|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
The following analysis was authored by Tablet Magazine columnist and CAM editorial advisor Lee Smith:
The Democratic Party’s newly-minted nominee for Michigan’s open Senate seat Abdul El-Sayed gave little thought to mending fences after his narrow victory over Representative Haley Stevens in Tuesday’s primary. Instead, to galvanize his own base ahead of November’s general election, he doubled down on the formula that got him this far by attacking the foreign country the global left loves to hate — Israel.
In a Morning Joe interview on Wednesday, El-Sayed accused the Jewish state’s “bloodthirsty” government of committing “genocide” and maintaining an “illegal apartheid regime.”
El-Sayed’s anti-Israel messaging is a core reason why he won the votes of college-educated white progressives and, of course, the Muslim community from which the 41-year-old son of Egyptian immigrants emerged. Stevens, meanwhile, ran strongest among African Americans, working-class voters, and Jews from the Detroit suburbs, including the district she represented for four terms in Congress.
Ironically, Stevens is hardly a Zionist firebrand. She is a mainstream Democrat who holds what the standard Democratic position on Israel was for decades, including support for a “two-state solution” long sought by successive U.S. administrations but persistently thwarted by Palestinian intransigence.
El-Sayed, on the other hand, is an ideologue. And what his supporters really like is that he’s running on a platform he truly believes in. Will it get him to Capitol Hill come November? Who knows? But Chuck Schumer, long regarded as one of the Senate’s leading friends of Israel, has already endorsed him.
“El-Sayed has run an energetic campaign that inspired thousands of Michiganders across the state, with a clear focus on lowering costs and standing up for working families,” the Democratic Senate minority leader said in joint statement with fellow New York Senator and Chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Kirsten Gillibrand. “We congratulate him on his victory and are proud to support him.”
El-Sayed’s win appears to have answered the question of whether moderate Democrats can hold the line against a progressive faction energized by anti-Israel animus.
Republicans couldn’t be happier with the result. GOP strategists were worried about running against Stevens, who polled evenly with their candidate, Mike Rogers. But the former FBI agent who served seven terms in congress before retiring in 2015 enjoys a ten-point advantage against El-Sayed. And Rogers wasted no time laying into his opponent’s reputation as an anti-American terror sympathizer while highlighting his own law-and-order credentials.
“I spent years hunting terrorists and bringing Osama bin Laden to justice,” Rogers said. “Never in a million years did I think that I would be running against someone who believes America deserved 9/11.”
In truth, it was El-Sayed’s friend the podcaster Hasan Piker who justified the murder of nearly 3,000 people 25 years ago. But El-Sayed asked the far-left media celebrity to campaign with him to bolster his “pro-resistance” credentials.
El-Sayed demands an end to all military aid to Israel, including defensive systems such as the Iron Dome. In March, after an armed Hezbollah-inspired terrorist rammed an explosives-laden car into Temple Israel synagogue in West Bloomfield, Michigan, El-Sayed appeared to rationalize the attack. “Hurt people hurt people,” he said, referencing reports that members of the terrorist’s family had been killed in Israeli strikes on Hezbollah positions in southern Lebanon. “Violence,” he asserted, “is a cycle.”
And it’s not as if El-Sayed’s sympathies are only with anti-Israel entities thousands of miles away. El-Sayed’s father-in-law, Jukaku Tayeb, is a leader of what the federal government describes as a front group for the American branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, the original anti-Western, anti-U.S., and anti-Israel organization with offshoots waging violence against America and its allies across the globe. Tayeb also contributed $200,000 to one of his son-in-law’s super-PACs, Fighting for Michigan.
Curiously, many pro-Israel Democrats still see the glass as half full. El-Sayed was polling ahead of Stevens by double digits, so a one-point loss to a Hamas-friendly candidate felt like a win to some. And it’s true that the Democrats’ anti-Israel faction underperformed across the country on Tuesday.
In the primary for Stevens’ vacated House seat, Jeremy Moss beat two anti-Israel candidates, including Aisha Farooqi. In Missouri, former Congresswoman Cori Bush failed to wrest back her seat from Wesley Bell and fulfill the promise she made after her 2024 loss to take AIPAC’s “kingdom down.”
Indeed, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee had a pretty good night, with 30 pro-Israel candidates from Missouri, Michigan, Virginia, and Washington winning their primaries. And yet the fact that the pro-Israel organization spent more than $30 million in a losing effort showed the limits of its ability to project power in environments that have been shaped against the U.S.-Israel alliance.
There are more than 200,000 estimated Muslim voters in Michigan, and when it comes to foreign policy they vote as a bloc because they believe the same thing — Israel is the root of all evil. And Israel is a curse not just on the Middle East where, from their perspective, the IDF slaughters innocent Muslim babies to sate their Jewish bloodlust, but also on Washington, where the Zionist lobby controls foreign policy.
As El-Sayed stated on the campaign trail: “I’m not O.K. saying that, as a senator from Michigan, I’m going to take tax dollars from Michigan, send them to a foreign government that does heinous things in contraposition to the ideals that I support.”
“We should be using our tax dollars here rather than sending them over there to buy bombs and tanks that get used to drive apartheid and genocide,” he added.
That’s a winning message not only in Muslim communities but also among the young college-educated white men and women who voted for El-Sayed. Left-wing academics have indoctrinated several generations of American college students to support radical anti-Israel and anti-American causes, so naturally large numbers of them vote in alignment with what they’ve been taught to believe.
And much of that academic brainwashing has been funded by Gulf Arab states historically opposed to Israel, especially Saudi Arabia and Qatar. In the last two decades, Riyadh and Doha have given hundreds of millions of dollars to Michigan schools, with the University of Michigan and Michigan State University the leading recipients.
So, given the nature of an electorate molded by unchecked immigration from the Muslim world, and influenced by anti-Israel petrodollars, the Democratic Party leadership believes there’s little point in swimming against the tide. The clearest indication is Schumer and Gillibrand’s prompt endorsement of El-Sayed, and there are other signs, too.
On Wednesday, Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Federal Courts, Oversight, Agency Action, and Federal Rights boycotted Republican colleague Ted Cruz’s hearing on the Muslim Brotherhood.
Why? Because regardless of the threat the organization represents to America’s domestic peace, as well as the integrity of our foreign policy, Democrats don’t want to be seen opposing a group dear to many in its growing Muslim support base. Indeed, there’s no point in alienating donors, including El-Sayed’s father-in-law, when, from the way many Democrats see it, Republicans are the real enemy.
Read more:
‘Turning a Blind Eye to Muslim Brotherhood Emboldens Extremists and Undermines US National Security’
