’s “settler colonialism,” and serves on the advisory council of the Gaza Tribunal, a group that accuses Israel of genocide.

Worse still, he is on record, in a book that he published, as believing that “Suicide bombing needs to be understood as a feature of modern political violence rather than stigmatized as a mark of barbarism.” That perhaps explains why he has also encouraged a “Third Intifada.”

This is the father of the mayor of the city with the highest concentration of Jews living outside of Israel? Oh, and Mamdani’s mother, a filmmaker, spearheaded a drive to deny Israeli actress Gal Gadot from participating in the Oscars.

You can’t choose your parents, nor can you deny how profoundly they influenced your worldview. This is particularly telling with elected officials and those aspiring to higher office. Values get instilled that are not easily abandoned.

You can’t choose your parents, nor can you deny how profoundly they influenced your worldview. This is particularly telling with elected officials and those aspiring to higher office. Values get instilled that are not easily abandoned.

We used to issue daily color-coded warnings about the possibility of terrorism. Now we may need to create a new palette of color-coded warnings to guard against our political candidates!

Thane Rosenbaum is a novelist, essayist, law professor and Distinguished University Professor at Touro University, where he directs the Forum on Life, Culture & Society. He is a contributing writer for White Rose magazine. His most recent book is titled, “Beyond Proportionality: Israel’s Just War in Gaza.”