Abdul El-Sayed disavows Muslim Brotherhood, responds to claims

Michigan US Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed said he “absolutely” disavows the Muslim Brotherhood in testy town hall back-and-forth
Republican Mike Rogers, President Donald Trump and other El-Sayed critics have attempted to link him to the group
Rogers and El-Sayed are locked in a battle for the US Senate seat being vacated by US Sen. Gary Peters

Michigan US Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed said this weekend that he “absolutely” disavows the Muslim Brotherhood, countering persistent claims from conservatives that he is affiliated with or supports the group.

In a back-and-forth during a Caro town hall, El-Sayed compared the scrutiny he’s gotten as a Muslim candidate to that of former President John F. Kennedy, who was the United States’ first Catholic president and was frequently questioned about his faith.

“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 told the crowd. “I’m not running to be a Muslim senator, I’m running for the US Senate and happen to be Muslim.”

A video of the exchange with a town hall audience member — identified by several media outlets as Thomas Teepell, a former aide to Republican US Sen. Josh Hawley — has since gone viral on social media platforms.

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Claims that El-Sayed is affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, a transnational Islamic organization that has historically advocated for political systems entwined with Islamic law, have persisted since he won the Democratic nomination for the US Senate race.

Those claims heated up in recent weeks after a conservative news outlet resurfaced 2010 tweets by El-Sayed’s half-sister, who reportedly said at the time that their mother and family had “long been” affiliated with the group.

The US government last year designated some chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood as terrorist organizations for supporting Hamas.

El-Sayed’s Republican opponent, former US Rep. Mike Rogers, frequently evokes the group in political attacks.

In a Sunday CNN interview, Rogers argued that El-Sayed’s weekend response was not a sufficient disavowal of the group. He said El-Sayed’s faith isn’t the issue, but called his ideology “dangerous.”

“He did not disavow the Muslim Brotherhood. He didn’t disavow it,” Rogers said. “He goes on this word salad trying to get around the fact he can’t do it…My argument is: Is that ideology something we should worry about?”

Trump takes it further

Bridge Michigan analyzed some of the Muslim Brotherhood claims in September and found no direct evidence for Rogers’ claim that El-Sayed had “pledged his support to the Muslim Brotherhood,” though he occasionally weighed in on Egyptian affairs and politicians associated with the group.

Rogers and other critics have more recently pointed to social media posts from El-Sayed’s half-sister suggesting their family in Egypt had connections to the group.

Asked about those posts by NBC’s Tom Llamas, El-Sayed reiterated that he has no ties and said he’s never discussed the Muslim Brotherhood with his mother. El-Sayed was primarily raised by his father and stepmother in Michigan after his parents divorced. He called the tweets “hearsay,” adding that the insinuations are “just not serious.”

“I was born in 1984, down the street in Rochester Hills. I was raised here in Michigan, went to the University of Michigan,” he said. “You want to ask me about what was happening in Egypt in 1970? Are you serious?”

US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat and well-known progressive who spent last week campaigning with El-Sayed in the Upper Peninsula, told TMZ she believed the focus on the Muslim Brotherhood was “racist, very clearly” and dredged up family history that “doesn’t define Abdul at all.”

“What’s hard about this is that people are throwing really painful and insulting and racist stuff around, but it also hits on a little boy in Detroit that grew up without his mom,” she said. “It’s really hard to have that used and spread all over the place in that way.”

The claims have gone well beyond Michigan, with President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance and other prominent conservatives fanning the flames on El-Sayed’s Muslim identity.

During a recent campaign stop in Michigan, Vance suggested El-Sayed has gone to bat “defending Sharia law in the state of Michigan.”

Trump has begun referring to El-Sayed in speeches and social media posts as “Mohammed El-Sayed,” in one video calling him a “Muslim radical” and “Muslim Brotherhood member, even though he denies it.”

El-Sayed responded that the president knows his name is Abdul, arguing that Trump “thinks he can use my name and my faith to distract us from the suffering his policies are inflicting on us at the pump, at the grocery store, and at the doctor’s office.”

At a Saturday rally in Kentucky, Trump hit back: “I’m the president of the United States, I can call you whatever the hell I want,” he said, adding, “His middle name is Mohammad, so I’m pretty close.”