El-Sayed refuses to disavow Muslim Brotherhood, insults voter for asking

Democratic Michigan senatorial candidate Abdul El-Sayed deflected a question about his disavowal of the terrorist Muslim Brotherhood by accusing the questioner of Islamophobic bigotry at a recent town hall Q&A.

The question, from an audience member named “Tommy” during a campaign stop Saturday in Caro, Michigan, followed recent reporting by outlets including the New York Post that El-Sayed’s “ummi,” aka his biological mother, was active in the extremist group during the 1970s, something El-Sayed initially denied.

The truth came to light in a social-media post from his half-sister, Eman Abdelhadi. However, El-Sayed’s Egyptian-born ummi, Fatten Elkomy, who now lives in Columbia, Missouri, was flagged as recently as 2010 in federal court documents that noted her affiliation with another alleged terrorist organization, the Islamic American Relief Agency.

Despite the clear ties that would make a question about his terrorist sympathies entirely relevant to him personally, not simply as a radical Islamist in general, El-Sayed hemmed and hawed, treating the question like something that had only popped into Tommy’s mind as a result of his systemic biases.

“OK, no, no, but what are you implying? Do you assume that I wouldn’t?” El-Sayed said in reaction to Tommy’s assertion that the Muslim Brotherhood engaged in terrorist activities.

After the young man explained that he had not heard a disavowal from El-Sayed, the Senate hopeful said he hadn’t heard one from Tommy either.

“Have you disavowed them? I haven’t heard you disavow them yet,” he said.

Tommy then promptly and unequivocally disavowed them.

“But here’s the thing about it,” El-Sayed retorted. “You’re asking the question because implicitly you assume that I’ll have dual loyalties, right? You assume that somehow I wouldn’t disavow or that I’ll have some higher-order allegiance than to the Constitution, correct? Tommy, is that what you imply?”

Tommy then affirmed that this was, indeed, what he was implying.

After falsely claiming that he had disavowed them, El-Sayed proceeded to hector Tommy about his prejudices.

“Answer the question, Tommy. Everybody knows the answer to it. Answer the question, Tommy,” he said.

El-Sayed then lectured the audience about the fact that the US Constitution guaranteed his right to believe whatever he wanted.

“I’m going to swear an oath to the Constitution of the United States. And that Constitution guarantees us all the right to practice whatever faith we want or no faith at all,” he said. “And now you assume, you assume, Tommy, that because I am Muslim, that somehow I would have some allegiance to something that is not our Constitution. That’s your assumption. That’s implicit in the question. And what’s interesting to me is that this is not the first time people have asked those kinds of questions.”

He then pivoted to a comparison between himself and former President John F. Kennedy, the first Catholic elected to the office. Kennedy’s family, although known to have mob ties, had no known ties to terrorist organizations.

“We should read history, Tommy,” El-Sayed said.

“When [Kennedy] ran for president, he was asked whether or not he was going to have allegiance to the Pope at the Vatican because, of course, he’s Catholic. And his answer famously was that he was not running to be a Catholic president. He was running to be president and happened to be Catholic,” El-Sayed continued. “I’m not running to be a Muslim senator. I’m running for US Senate and happen to be Muslim.”

El-Sayed then pressed Tommy, who identified himself as a Christian, to “disavow any attempt to read any religious doctrine into the laws of our country.”

Tommy refused and walked out.

Fox News columnist David Marcus suggested that El-Sayed’s baseless attack on a constituent over a reasonable question about his family ties to terrorism “[s]hould be a Rogers ad tomorrow,” referencing El-Sayed’s GOP opponent, former Rep. Mike Rogers.

However, CNN cheerleaded for El-Sayed, claiming his response “challenged assumptions” while also falsely claiming that El-Sayed had explicitly disavowed the Muslim Brotherhood in his reply.

Rogers and President Donald Trump have both conveyed their certainty that El-Sayed had sympathies for, if not allegiances to, the Muslim Brotherhood.

“He is a Muslim Brotherhood guy, 100 percent,” Trump said Thursday during an event at the White House Rose Garden, Forbes reported.

El-Sayed, who was raised by an adoptive mother, has denied having direct ties to the group.

“I have no ties — we have no ties,” he said in an interview Wednesday. “I have never had these conversations with my mother. I wasn’t raised by my mother… you’re using hearsay evidence from a tweet. It’s just not serious.”

Former President Barack Obama, who supported the Muslim Brotherhood’s overthrow of the Egyptian government during the 2011 “Arab Spring” coup, recently joined El-Sayed on the campaign trail.