Graham Platner has a Nazi tattoo on his chest. Abdul El-Sayed’s antisemitism is not as visible, but it is just as obvious.
Not too long ago, these two men represented the prospect of a potentially frightening future for the Democratic Party. Today, Platner is a malodorous memory, a disgraced former Senate candidate from Maine who will soon be the answer to a difficult and unpleasant trivia question. If the Democratic Party, the United States Senate and the people of the state of Michigan are fortunate, in two weeks time El-Sayed will join Platner on the sidelines and each of these entities will move forward with a markedly lower level of prejudice and anti-Jewish hatred in their ranks.
Platner’s campaign was derailed not because of the Totenkopf skull-and-crossbones insignia of Hitler’s elite SS paramilitary force that he had proudly affixed to his chest but the allegations of sexual assault levied against him by several women. By contrast, El-Sayed is not facing charges of criminal behavior. But also unlike Platner, whose antagonism toward Israel and Jews appears to have been a somewhat superficial populist appeal to a particularly noxious strain of fashionable progressivism, El-Sayed has spent a great deal of time thinking about Israel and the Middle East. The results are disturbing.
Earlier this year, El-Sayed stated that the Israeli government is “evil,” drawing a moral equivalence between a state whose people were attacked, kidnapped, tortured and murdered on Oct. 7, 2023, and the terrorist group responsible for those atrocities. Asked in the same interview if he thinks Israel is as evil as Hamas, El-Sayed said: “Yes. Killing tens of thousands of people makes you pretty damn evil,” he said. “It’s not how evil is this one versus that one: Hamas evil, Israeli government evil. You can say both.”
Asked whether he believed Israel has a right to exist, he refused to answer.
“The question of Israel’s existence is not a question,” he told the interviewer. “I’m not going to play this gotcha game about whether or not it has a right to exist. The question, ultimately, is about whether or not we want a politics that dignifies equal rights.”
El-Sayed’s hatred carries over into the communities he hopes to represent in the Senate. Following a terror attack on a Michigan synagogue, El-Sayed argued that the attack was an understandable response to Israeli military strikes in Lebanon. “Hurt people hurt people,” he said glibly and coldly.
The Democratic establishment is in an understandable panic about what El-Sayed winning the upcoming primary would mean. They recognize that he could lose what has been a Democratic seat since 1978, or that a victory in November would allow him to become the voice of the ugliest type of antisemitism with a national platform for the next six years. The campaign of El-Sayed’s opponent, the centrist and underwhelming Haley Stevens, is currently outspending him by an astronomical 12-1 margin. If she does not win the August 4 primary, the pro-Israel wing of the party will take a devastating hit.
(Back in Maine, Platner will be replaced by an ideologically indistinguishable successor. Former state legislator and logger Troy Jackson has posted on social media that “Anybody with eyes and a heart knows the Israeli government is committing genocide in Gaza.” But at least he does not have any Nazi tattoos.)
Then there is JD Vance, who continues his unflagging efforts to remind us that such objectionable sentiments are not the sole province of either party. When we last checked on the vice president, he was engaged in his own brand of moral equivalency, comparing Israel and the Palestinians to a chicken and an egg.
Last week, Vance discussed ties between convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and Israeli national intelligence. He also accused Israel’s government of surreptitiously undermining his failed efforts to end the U.S. war with Iran. Vance regurgitated some of the most repulsive slurs against the Jewish people, implied illicit influence by powerful and nebulous Semitic agents and proved that maligning Jews can be a bipartisan exercise for politicians who see political benefit in such execrable behavior.
Dan Schnur is the U.S. Politics Editor for the Jewish Journal. He teaches courses in politics, communications, and leadership at UC Berkeley, USC and Pepperdine. He hosts the monthly webinar “The Dan Schnur Political Report” for the Los Angeles World Affairs Council & Town Hall. Follow Dan’s work at www.danschnurpolitics.com
