Deceit is El-Sayed’s stock in trade
It has been viewed more than 50 million times.
“It” is a video promoted by Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, showing an October 17 town hall exchange in Caro, Michigan, between the candidate and a young man in the crowd. The man pressed Mr. El-Sayed to disavow the Sunni Islamist organization known as the Muslim Brotherhood.
The candidate dismisses the question with a quick, “Sure, yeah, absolutely” but then immediately launches into a verbal attack on the questioner.
“Why are you asking the question?”
“Because they are a terrorist group,” he answers.
“Okay,” responds Mr. El-Sayed, adding, “No, no, but what are you implying? Do you assume that I wouldn’t?”
The questioner answers in the affirmative. Challenged to explain why, he says, “Because I haven’t heard you disavow them.”
In full bulldog mode, Mr. El-Sayed accuses his questioner of “implicitly assum[ing] that I have dual loyalties.”
And then, in a strikingly nonsensical thrust, he demands of the questioner: “Have you asked everybody in your life if they disavow them?”
The question, however, was being put to a candidate for the US Senate. And one, as it happens, with family connections to the Muslim Brotherhood, and who has loudly and proudly declared his hatred for Israel, which he believes is “not actually our friend.” This is someone who wouldn’t even say if he considers Israel to be a lesser threat than Iran.
El-Sayed then evasively—no, deceitfully—pivots to an unrelated point.
“I’m going to swear an oath to the Constitution of the United States,” he explains. “And that Constitution guarantees us all the right to practice any faith.” Then, condescendingly, he asks the questioner, “Do you know what the Constitution of the United States is?”
And then: “It seems like you don’t want to protect my right to practice as I choose.”
The hundreds of Michiganders packing the room, clearly impressed with El-Sayed’s wisdom, erupt with loud applause and howls of approval.
Slyness and evil have been close comrades ever since the nachash spoke to Chava in Gan Eden. And El-Sayed well embodies both characteristics. No one was questioning his right to be a Muslim. He was being asked about connections with a terrorist group, and he subtly flipped that into a challenge to his freedom of religion.
To expand a bit on the valid—in fact, crucial—reasons for asking him about the Muslim Brotherhood, we might start with his half-sister’s 2012 posts about her and Mr. El-Sayed’s mother’s “activism in the Muslim Brotherhood,” and her statement that their “family… supports the #MB in #Egpt,” and has “long been MB.”
That same year, El-Sayed himself signed a letter urging Mohamed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood-backed president of Egypt at the time, to use new powers he had bestowed upon himself to punish his political foes.
“We… support,” the letter reads in part, “the revolutionary decisions taken by the president, and we call on him to purge the media and the police as quickly as possible.”
El-Sayed’s father-in-law, moreover, was a member of the founding committee of the Islamic Society of North America—a group that was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the infamous Holy Land Foundation terror-financing case and was identified as a US branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.
None of that, of course, means that El-Sayed supports Islamist terrorists (though that remains an open question). What it does mean, though, is that his repeated claims that no one in this family has had connections to the Muslim Brotherhood were—not to put too fine a point on it—brazen lies.
CBS News chief legal correspondent Jan Crawford was forced to apologize for posting her reaction to the town hall exchange.
Addressing the questioner, she had written: “Thank you. I had to watch this twice to catch… El-Sayed’s nanosecond, ‘yeah, absolutely,’ response. His subsequent uninterrupted diatribe proving your exact point is [a] spectacular self-own… Congrats.”
By taking a partisan stance, Ms. Crawford ran afoul of CBS News’s standards, hence her apology.
But her observation was spot on. Even if it escaped the mindless, adoring crowd, enchanted as it was by the shrewd tongue of a dangerous demagogue. ●
