Michigan elections are a shitshow. Michigan political races are a shitshow. Dearborn, Rashida Tlaib, Hamtramck – the country’s first all-Muslim city council….
As awful as the other far left contenders are, Abdul El-Sayed is the worst. And that’s saying a lot.
Born to Egyptian immigrants, Abdul El-Sayed was the vice president of the terror-tied Muslim Students Association in college.
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El-Sayed has also positioned himself as a fierce critic of Israel. The progressive champion was a prominent supporter of the “Uncommitted movement” a coalition of Democratic officials which refused to support the 2024 Kamala Harris presidential campaign over her support for Israel. However, El-Sayed later clarified that he would support Harris over Donald Trump in the general election.
El-Sayed has been especially critical of Israel’s war in Gaza. On Oct. 21, 2023, two weeks after the Hamas slaughter of roughly 1200 people in southern Israel, the progressive politician accused Israel of “genocide.” He also compared Israel’s defensive military operations to the Hamas terrorist group’s conduct on Oct. 7, writing “You can both condemn Hamas terrorism AND Israel’s murder since.”
In comments to Politico, El-Sayed criticized Democrats’ handling of the Israel-Palestine conflict, arguing that Democrats should become the “party of peace and justice” and said that they “ought not to be the party sending bombs and money to foreign militaries to drop bombs on other people’s kids in their schools and their hospitals.” He called on Democrats to stop supporting financial support for Israel, saying “we should be spending that money here at home.” Source: (Algemeiner)
Rashida’s Marxist comrade and Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed says the quiet part out loud: “you may not hate Muslims, but Muslims definitely hate you”. pic.twitter.com/qzxrtX0mdl
— Magasonic Grandpa Mark (@Hairball_63) April 17, 2025
Fierce Israel critic launches Senate bid in Michigan high-stakes 2026 midterm race
Abdul El-Sayed is running to replace outgoing Democratic Sen Gary Peters
By Danielle Wallace Fox News, April 22, 2025:
A former Michigan public health official and Democratic candidate for governor entered the race for the state’s open U.S. Senate seat on Thursday in what could be one of the most watched races in the 2026 midterm elections.
Abdul El-Sayed, 40, is the second Democrat to put his name in the running to replace Democratic Sen. Gary Peters, who is not seeking reelection.
El-Sayed, a prominent figure in a movement that was highly critical of support for Israel in the 2024 election cycle, aims to set himself apart from the other Democratic candidates in the race to replace Peters, state Sen. Mallory McMorrow.
“What we need right now is somebody who’s willing to take the fight directly to Trump and Musk, but then also knows how to rebuild a version of our federal government that better serves working people after the carnage that Musk and Trump are going to leave behind, and I think I offer that,” he told Politico.
Other Democrats considering a run to replace Peters include U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens and Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel.
El-Sayed was active in the “uncommited movement,” a group of anti-Israel, traditionally Democratic voters in Michigan, a critical swing state, who threatened to withhold support from then-President Joe Biden, and then then-Vice President Kamala Harris, over the administration’s stance on Gaza. He did say he would back whoever was the eventual Democratic choice for the presidential ticket to oppose now-President Donald Trump, according to Politico.
Discover the Networks reports:
Abdul El-Sayed was born in Detroit, Michigan, on October 31, 1984. His parents divorced shortly after El-Sayed was born, and the boy was raised by his father, a native Egyptian who was employed as both an engineer and a part-time imam, or Islamic worship leader. After working his way through the Detroit public school system, Abdul El-Sayed attended the University of Michigan, where he served as vice president of the campus chapter of the Muslim Students Association (MSA). In 2007, the young man graduated with a BS degree and delivered his class’s commencement address alongside the event’s special guest speaker, former President Bill Clinton. In 2011, El-Sayed earned a PhD in public health from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. In 2012 he was awarded a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans. (Paul Soros was the late brother of billionaire philanthropist George Soros, and Daisy was Paul’s wife.)
On September 11, 2012 — the 11th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks — El-Sayed co-authored an article lamenting “the cultural and social biases that fuel discriminatory behavior and hate crimes” against Muslims. Further, the piece asserted that “the post-9/11 climate of discrimination and marginalization against Muslim and Arab Americans” had caused members of those demographics to develop inordinately high levels of “stress” as well as “harmful coping mechanisms like the use of drugs and alcohol,” resulting in their “poorer mental and physical health.” “After 9/11,” El-Sayed wrote, “America’s about 10 million Arab and Muslim Americans, who were too often the victims of association with the perpetrators of the attacks, were — and continue to be — subjects of suspicion, discrimination, and abuse. Hate crimes against Arabs, Muslims and even Sikhs (who are often mistaken for Muslims) rose dramatically following the attacks, and continue to occur more commonly than in the pre-September 11 era.”
After earning both an MD and a PhD in social medicine from Columbia University in 2014, El-Sayed became a professor of public health in that school’s Department of Epidemiology, where he developed a reputation as an expert on health inequalities across racial and ethnic lines.
In 2015, El-Sayed was appointed director of the Detroit Health Department.
On December 16, 2016 at the University of Michigan, El-Sayed, who had already announced his intent to run in Michigan’s 2018 gubernatorial election, co-hosted a town hall with the noted pro-Sharia activist Linda Sarsour. Encouraging the crowd to vote for El-Sayed because of his progressive politics, Sarsour stated: “I have the audacity to believe we can make history and put the first Muslim governor in office. I want you to read the history books and say, ‘I was there.’”
On February 9, 2017, El-Sayed resigned from his job as Detroit’s Health Department director in order to formally launch his political campaign. He stated that he had first been motivated to run for public office by: (a) the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, which began in 2014 when a newly constructed water pipeline brought dangerously high levels of bacteria and lead into residents’ homes; and (b) his desire to combat the policies of Republican President Donald Trump. Of particular concern to El-Sayed, a Democrat, was a January 2017 executive order by which Trump had sought to impose a temporary moratorium on the issuance of visas for people seeking to travel to the United States from seven majority-Muslim nations that were hotbeds of Islamic terrorism.
El-Sayed views the United States as a nation awash not only in anti-Muslim sentiment, but also in racism against nonwhites generally. In May 2017, for example, the Canadian paper The Globe and Mail quoted him saying: “I know what it’s like to have your butt kicked by a cop for being the wrong colour in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
At a candidates’ forum in May of 2018, El-Sayed was confronted directly by Patrick Colbeck, his Republican opponent in the Michigan gubernatorial race, who voiced his concern over El-Sayed’s associations with the notoriously radical MSA, an organization with close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. In the course of his response to Colbeck, an angry El-Sayed said: “I knew, when I decided to run as the first Muslim American ever to run for governor, that I would face the ugliness of white supremacy, the ugliness of racism.” He also told Colbeck that because of the latter’s “Islamophobia,” “Muslims definitely hate you.” (Video of their exchange can be seen here.)
On August 7, 2018, El-Sayed lost the Democratic primary race to former Michigan state senator Gretchen Whitmer. The latter captured 52.1% of the vote, vs. 30.2% for El-Sayed.
El-Sayed is married to Sarah Jukaku, a former University of Michigan student who once served as president of that school’s campus MSA. El-Sayed’s father-in-law is Dr. Jukaku Tayeb, a nephrologist and a former president (and current board member) of the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
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