Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed spent this past weekend trying to mend fences with Jewish Democrats in Michigan, but his Republican rival calls El-Sayed’s comments a “sham apology.”
El-Sayed, in an appearance Saturday before the Michigan Democrats’ Jewish Caucus, and in an answer to a question from Fox News Digital, apologized for comments he made after a March attack on a suburban Detroit synagogue. But he pushed back when asked to repudiate controversial comments from incendiary left-wing streamer Hasan Piker, who is a strong supporter of his campaign.
A vocal critic of Israel who describes its military actions against Hamas in Gaza as “genocide,” El-Sayed is facing off against former Rep. Mike Rogers, the Republican nominee in the Great Lakes battleground state, for a crucial open Senate seat the Democrats must hold in the midterm elections as they aim to win back control of the chamber.
El-Sayed’s narrow primary victory over more moderate Rep. Haley Stevens in what was a divisive intraparty showdown was arguably the biggest victory to date for the left in its battle against the establishment for the ideological future of the Democratic Party. El-Sayed appeared this past weekend at the state party’s nominating convention in Lansing, Michigan in an effort to unify Democrats in the wake of the primary battle.
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Fox News Digital asked El-Sayed about a recent controversy stemming from comments he made in response to an attack on a Michigan synagogue, when federal investigators say a gunman inspired and radicalized by Hezbollah crashed into the place of worship seeking to kill as many Jewish people as he could. The alleged attacker was a Lebanese-born man who a week earlier had lost relatives in an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon.
“Hurt people, hurt people,” El-Sayed said in response to the attack. He was criticized by members of his own party, including Michigan Secretary of State Dana Nessel, who discussed the comments in a recent interview with The Atlantic, and declined to attend this past weekend’s convention partly over concerns of antisemitism in the Democratic Party.
El-Sayed told Fox News Digital his comments “might have been misconstrued to be justifying something I did not intend to justify,” but then offered an apology.
“To anybody who feels like my comments may have been hurtful, I’m really sorry. That was not my intention. We condemned that terrorist attack. We condemned it outright,” El-Sayed added. “What I was trying to do was offer context for why it happened, but it wasn’t the time for context and you don’t ever want to trample somebody’s pain.”
El-Sayed is an epidemiologist and former Wayne County Health Department director who, if elected in November, would make history as the nation’s first Muslim senator. He has argued against unconditional U.S. military aid to Israel, as have other progressive politicians. And El-Sayed has repeatedly declined to directly answer whether Israel has the right to exist.
He said his message to Jewish voters in Michigan is, “We may not agree on everything when it comes to foreign policy… I’m not going to stop fighting for Palestinian self-determination… but that does not mean that I will not stand up… for safety for all communities and I believe in the safety and dignity of Jewish kids like I believe in the safety and dignity of my own kids.”
Before taking questions from reporters, El-Sayed met in Lansing with the state’s Democratic Jewish Caucus.
“He just had a very good meeting with us,” Daniel Rivkin, a convention delegate and member of the caucus, told Fox News Digital, as he referred to El-Sayed. “We’re having real conversations.”
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The El-Sayee campaign is also in the process of hiring a Jewish liaison, Fox News Digital confirmed on Monday.
But some Jewish leaders in Michigan went public on Saturday with an open letter urging Jewish Democrats and independents in the state to sign their names in support of Rogers, who is making a second straight run for the Senate after falling just 20,000 votes short in 2024.
“Many of us have been fiercely supportive of Democratic candidates and principles. All of us have felt threatened and alienated by the politics and allies embraced by Abdul El-Sayed, which has included demonization of Jews, equivocation on terrorism, exclusion of Jewish Americans from public life, and expression of implacable hatred of the world’s only Jewish nation,” the letter stated.
Rogers, in a statement highlighting the letter, claimed that “Abdul El-Sayed fans the flames of antisemitism. We’re fighting to extinguish it.”
In an interview Monday morning on Fox News’ “Fox and Friends,” Rogers said, “We’ve had so many Democrat Jewish people here in the state of Michigan ring up our phone and say, “I can’t do this. I’m for you.”
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Referring to El-Sayed, Rogers said, “When someone says you might have been offended by what I said, that’s not an apology.”
And he claimed that El-Sayed “has a long history of antisemitic and inflammatory comments.”
