Abdul el Sayed has refused to condemn the blatantly antisemitic ad his allies are trying to air in Michigan, and the language in the ad is indistinguishable from what el Sayed himself has said on the campaign trail.
This is a candidate who has shared the stage with and embraced the endorsement of antisemites across the spectrum. Antisemitism is a feature, not a bug, of el Sayed’s Senate campaign, which makes former President Barack Obama’s decision to rally for el Sayed all the more contemptible and disturbing. Contemptible because it is uniquely low; disturbing because it shows that antisemitism could not now become more mainstream than it is in the Democratic Party.
“We have to put that $7 aside,” an actress playing a mother shopping for groceries tells her husband about a carton of eggs. “For killing Palestinians.”
From that very low point, the ad nevertheless manages to go downhill, falsely claiming that taxpayers recently gave Israel $26 billion, that “it’s costing us a lot of money to drop bombs on Gaza,” and that bananas are expensive because Americans are paying for Israel’s healthcare system.
The video was produced by social media personality Cenk Uygur, who, in addition to sharing the ad online, asked supporters to donate to a political action committee so it could air more often on Michigan television. While Uygur has no role in the el Sayed campaign, he is the uncle of Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, who appeared with el Sayed at two rallies widely promoted by the campaign.
Piker is a well-established antisemite who has described Orthodox Jews as “inbred,” declared that he would “vote for Hamas over Israel every single time,” and demanded that anyone expressing support for Israel be treated as a neo-Nazi and barred from public office.
El Sayed’s campaign has also embraced former conservative commentator Tucker Carlson, featuring him in an ad declaring, “I wouldn’t vote for [Republican Senate candidate] Mike Rogers at gunpoint.” Like Piker, Carlson has an established record of antisemitism, promoting the conspiracy theory that Israeli spies knew the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were coming and claiming that Israel has a “desire to destroy Europe.”
That el Sayed would willingly associate himself with Piker and Carlson and fail to denounce Uygur is hardly surprising given how closely the ad’s message echoes his own rhetoric. El Sayed has blamed Israel for everything from the price of groceries to the cost of gas, specifically saying of military aid to Israel that “every dollar we spend abroad is a dollar we’re not spending on your healthcare,” a criticism el Sayed never applies to aid given to Ukraine or Taiwan.
When asked by CNN’s Kaitlan Collins why he opposes support for Israel’s Iron Dome, which has saved countless civilian lives, including those of Muslims, from terrorist rockets, el Sayed replied, “I don’t believe that there’s really a difference between offensive or defensive weapons, and I also don’t believe it’s my responsibility to buy defensive weapons for a foreign government when our kids are defenseless against schools that have been underfunded for a very, very long time.”
The United States’s regular annual military assistance to Israel amounts to about $4 billion, roughly 0.005% of federal spending. El Sayed would have voters believe that this rounding error in Washington’s budget explains why Michigan cannot adequately fund its public schools. Congress spends trillions of dollars on domestic programs every year, yet somehow funding missile interceptors to protect Israeli civilians is what leaves Michigan’s classrooms wanting. Whatever Michigan’s school problems are, they were not created in Jerusalem, and abandoning Israel to terrorist rockets will not solve them.
El Sayed is not the only Democrat using this antisemitic formulation. Asked if the federal government should cut off all money for Israel, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani responded, “It is hard for me to explain to my constituents, who live in the largest public housing development in North America, in Queensbridge, why they have to live in substandard conditions because the government refuses to fund public housing, all while we continue to find billions of dollars to drop bombs that kill tens of thousands of Palestinians.”
EDITORIAL: DEMOCRATS ARE ALREADY PLANNING THEIR NEXT REGRET
Again, whatever faults the state of Israel may have, Jews are not to blame for the fact that housing is unaffordable in New York City.
Obama could have used his standing in the Democratic Party to challenge this ugly and ancient prejudice. Instead, he lent his prestige to it. Voters deserve candidates who offer serious answers to their problems, rather than blaming a foreign country for everything from expensive groceries to struggling schools. They also deserve leaders willing to confront bigotry among their allies. By campaigning for el Sayed, Obama failed that test and rewarded a candidate who has repeatedly failed it.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