But El-Sayed has repeatedly pushed back, saying, “My commitment to Jewish safety is the same as my commitment to the safety of my own kids. We have a responsibility to take on antisemitism in all of its forms, wherever we see it.”
Making El-Sayed’s mission to make peace with Jewish Democrats and independents more difficult is the backing he receives from Piker.
Piker recently featured on his stream an image of state Sen. Jeremy Moss, the Democratic nominee in Michigan’s 11th Congressional District. Moss, who is Jewish, has said that people are sharing a fake audio clip of him claiming that his entire reason for running for Congress is to make sure that America continues to support Israel.
“If Jews in America keep putting this idea out there that they are singularly invested in Israel, eventually someone is going to come around and take action, not against the state of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews,” Piker warned.
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Piker, who endorsed El-Sayed for the Democratic nomination and appeared at some of the candidate’s campaign events including a primary night party in Detroit, has repeatedly stood by his numerous past comments critical of Israel over its ongoing war against Hamas in Gaza.
El-Sayed, who over the past week appeared to try and distance himself from Piker, responded to the firestorm by saying, “I want to be crystal clear, nobody speaks for this campaign besides me and my campaign spokespeople.”
On Saturday, El-Sayed was peppered with questions from reporters about Piker.
“We’re in the state of Michigan. If you want to make this race about a streamer in California, I just think you’re missing the boat,” El-Sayed told reporters. “This is about affordability in Michigan. This is about seeing a doctor in Michigan. This is about Donald Trump’s disastrous policies in Michigan. That’s what I’m focused on right now.”
As the questions about Piker continued, El-Sayed repeatedly characterized him as “a streamer from California” who is irrelevant to his race in Michigan. “This is not a serious conversation.”
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Besides his numerous antisemitic comments, Piker is known for saying “America deserved 9/11,” praising Mao Zedong and Communist China, and arguing that capitalists should be murdered in the streets.
The Democrats’ discord over Israel comes as most GOP leaders continue to showcase their support for Israeli leaders. As the Republican Jewish Coalition’s annual leadership summit got underway Sunday evening in Las Vegas, El-Sayed and the far-left drew boos from the audience of high-powered GOP activists and donors.
Republican National Committee Chair Joe Gruters, speaking Monday at the RJC gathering, said that “the same hatred that fueled” the Oct. 7, 2023 large-scale attack by Hamas on Israel that killed about 1,200 people and triggered the ongoing war “is growing right here in our backyard.”
“It has found a home in the Democratic Party. This did not happen overnight. It happened step-by-step as radical extremists took over the party, and the Democratic leaders let them,” Gruters argued.
Meanwhile, there’s no letup in the battle between the left and the center for the future of the Democratic Party.
Rahm Emanuel, a former ambassador, congressman, Chicago mayor and former White House chief of staff to then-President Barack Obama, took aim at the socialist push taking aim at the party’s establishment.
“The Democratic Party is not open to being taken over,” Emanuel, who’s seriously mulling a 2028 White House run, told Fox News’ Shannon Bream on “Fox News Sunday.”
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“I don’t consider the Democratic Socialists are part of the Democratic Party. About four weeks ago, they had a convention in Chicago. Separate party. They believe in defunding police, letting prisoners out of prison, opening borders, eliminating the Pentagon. If you’re so confident people want that, I’ll see you in November. Put it on the ballot. Let’s go. Run as a separate party,” Emanuel emphasized.
Democratic Party leaders, when asked about the party’s current ideological warfare, often point to Democrats as a “big tent” party.
But veteran Democratic strategist Julian Epstein criticizes such responses and jabs at his party for failing to call out the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).
“They’ve taken cover behind the empty ‘Big Tent” lie as radical DSA members and allies, like Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed and Colorado’s Melat Kiros, triumph in Democratic primaries,” Epstein wrote in an opinion piece last week in the New York Post.
Epstein, who served as chief counsel for the Democratic minority on the House Judiciary Committee during the 1998 impeachment proceeds against then-President Bill Clinton and who later served on Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, argued, “Moderates should unite and shed the Big Tent delusion — because they have nothing to lose but their chains.”
With the House of Representatives back in session, a resolution “condemning socialism in all its forms” could see a vote later this week.
Rep. Jeff Crank, R-Colo., introduced a measure Thursday condemning socialism in all its forms, telling Fox News Digital he wanted to use the vote to force moderate House Democrats to take a more public stance against the DSA.
Fox News’ James Cirrone contributed to this report
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